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 …
“I like to build for people, not for profit”. Quote from Isaac Davidson “If we’ve got a subdivision of 1600 new homes to build, you have to ask is it cheaper to build them to low specifications or build a new power plant, because that is where we are going. You spend 20% more to build each house to an …
Our congratulations to Professor Philippa Howden-Chapman as well. I’ve had the opportunity to meet and hear her important research on the direct relation between really bad housing and bad health in children in New Zealand. The huge health care costs of choosing to build poor quality housing is shocking. And that is just the money never mind all the misery and …
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 …
Recently came across the great article on Passive House social housing planned at no extra cost in Melbourne, Australia from early last year. I’m looking forward to hearing about this project and some of the large commercial projects in Australia at the next South Pacific Passive House Conference in February 2019 in Wellington. We’ve two multi-family projects in NZ that …
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 …
I’m helping to set up a session of hands on builders to each speak for 5 minutes at the next Passive House Conference in Wellington (9th and 10th of February). The concept is to have some real hands on discussion from folks actually building Certified Passive Houses rather than all the talks being from design folks. You would all be speaking together …
This well written article reminds us that buildings in Australia (and NZ as well) are a large contribution to our CO2 emissions and we have the skills needed to significantly reduce that and at the same time save occupants on their energy bills with increased comfort. So if we have the skills and everyone benefits when we build Passive House …
