Stuff ran an impressively long and well-researched story on Passive House and the need for net-zero buildings this week; it’s well worth a read in its entirety and a plug on your social media feed. Good to see the Dunedin co-housing build steadily progressing; wouldn’t it be great if all new homeowners could enjoy living somewhere that functioned as well as …
Choose gas for cooking? Please don’t.
I recommend against combustion devices in homes—all of them. Using gas to cook is particularly bad, with health impacts related to the indoor air pollution it causes. (American think tank RMI calls it a hidden health crisis). If a client specifies a gas hob, first I attempt to talk them out of it. After all, top chefs as Neil Perry, …
Calculating embodied carbon: live presentation at the NAPHA virtual conference
The North American Passive House Network is hosting a virtual conference next month. The tickets are cheaper and you save all those carbon emissions by not flying. Hopefully, you bought your Earlybird ticket already. Sustainable Engineering Director, Jason Quinn is part of the panel discussing “What’s Your Building’s Carbon Debt? You should know.” He and we got lucky, the session …
Reality check: PHPP accuracy in the real world
I’m sometime asked just how accurate PHPP’s models are. This great paper quantifies it. “Are the energy savings of the passive house standard reliable? A review of the as-built thermal and space heating performance of passive house dwellings from 1990 to 2018.” David Johnston, Mark Siddall, Oliver Ottinger, Soeren Peper and Wolfgang Feist When measured in the real world, the …
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 …
External insulation facade solutions: thermal facade clips
I’ve been asked about improving the performance of larger buildings. This often requires an external insulation facade solution but getting it right is not always obvious. I’m a fan of timber. But if you are retrofitting a concrete, steel or brick building, continuous external insulation is one way to improve performance. This can be done with external foam insulation and …
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 …
Look back and celebrate: 8 years of PH in NZ
It’s eight years since the first New Zealand home was certified as a Passive House. That distinction went to the aptly named PH1NZ in Auckland. (Notable second was a more modest family home in Raglan.) It’s extraordinary to reflect on how far we’ve come in less than a decade, on multiple fronts: the profile of Passive House in particular and …
Attend the North American PH conference virtually
The North American Passive House Network annual conference will be a great event—and way cheaper than normal due to being virtual. The bad news is the timing sucks for Australia and New Zealand time zones if you want to chat with the speakers live. However, all the recordings will be available to registered participants for later viewing. All the details …