This half-day workshop is offered on 30 July 2025, immediately prior to the PHINZ hui in Christchurch. It’s designed for architects, Passive House designers and tradespeople and its practical focus will equip people with the knowledge they need to safely design and build building envelopes—from Building Code-minimum to high-performance. Condensation and mould are not just problems in tired, old housing …
Keep designPH up-to-date to avoid Passive House certification hitches
Passive House designers: do you know what version of designPH you are using? It’s important you are using, if not the latest version (2.2.24 at time of writing) then 2.1.15 or later. Otherwise your shading factors may not be accurate. We identified this issue last year and issued a brief advisory in our November email newsletter. Here’s the background explainer …
Help coming for PHPP heat pump worksheet
Every Passive House designer who has modelled in PHPP10 knows what a pain it’s become to enter heat pump data. To solve this, we’re developing a heat pump webinar with a whole lot of building physics behind it. (Save the date: 5 March 2025, 12.30 – 2.00pm) PHPP9 allowed standard data to be used, but PHI changed that with the …
Kara’s last tradies course

It was the end of an era last week, when Kara Rosemeier taught her last CET (certified Passive House tradesperson) in Auckland . Knowing Kara, hers will be a very active retirement and it’s a staged process. Kara will run one or more Certified Passive House Designer courses in 2025 before Sustainable Engineering assumes responsibility for all Passive House certification …
Wanted: Passive House champions

We want more Passive House champions! Resources will be released this summer to make it easier for select professionals to present the benefits and details of the Passive House standard. I’m currently working on a PowerPoint presentation—full slides, plus speaker’s notes—that will be available for certified Passive House professionals to use. Basically, we want to make it easier for you …
designPH course now available on-demand

You can supercharge your designPH skills and improve your Passive House energy modelling whenever it suits you: our short course is now available on-demand. This is particularly useful for anyone wanting to complete the prerequisites for sitting PHI’s PHPP Expert exam*. Our team leans heavily on designPH software because it makes our energy modelling and consulting work faster and more …