I see mouldy houses quite a bit in my work but this Spinoff article still shocks me with the impacts on occupants. Most of the bad buildings in this article are in Wellington, because that’s where the writer is located, but I’ve seen even worse examples in Auckland and Christchurch. The statistics are pretty grim with over 40,000 children hospitalized …
Case Studies on Certified Passive House Projects – example Kowhai Passive House
Sustainable Engineering is putting together a page on all of the New Zealand Certified Passive House Projects. We will start with projects we have certified ourselves and then add in all of the remaining ones certified by others. The intent is to put up the sort of data that we ourselves tend to want to know about projects; like floor …
16 August 2018 The Fifth Estate – Melbourne’s proposed Green Spine “could be benchmarked to Passive House standard”
This past March at the Passive House Conference in Munich, Germany, I had the opportunity to meet with Dieter Herz of Herz and Lang. One of the founding members of a very experienced & prestigious passive house design consulting firm in Europe. During our discussion and later in his presentation, I was a bit surprised at the level of emphasis he …
15 August 2018 The Guardian’s Bob Ward: Planning regulations overlook heat – so developers build death traps
“Heat deaths are preventable. No more excuses: we need better regulation and guidance to stop unsafe housing being built” If you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail. If you do not model and understand how a building is going to perform. To predict overheating, to understand it, and fix it before it is built. Then don’t be surprised …
13 August 2018 Otago Daily Times – Warm and Cosy Homes Essential for Everyone
This article from the Otago Daily Times is pretty shocking. It’s amazing to feel the scale of the problem when you think about one-third of all the hospital missions due to poor quality housing. If it is even close to accurate that’s an outrageous amount of money. Think how much we save on health care and misery as a society …
Passive House Climate Files for NZ
As of 13 December 2017 there are six additional PHI certified climate files for NZ. These now cover all of NZ including the Chatham Islands. It is important to note these are all (excluding the Chathams file) based on work done by NIWA to develop regional files for NZ and this last set of climate certification work done by PHI …
WUFI
Hygrothermal modeling with WUFI Sustainable Engineering can perform hygrothermal modeling of your proposed assemblies using WUFI one or two dimensional software. Quick initial reviews of assemblies and more in-depth consulting to improve or fix the assemblies performance are available. Presentation for Expert Tour 2015 – Introduction to WUFI As part of the 2015 Expert Tour Sustainable Engineering Ltd. was asked …
Stress test your design for Overheating
I hate comfort complaints. Not the complaining bit – folks are nice – but I hate the failed expectations of comfort. This past summer I had several calls from clients living in certified Passive Houses. They say it’s too damn hot. What is going on here? The Passive House Planning Package (PHPP) appears to predict the overheating pretty well. When …
Glass is rocket science for high performance buildings
During a presentation at the South Pacific Passive House Conference in Christchurch (March 2017). I spoke on lessons learned from New Zealand projects. One of the biggest lessons we’ve learned is that windows are the rocket science in high performance buildings. They are very advanced technology originally from the space industry and they can make your building high (sky high) …