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Interviews with the leaders, practitioners, and change-makers in the global Passive House movement. A production of Passive House Accelerator.
00:01-00:04
I really think the Passive House space would be much better if it was more community-led.
00:05-00:57
I honestly think that the Passive House world and ecosystem would be much stronger and better off if we had more Passive House practitioners leading the way, making decisions, making proposals, making enhancements, making tools, being really engaged as the creators of the Passive House space and Passive House community, rather than just waiting for the groups to hand us their decisions and their tools.
Hello and welcome to the Reimagine Edit, a special series of the Passive House podcast that shares curated insights from our experts in residence at the Reimagine Buildings Collective, our membership community of building professionals stepping up to tackle climate change. Today is February 15th, 2025, and it's been a packed week in the collective.
00:58-01:15
So in this episode, we'll hear selected clips from Skylar Swinford, Ed May, Lois Arena, Maureen Sanchez, and Steve Quarles. I'm Zach Semke, director of Passive House Accelerator and host of the Reimagined Buildings Collective, and a big thank you to you for tuning in.
01:16-01:20
Let's start with Skylar Swinford and his Technical Tuesday Ask Me Anything session.
01:21-02:16
Skyler is a great friend, a former colleague from our days at Hammer in Hand, and a nationally recognized Passive House modeling expert. In this clip, he shares his top recommendation for a tool to make Passive House modeling more effective. When you're working on a project, what are some of the tools that you've developed, maybe two or three, that are go-to resources for you to make your work easier in modeling and either dealing with PHPP or dealing with Wifi passive and making the project work? I would say the first thing was, and I don't use it as much anymore because I work in Wifi passive a lot more, but Dylan Lamar and I built out a dashboard that allowed us to use PHPP, which is a single input sheet. You could really only build like a box and like stack stories on it and change window to wall ratios.
02:18-02:28
And, but basically having a single sheet where you could come into a meeting at the early onset of a project and come out of there with a plus or minus 20% idea of how this building is going to perform.
02:29-02:40
And you could pretty much dial in the, within approximation, what the U values for all the assemblies would be and how thick the assemblies would be, where we want to target different performance levels.
02:41-03:34
pretty much having a shoebox type calculator, whether it's a PHP that you've rigged into be a dashboard or just a simple UA Delta T type of spreadsheet with the project like heating degree days in it, where you can do some really quick optimization with the rest of the team there and not having to get back to them with a model and a report. It's amazing what you can work like you can do 90% of the project design in some of the very first early meetings of the project and have pretty good feedback. I found that to be the most valuable tool because it helps give me more context in the passive house world. Like sometimes we get just super hung up on all these little details and just trying to hit that really stringent heat demand. And so we start cranking up the values of slab insulation and all these other things. And we're not really looking at how much that's impact.
03:34-03:41
We may do all this work and from a heat loss perspective, we're still in the same size of HVAC equipment that we would have been in.
03:41-03:54
And so we're not really tunneling through the cost barrier anymore because we're making the envelope way more efficient, but we're not really able to downsize the HVAC equipment anymore because we're already at the smallest piece of equipment.
03:55-04:00
And we can look at the enclosure more holistically.
04:00-04:08
And rather than just looking at the heat demand, you can have a quick EUI calculation as well, which is looking at the overall building energy use of the building.
04:09-04:25
When you start to realize you get into these situations where you're doing all these things to be compliant with certification, but they're not really having an impact on the building EUI or the building overall sizing mechanical equipments.
04:25-04:37
And you have to understand if this project's not getting certified, maybe we don't need to go as extreme as we thought we did and have no change in comfort on the project, no change in sizing the mechanical systems.
04:38-04:47
And it lets you oftentimes upgrade to higher components and you better maybe have more budget for better mechanical equipment and things that you wouldn't have had that you could have sunk in the enclosure.
04:47-05:01
So for me, having that high level dewbox energy model to look at peak loads and heat demand is, has been the most valuable tool for me in my practice because it just helps get context and perspective and really fast answers.
05:02-05:25
It's probably been one of the most valuable pieces I have. And then from a learning perspective, just doing the formulas and understanding it helps. I mean, those are the same formula that are in behind Passive House, just like a simplified version of them. And so it's really, really just helps the loading process. I think when you are doing the math yourself and forcing yourself to go through the formula, it's just kind of like you have to do for the CPHC training and testing.
05:26-05:46
Even though it seems dumb at the time, the more you can understand it, the better it is, because then you start to understand just the holistic heat flow and the whole building and like you start to look at the U value of the entire building rather than just getting laser focused in on components and trying to like turn up the knob on one component.
05:46-05:48
That's not really improving the U value of the overall enclosure.
05:49-05:54
So that, that would be my one level of recommendation and have a tool like that.
05:54-06:00
There's something about just getting instant real time results and simple inputs that are manageable that you can show real time.
06:00-06:11
And then that ties into the calculator that I developed that does this with some, some inputs for different insulation and window types from the, the beam tool.
06:12-06:23
And then you can start looking at operational energy and comparing that to upfront embodied carbon and really, and it helps put everything in context as well with the projects.
