Passive House is supposed to be a solution. It's not supposed to be a whole set of new problems. It's supposed to be a framework and a set of tools that help us to answer the problems that we already have.

We just shared everything we knew. Failures, lessons learned, and and just like, here, here's all of the information. And so just giving all of that information out to the industry, that was our marketing. You're just giving people information to to drop the fear level so that they'll take the next step forward.

Hello, and welcome to The Reimagine Edit, a special series of the past podcast that shares curated insights from our experts and residents at the reimagine buildings collective, our membership community of building professionals stepping up to tackle climate change. Today is 02/01/2025. And in this first episode, we'll hear selected clips from Ed May of Building Type and Lois Arena of Stephen Winter Associates. I'm Zack Semke, director of Passive House Accelerator and host of the reimagined buildings collective. And thank you for being here.

Let's start with Ed May and his fireside chat with Passive House Accelerator founder, Michael Ingwe, as part of our next level secrets of the pros course in the collective. A partner at the consulting firm Building Type, Ed is a passive house consulting and education powerhouse. In this first clip, Ed shares his view that passive house is useful because it's a tool to help us do a better job.

Monte Paulsen always used to talk about Passive House this way. Passive House is supposed to be a solution. It's not supposed to be a whole set of new problems. It's supposed to be a framework and a set of tools that help us to answer the problems that we already have. And so we had a lot of problems and challenges as designers, builders, engineers trying to do better buildings, trying to understand the physics of buildings, trying to implement high performance techniques on buildings of all sorts of scales and sizes.

And it was really out of desperation and need that we reached for, eventually, the desperation and need that we reached for eventually the PASCO standard or eventually came upon the PASCO standard. And it in those early years, it really did seem to answer and solve a lot of those questions. It really provided a whole set of super useful tools, especially at the residential scale. Some of the things that it was doing had already been stock and trade and commercial buildings, energy modeling and the like. Those kind of techniques were like relegated to a very small set of buildings and really a small group of and in many ways the passcode standard kind of broadened that out and said like, oh, we can apply a lot of these ideas and techniques to residential projects.

You don't need a PhD in physics in order to do these things because we've built these tools to enable you to use these techniques and ideas that come from the guys with PhDs. But you guys can use them on, like, single family homes out in the out in the woods someplace. And that would be incredibly useful and powerful and helpful. And it really did help us to solve a whole set of questions and and enable us to, I think, do a better job with the buildings that we were to so the big thing, it was really it was very pedestrian in that sense. It was like, we really need a tool today to answer a question today.

And, oh, look, this tool could help us answer this question. And so in that sense, it was incredibly useful, incredibly fruitful. And I I think I like to think that's still why a lot of folks gravitated towards the fast OS frameworks and fast OS standards because they are useful tools. And that's really how I see them as tools to help us do a better job.

So if Passive House helps us do a better job, should practitioners spend a bunch of their time in the Passive House modeling tools, the Passive House planning package for PHI projects, and WUFI Passive for PHIUS projects. Not necessarily.

I've just always been enamored of and fascinated by the impact and power of tools and how some tools make you feel like a superhero and then other tools make you feel like you're the dumbest person on Earth. You can use whatever metaphor you want, and there's a million different examples of that. I always go back to my builder days of the flathead screw and the Phillips head screw. The flat head screw, the screwdriver slips off the side every three seconds and you constantly have to recenter yourself and keep working and work hard at it. And the Phillips head screw, yours screw fails to the center every single time.

And that's sort of dichotomy between tools that make you feel like a chump and then tools that make you feel like a superhero is added to all of our work. And our position is and our feeling is that we really do need to work hard to create better tools in the past space that make it easier for people to do this work so that when you make accidents, you accidentally fail towards the center, towards the correct answer rather than spinning off, into into outer space. So from a sort of like nuts and bolts perspective, we work in both the PHI and the PHIUS standard. So we like both standards. We're very happy with both standards.

We use both standards on different projects of different sizes and types and regions. So we work in both the PHPP, the Passive House Planning Package, which is an Excel, document, and Wulfi Passive. So those are both, like, core tools that any Passive House practitioner should be familiar with. And So those are both important tools to be aware of and understand and be sensitive to and gain experience in. So those tools though get supplemented by a whole host of like ancillary or supporting pieces.

And so those two calculators are the core of the work of a pest us consultant, but you're not gonna work only in those tools. And in fact, in my opinion, you should only barely work in those tools. Those are good calculators, but you should be building up your whole body of project information and project knowledge somewhere else.

Okay. If we should be building the body of project info and knowledge somewhere else, where is that somewhere else? Here, Ed dives into Honeybee PH.

