Air control layers are critical to warm healthy homes. Paying for a second brand new roof on a building should not be common to homes or commercial buildings. More ventilation can help with controlling moisture under the roof cladding but if there is no air control layer at all in the ceiling ventilation is not always enough. “We have recently …
If you could block 100% of UV light than the fading would be reduced to approximately 1/3rd the amount. As the entire spectrum of light contributes to fading and it is very dependant on the material the best you can do is select a glass which has low damage-weighted transmittance has the symbol T-dw. This isn’t perfect as T-dw was developed …
Many speakers talk about how much time we spend indoors when they talk about how important indoor air quality is and they seldom take the time and reference source of references. So I thought I’d point out this very technical reference to the amount of time spent indoors was a survey done in the United States. It’s been done quite …
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 …
Dangerous overheating in buildings may not be showing up in desktop studies, new research suggests.” “Monitored operative temperatures of up to 47.5C recorded in a highly glazed apartment building in London were not reflected in software modelling of the same building, with temperature peaks in simulated scenarios between 18C and 30C cooler, depending on which weather files were used.” …
This report reviewed detailed test measurements for air tightness and heating loads for passive houses and non-passive houses designed to meet an energy target. From this data the Passive Houses (Passivhaus in the UK) predicted performance matched quite closely to the measurements compared to other non-passive house designed buildings. “Most of the homes were fitted with mechanical ventilation with heat …
Newly released standard AS/NZS 5141:2018 Residential heating and cooling systems – Minimum applications and requirements for energy efficiency, performance and comfort criteria Specifies requirements for the design, selection, installation, commissioning and maintenance of residential heating and cooling systems to maximize operating energy efficiency within residential buildings. It also sets requirements to achieve prescribed performance and comfort criteria. This standard includes …
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 …
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 …
