It’s not correct to say a Low Energy Building (LEB) is a Passive House. Yes, it is a PHI standard. But to claim it is a Passive House, as a real estate agency’s media release did last month, is going too far. Yes, LEB is a building certification awarded by the Passive House Institute but it is confusing to conflate …
MBIE response (and ours) to NZ Emissions Reduction Plan
MBIE has summarised its take on the New Zealand Emissions Reduction Plan. Building for Climate Change (BfCC) will be its tool to make this happen through legislation. We will finally be stepping up to designing for thermal performance (eg operational carbon) and embodied carbon. At Sustainable Engineering, we’re doing our best to lay out a path for this to happen …
Great developments in NZ social housing
Kāinga Ora’s priorities for New Zealand social housing were laid out in a recent detailed article in Architecture Now, which is worth reading in full. It charts the agency’s journey toward building very high-performance homes, right up to Passive House standard, and slashing embodied carbon. Sustainable Engineering has completed pre-construction (design stage) review and approval for Nga Kainga Anamata and …
Four tools for scaling up Passive House adoption: international review
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
Update 16May2024 We want folks to know that Kainga Ora has regretfully informed us that they are now in the process of officially closing the R&D component of the project as the investment is no longer commercially viable. They are removing their pages from their website and links to this will no longer work. Kāinga Ora’s ambitious research project, Ngā …
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. …