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 accurate. Sustainable Engineering Ltd’s principal, Jason Quinn, is a master of designPH, having been working it hard since its early stages of development. We turned that expertise into a very well-received online course, which was last offered in June 2024.
You can read all about what to expect from the course here. The presentations from the SELtd team in the last live course were recorded and have been professionally edited for the on-demand version of the course, which runs on a professional learning platform. There are six videos to work through in the student’s own time. One of the key benefits of this self-paced format is the ability to pause videos or re-watch them while you are working through the exercises.
Our team remains at hand to support your learning.
- Students have access to a private forum, which contains questions from previous courses and our answers, plus they can post new questions we’ll respond to.
- Homework is set in each session, which must be submitted and will be reviewed and feedback offered.
- The course fee also includes two one-on-one online coaching sessions with one of the Sustainable Engineering Ltd experts.
Students can take up to 12 months to complete the on-demand course, but will be much better off working through the material in a concentrated fashion. The exercises will consolidate your learning, which you can then start applying to your projects right away.
SELtd’s Passive House in Practice (PHiP) course touches on designPH as well, because the software is so integral to efficient PHPP modelling. Because there is a bit of overlap, we’re offering a discount to students who have completed PHiP and who want to enrol for designPH Skills. The discount also applies to designPH Skills graduates who want to enrol in PHiP.
The course description page covers in detail how your Passive House design work will benefit from using designPH, but in brief it makes for much faster modelling and better outcomes because more variables can be tested. As certifiers, we are requiring that site shading calculations are carried out using designPH, as the classic tools in PHPP are just not accurate enough for modelling New Zealand projects.
I know there are some designers resistant to learning SketchUp, which designPH runs in. I was one of them, so I can relate! designPH was the motivation for me to finally get to grips with SketchUp and I can report that it was certainly worth it. You only need to learn the basics of SketchUp to access all the benefits of modelling in designPH. There are free short courses available online that will get you up and running on SketchUp to the extent needed. (Do note that designPH can’t run on the free, limited online version of SketchUp: you will need a licensed version, but it’s not expensive.)
The designPH Skills course is an integral part of the learning pathway to PHPP Expert status. However this course is suitable for people at all stages of Passive House design. Learning how to model projects in designPH will get newly qualified Passive House designers off to a flying start, establishing efficient workflows and enabling better, more informed choices right from the start. For more experienced designers who may already be using designPH, I promise you’ll learn ways to supercharge your workflow. You can read some feedback from previous graduates here.
*Designers need to be proficient in designPH to qualify to attempt the PHPP Expert exam. For most people, completing this course is the most effective way to acquire the skills and demonstrate competency but a RPL route is available.