So broadly speaking, how do we use computers to make good decisions about buildings? How do we do simulations and use the data from those simulations to make better decisions? And the Honeybee toolkit is a really important and popular open source toolkit. And so we have been building on top of that or making use of that to build out these other sort of tool or components that I'm describing there, whether it's visualizations or dashboards or models, model editors, or what have you. So there's Honeybee and then the specific package or probably the main specific package that we maintain is something that goes by the name Honeybee PH.

So it's a specifically passive house branded or passive house focused rather, not branded, focused toolkit, which harnesses and uses the Honeybee fundamental code libraries, but then extends and expands upon them for Passive House style modeling. And so that's a project we've been working on for five years or so now. It's fairly mature at this point. So that's what we use for all of our artwork. So internally, we do all of our modeling and all of our production work and all of our client communication using that code library that we developed, which was by the name Honeybee PH.

It's actually a whole ecosystem of 15 different libraries that all do different things, but it's under that heading of Honeybee PH. That's the sort of key the brand name there.

And by the way, Ed is recording coursework right now that will teach practitioners how to use this suite of Honeybee PH tools. We'll begin rolling that out on the reimagined buildings collective in the coming months, which I'm super excited about. Ed's fireside chat with Michael also delved into advice for new practitioners, including the value of construction experience.

I do think there's a lot of value in touching something with your own hands, building something with your own hands, being part of or at least experiencing the construction industry firsthand or directly. It just gives you a lot of experience about things, not least just the sort of like most fundamental fact about construction, which is that the world hates your building. The world and the universe does not want your building to exist and will do everything in its power to destroy your building, interior building down and stop your project from succeeding. And it takes a tremendous amount of effort and focus and work to create anything from the smallest doghouse to the biggest building. And so just even understanding that fact is really useful, I think.

And that just comes, I think, through through working in the field or getting experience in the field. I I find that to be incredibly valuable.

Oof. The world hates your building. Some tough love there from Ed folks. But I guess let's be ready and prepared for that reality so we can thrive and succeed even in the face of it. Ed also talked about the state of the Passive House market.

I really think that the passive house market follows the broader construction and architecture market, which is to say that it's moving towards a dumbbell shape just like the rest of this country is. Right? So you're gonna have a much you're gonna have an inflation and an expansion expansion at the low end, and you're gonna have much less of a demand in the middle. So you're gonna have a lot of projects in the luxury realm, and those are gonna be bigger and fancier and more complicated and more expensive than they ever were. And then you're gonna have more projects in the social housing or affordable housing that are being subsidized somewhere by somebody, by some agency, whether at the state, federal, the local level.

And so you're gonna have a a large expansion on those two ends and then you're gonna have a contraction or a sort of slow dying out of that middle. That's just the architecture discipline broadly. It's the construction market broadly. And I think that's just from a really high level what we see in the passive house space as well.

I think Ed's probably right, and that's sobering because we also need to figure out how to transform the middle of the market. That's something that code improvements can help with, and that's certainly happening with multifamily buildings in places like Massachusetts. But this is food for thought for production building, and that's one of the reasons that PHIUS pioneered its prescriptive path for passive building certification. Anyway, interesting stuff. Ed also shared why he thinks operating under a fixed fee is helpful.

As an outside consultant, it's it's much easier and more straightforward to do hourly consulting and say, listen. I'm not in charge of any of this. You guys are making all the decisions, and so I'm just gonna follow your lead, and I'm just gonna be I'm just gonna charge you for every hour that we work. That's probably the most typical sort of outside consulting fee structure. We felt early on that it was important to try and put fixed fees to things wherever we could.

The upside of doing a fixed fee pricing schedule for as much of it as you can is you have a really strong internal incentive to get better at it. So, we keep our fixed fee relatively constant and then we work our asses off to improve our efficiency and deliver those products much faster, much with much less effort. And so, if we do that over five or eight years, profitability goes up because our efficiency goes up. And that's all incentivized by that fixed fee model. So again, the fixed fee can't do that for everything because you'll lose your shirt when it comes to certain parts of the puzzle because again, you're not in control or making decisions over all of it.

But wherever you can, wherever things are in your control as an outside consultant, I think using that fixed fee model is really is maybe hard in the beginning, but it really incentivizes the right behavior over the long term. And I I'm a very big believer in setting in place structures that help make people choose the right long term decision. We're all human beings. It's so much easier to make the easy near term decision. You need structures in place to help you make those long term decisions correctly.

And so that fixed fee model, I think, for us, at least, has been part of that, has really incentivized us to to become more efficient and to deliver those products faster with a lot less nonsense.

