Passive House Climate Files for NZ

As of 13 December 2017 there are six additional PHI certified climate files for NZ. These now cover all of NZ including the Chatham Islands. It is important to note these are all (excluding the Chathams file) based on work done by NIWA to develop regional files for NZ and this last set of climate certification work done by PHI …

Top 10 tricks for PHPP speed and ease

Tech Tips with Toby PHPP is the software Passive House designers use to model the performance of buildings—before they are built. It’s a front-end on an Excel spreadsheet. Now, most people use Excel, at least a little bit. But Excel is a powerful beast of a software programme and there are tonnes of shortcuts and tools that make it faster …

New design choices possible in Queenstown and Wellington

Thermal comfort targets have been revised by the Passive House Institute for use in PHPP. Passive House certification requires that windows and doors meet specified thermal comfort targets*. This requirement ensures people inside Passive Houses will enjoy comfortable temperatures everywhere, even if sitting right next to a window in the middle of winter. I became aware some time back that …

MVHR commissioning in Certified Passive House Buildings (includes PHI Low Energy Building Standard and EnerPHit as well)

In order to certify your building as meeting the exacting Passive House Standard the certification standard “Criteria for the Passive House, EnerPHit and PHI Low Energy Building Standard, version 9f, revised 15.08.2016” requires in 3.2.5 Ventilation: HRV commissioning report: at minimum, the report must include the following: description of the property, location/address of the building, name and address of the …

Documentation required for a Certified Passive House

A fairly common question during the certification process is ‘What sort of construction documentation is required for a certified passive house?’ Required documentation for a Certified Passive House (Passivhaus) or PHI Low Energy Building is that sufficient to fully check the energy model and design quality and assure that the building was built as per the design. That sort of …

The Four Control Layers – Fundamentals of Building Science

The Building Enclosure and the Four Control Layers   Understanding of the building enclosure and the four control layers that make up the building enclosure is vital to understanding how the building enclosure will perform Enclosure The building enclosure is what separates the inside environment from the outside ‘natural’ environment. This includes everything from the paint on the outside of …

SE Certification Platform Checklist

Sustainable Engineering Ltd. provides client certification resources to help them with their certification process. The attached link to the PDF is a list of all the different entries of the Passive House Certification Platform to enable you to go through and just check off and make sure you’ve made each of these entries to make the certification process easier and …

Stress test your design for Overheating

I hate comfort complaints. Not the complaining bit – folks are nice – but I hate the failed expectations of comfort. This past summer I had several calls from clients living in certified Passive Houses. They say it’s too damn hot. What is going on here? The Passive House Planning Package (PHPP) appears to predict the overheating pretty well. When …

Glass is rocket science for high performance buildings

During a presentation at the South Pacific Passive House Conference in Christchurch (March 2017). I spoke on lessons learned from New Zealand projects. One of the biggest lessons we’ve learned is that windows are the rocket science in high performance buildings.  They are very advanced technology originally from the space industry and they can make your building high (sky high) …