This in-depth international review, The Keys to Successful Passive House Implementation, aimed to identify how to successfully implement Passive House construction at scale. The research was commissioned by the California Public Utilities Commission, which aims to apply these learnings in that state. The report developed a “Passive House Best Practices Toolkit” to increase the uptake of the Passive House standard …
How to decarbonise NZ schools
Clear, specific and timely actions to reduce schools’ operational and embodied carbon footprint are contained in a recent Ministry of Education (MoE) report, . The recommendations are excellent and they matter because the Ministry manages a huge real estate portfolio and is a major real estate developer: over 16,000 buildings used by over 790,000 students in 2100 state-owned schools/kura The …
What does NZ’s first deep retrofit teach us?
New Zealand’s first certified EnerPHit project began back in 2019. A very expensive and complex undertaking, it’s taken three years to complete. Sustainable Engineering’s Jason Quinn got involved not as the certifier but the Passive House designer—unwillingly at first, he says. But the owner impressed him with his commitment to going the whole way and fixing the problems at the …
Ngā Kāinga Anamata passes pre-construction review
Kāinga Ora’s ambitious research project, Ngā Kāinga Anamata, has cleared its first certification checkpoint: it has passed its pre-construction review. This is an extremely important milestone as it warrants that if built as designed, the project will meet the standard for certification. Notably, Kāinga Ora’s specifications for on-site energy generation mean the buildings qualify for Passive House Plus certification. There …
Scaling up PH trades training
New Zealand needs more tradespeople, full stop. But we also need tradies with skills and experience of building the Passive House way, especially as larger certified projects get underway. In the UK, a large construction firm developed their own training and to date more than two thousand tradies have earned their “Passivhaus Passport”. This seems to be shorter and more …
Haiku sums up warmer home benefits
Who the hell composes a haiku as the summary in a technical report to a government agency? A New Zealander, that’s who. I love this country. People’s ability to care and be serious—but also irreverent or playful, sometimes at the same time—is something I really appreciate. Winter through to spring Houses keep warm with heat pumps At no added cost. …
Elements of building industry lobbying to delay H1 changes
Like I’ve said before, if we want to change, we actually will need to change. Seems simple enough, right? But many in the “pro-cold-home” contingent of our building sector don’t want to change anything. Andrew Eagle from the NZ Green Building Council wrote a very terse essay for The Spinoff a couple of weeks ago. He was incensed that some …
Builder backlash to H1 upgrade begins
And, it’s begun: the backlash to the update to the energy efficiency requirements in New Zealand’s Building Code announced last November. It’s been a long time since the last upgrade. The message from submitters was overwhelmingly in favour of improving energy efficiency through higher-performance windows, more insulation, and moving on to whole building energy performance measures rather than simple R-value …
998 days to reach climate change reduction goals
The latest IPCC report emphasises that we have to peak our CO2 emissions by 2025 at the latest to reach 1.5 degrees global warming, to follow those rational paths that are still open. From Newsroom’s analysis: “Achieving 1.5 degrees would mean emissions growth must not only slow from the 1.3 percent a year it averaged during the 2010s but completely …