Let's pivot now to Ed's technical Tuesday ask me anything session, where we had a great question from Buck about how to right size an ERV or HRV for a project. How to really dial in and optimize the sizing of that equipment?

I would say that part of the answer to what you're just describing there is not to make these systems so tightly calibrated and tightly designed to a single type of use, a single level of occupancy, a single level of consumption, that in fact, oversizing and building in a bunch of extra capacity allows you to respond to those unforeseen or unknown events or uses in your building. We have seen this since the very first buildings that we've ever done. I think the very first Passive House we ever did was 02/2009. It was a social housing project for a lady in Washington, DC through Habitat for Humanity and everybody did. We did all the past house engineering and the PHPP and had it all dialled in and tight.

And then come to find out that her brother-in-law lost his job and so he moved in with all his kids. So now there's three times as many people in the house and the air conditioning can't keep up. Those kind of things happen, right? And so I think this I almost do think that really trying to dial in the heating and cooling loads to such a tight level of tolerance is almost the wrong thing to do when we're talking about human beings and human behavior. And that in fact, we need to be designing more resilient, more flexible systems that have more capacity built in to handle those unforeseen issues and loads and weirdnesses and weather conditions that we hadn't really thought about.

I think what we're hearing from the suppliers at least and most folks who are getting who have a lot of experience with the HRVs is that you should really be installing an HRV which is like 2X the size that you need. And then run it at 50% fan speed, but keep that other 50% fan speed like in your back pocket in case you need to boost it or modify it. Somebody else moves in, they turn it into a duplex instead of a single, right? There's all sorts of weird things that happen and so installing equipment which is bigger than needed and then running it at a slower rate is a really nice way to build in some belt and suspenders into projects. And so that makes a ton of sense on the HR V side.

On the mini split side, it is hard because over sizing leads to all sorts of issues, although those are becoming smaller with the ECM motors and the variable refrigerant. So it's not as bad of a penalty as it was twenty years ago, still is an issue. And so that is a little harder. But certainly on the ventilation side, like you should definitely be installing really big ERVs and then running them at a very low, fan speed. That seems to be like a pretty easy fix to me to build in a whole bunch of extra capacity.

You heard it here, folks. When it comes to HRVs and ERVs, better to oversize them. When it comes to mini splits and heat pumps, not so much. But what about delivering heating and cooling via those HRVs or ERVs? Via the ventilation system.

The notion of using the HRV to supply heating the ERV to supply heating to the space is just not in my opinion, is not a great idea. The HRV and ERV is used to provide fresh air to the space. And then the heating and cooling system should provide heating and cooling to the space. Those two systems have different logics to them and they have different distribution requirements and they want to work in different ways. And so when you combine them together, it's kind of a recipe for all sorts of issues.

Yeah, it sounds elegant. You only need one set of ducting and it's a neat idea. The physics is elegant. But in actual fact, we have not seen it work out very well. Heating and cooling and the fresh air ventilation follow different logics.

You want them to go into different places. You want to supply fresh air to the bedrooms, but you don't necessarily want to supply heating to the bedrooms. So when you couple those two things together, now they have to travel together. Henry Gifford was the one who used to say, he had that saying, right? He said, I love ice cream and I love spaghetti and meatballs, but I do not mix ice cream and spaghetti and meatballs together and eat it for dinner.

There's those two things are separate, and they're both great, and they're both important and and awesome, but you don't mix them together. And if you mix them together, you end up with a big mess. And so I think that would be my recommendation. And that's certainly how we approach our our designs is really consider them separately as separate systems.

So great. Ed is such an incredible resource. And by the way, you can access Ed's PHPP modeling course and his Honey Bee pH course at any time in the collective. So just another reason to join if you haven't already. We capped off last week with the Ask Me Anything Friday session with Lois Arena, director of the High Performance Building Solutions team at Stephen Winter Associates.

Lois has provided the Passive House brainpower behind many of North America's biggest, most challenging projects, blazing a path for the rest of us. So I was so happy to have her join us. The discussion kicked off with a question about how Lois and Stephen Winter Associates got started with these massive passive house projects. How did they become the go to guys for so many of these trailblazing buildings? She started by explaining how transformative it was to have the first one, Cornell Tech Tower, to point to.

Once we advertised that and started promoting it and people could come through and learn and and grow, it just took off. Everybody wanted to be the first of their kind, the largest tower. Are we the next tallest? Are we the next biggest? Are we the first of this type?

Are we the first part of space? And so because we had that reputation of jumping off a cliff on these different types of projects, we got a lot of those first time projects. The the other reason we are there is because we just shared everything we knew. Failures, lessons learned, and and just like, here, here's all of the information. So it made us more accessible to people to come and ask questions.

And they would come and ask us to do trainings and things like that. And so just giving all of that information out to the industry, that was our marketing. You know? It's like, seems like you're, you know, you're training up your competitors. I'm like, no.

You're just giving people information to to drop the fear level so that they'll take the next step forward.

So what was it about the culture at Stephen Winter Associates that made this leadership happen in the first place, landing Cornell Tech Tower, taking the risk to be the first movers? Lois shares her sense of it, and I chime in too.

It seems to take the first pioneer to do it. And once somebody takes that step, then everybody doesn't feel like they're the first one. No. Most people, like, I would say 99%, especially developers, something that's financially risky like that, don't wanna take that first jump. And so once they see it being done and being done successfully with products available in the industry today and the myths that they're hearing are sort of melted away by actual construction and practice and date around things, then then they go.

Because after we did Cornell, our work went like that. You know, it was an exponential curve. But until then, it was very minimal. You know?

I think there's also something

to be said for somebody

in

the firm deciding to take a risk as well.

I've been in a couple

of firms that, at the time, were were leading the way in their market around Passive House. And in both cases, there was one owner who was just really committed to making it happen. And it might it created some struggles internally with the other owner, but he he was just so like, with hammer in hand, who was Sam, was just so committed to making it happen and excited. And so

Which shows successful.

Yeah. They and then and then Brandon and Kay Architects put his the flag in the sand. So I I think that there's there's a piece of it where there needs to be the opportunity to take advantage of in the marketplace, but then there's also that person in the firm who's gonna be like, we're gonna make this happen and do something different.

We also had a great conversation about a stucco building on Vancouver Island that's having lots of air intrusion and moisture problems. Lois shared a diagnostic technique combining a blower door and an infrared camera.

You can also tell where you have leaks. If you have a blower door, so do an infrared scan of the building, then turn a blower door on. And from the you can do it from the inside to outside. If you're gonna do it from the inside, depressurize. If you're gonna do it from the outside, pressurize and do your infrared scan again.

And what you'll see where the leaks are, where the air leaks are, is you'll see, like, wisp. It'll look like hair growing, and then air is coming through that assembly in that location. So it's it's a very good diagnostic tool. You might wanna do it from the top of the roof as well just in case you have some connection issues there, and then you may have to take the stucco off.

You may have to take the stucco off. Not necessarily the news you wanna hear for your building, but sometimes that's the way it goes. Lois also fielded questions about breaking into the building decarbonization and passive house field and had this to say to a member who owns his own business in an adjacent field and is thinking about how to parlay his skill set and experience into building sustainability.

Don't shortchange yourself. I think you have some really good skills to offer some of these firms that most of the daily grind workers probably don't have. I came to Steven Winter. I had been working on my own for nine years. Yeah.

I had an engineering background, but I had nine years of construction. I was flipping houses. I was making them energy efficient and turning them over. And that actually was really appealing. They're like, okay.

You can run a project. You can work independently. You can manage a budget. Like, there's so many things wrapped up into having your own business that are really desirable to firms. They're gonna they're gonna babysit you.

Right?

Some empowering words from Lois right there. And I'll just add that I've seen folks from all sorts of educational and career backgrounds enter this world and thrive. Do you have that sense of mission, that drive? Are you curious and motivated to learn? My advice is take the leap, and that's why we created the collective to provide a safety net for all of us as we make the leaps in our professional lives that we know we need to make in order to pull off this transition to clean, resilient, climate forward buildings.

So a big thank you to Ed and Lois for helping us out last week. As always, these clips just scratched the surface. So if anything piqued your interest here, please do dive into the full replays of these sessions. And if you're not a member of Reimagine Buildings Collective, please join us. You'll get direct access to experts like Ed and Lois.

You'll get to know them, ask your burning questions, and expand your mind and your practice by engaging with these thought leaders. Head over to reimaginebuildings.com to join. Speaking of joining the collective, I wanna celebrate this week's new members. A big welcome to Jordana Vlueger, John Rogalski, Andrew Steingeyser, and Lois Arena. Welcome to the collective.

With that, thank you for listening to this first episode of the reimagine edit, a production of the Passive House podcast by Passive House Accelerator. As always, don't hesitate to DM me with anything Reimagine Buildings Collective related. What you'd like to see on the platform, any ideas you'd like to share, we're building this community with you and for you, so feedback is super valuable. And don't forget to invite your friends and colleagues to join us. Thank you, and have a great week.

Be well.