06:23-06:32
There's always people on the project team that are like, this seems extreme, or this seems crazy, or we're never going to pay back this EPS foam or this exterior foam.
06:32-07:06
you can explain, yeah, we were able to go to the smallest heat pump system and the leaking refrigerant of the smaller heat pump alone is going to offset all the EPS foam under the slab or something like that. But as soon as you do some back of the envelope math, it becomes very apparent. And so it can help get the project team informed and everyone on the same page because it sucks when you're working on a really cool project and there's people that are naysaying it, which happened, but it's just good to have the data and just for your own knowledge, because those things are what we're doing this for, in my opinion.
07:07-07:17
We're trying to electrify buildings and we're trying to flatten load curves and we're trying to decarbonize our economy and the built environment.
07:17-07:20
And so we kind of need to know all these little pieces of the puzzle.
07:21-07:23
There's a ton more where that came from.
07:23-07:30
So if you're a member of Reimagine Buildings Collective, check out the Replays tab of the Ask Me Anything space to dive into the full recording.
07:31-07:38
Okay, now pivoting to a roundtable conversation that was part of our Next Level Secrets of the Prose course.
07:38-07:42
This conversation features three powerhouses of Passive House Consulting.
07:43-07:49
Ed May of Building Type, Lois Arena of Stephen Winter Associates, and Maureen Sanchez of RDH Building Science.
07:50-07:56
Let's start with Ed's call for a more community-led Passive House movement and Lois's response.
07:57-08:00
I really think the Passive House space would be much better if it was more community-led.
08:01-08:24
I honestly think that the Passive House world and ecosystem would be much stronger and better off if we had more Passive House practitioners leading the way, making decisions, making proposals, making enhancements, making tools, being really engaged as the creators of the Passive House space and the Passive House community, rather than just waiting for the groups to hand us their decisions and their tools.
08:24-08:45
So that's what I'd really like to see in the future going forward, is more of a community-led, community-decided Passive House space, Passive House environment, Passive House ecosystem of tools and groups and people and agencies, rather than this kind of hierarchical system that we have right now, where we all sit around waiting for decisions to come down from the groups.
08:46-08:46
That's a perspective.
08:47-08:47
That's my opinion.
08:47-08:49
Feel free to object and disagree.
08:50-08:51
No, I totally agree with you, Ed.
08:51-08:57
And the dissemination of that information that's coming back down is so tightly held.
08:57-09:09
It's just for the person who asked instead of available to every practitioner on this planet who has the same question and has to go through the same arduous process of getting that one answer.
09:09-09:12
It's just too narrow of a path.
09:13-09:18
Now check out this segment about problem solving rather than problem identifying.
09:19-09:22
Everything about buildings is so complicated.
09:23-09:30
And so anybody who is able to manage or reduce or streamline that complexity in some way is incredibly valuable.
09:30-09:32
So I think that's a really important skill.
09:32-09:40
And I think the opposite of that is, and we see this, sometimes you get those characters who, and they're not wrong, but they just are adding complexity.
09:41-09:50
Rather than coming in with a bunch of solutions, just coming in with a list of problems or a list of issues or, oh, what about, or, oh, what about, or, oh, what about.
09:50-09:53
That sort of backseat driving, again, well, it's not wrong.
09:54-09:55
It's not that useful.
09:55-09:58
And we don't see a lot of folks asking for it.
09:58-10:09
What people really want are teams, processes, tools, organizations, partners that can help manage all the complexity, help reduce it down to a sort of controllable level.
10:09-10:10
And it's different on different projects.
10:10-10:14
Like at small scale, it's more about just the sort of madness of it.
10:14-10:16
And then at the big scale, it's more about the risk.
10:16-10:23
When you have a lot of risk on large projects, expensive projects with big budgets, that's something that everybody needs to be able to manage.
10:23-10:38
And so I would say from a sort of skills perspective, just being able to manage problems, come up with useful solutions and be part of a problem solving team rather than a problem identifying team is probably more what we're seeing.
10:38-10:41
And of course, there's a million specific skills that we can get into.
10:41-10:43
But I think from a high level, that's mostly what we're seeing.
10:43-10:47
But I don't know if Lois and Maureen, you guys would agree with that if you're seeing something similar.
10:49-10:49
100%.
10:50-10:53
It's something that I try and instill in our younger staff when we hire them.
10:53-10:56
And they hired you to help them navigate this.
10:57-10:58
This is your job.
10:58-10:59
So don't be afraid to speak up.
11:00-11:02
Tell them what they can and can't do, what they should and shouldn't do.
11:02-11:03
But you're absolutely right.
11:03-11:05
They want you to guide them.
11:06-11:06
That's why they hired you.
11:07-11:11
And here the panelists share why Passive House practice is so rewarding.
11:12-11:17
I might just add just how interesting and nice the Passive House environment is to work in.
11:18-11:22
There's a lot of ways to work in the building industry, and a lot of them are a bummer.
11:22-11:27
But working in the Passive House space is really fun, and everybody's super nice, and it's really, I don't know, it's pretty exciting.
11:27-11:34
So there's a lot of challenges, but it is also a great way to engage with the construction industry and get to work in this sector.
11:34-11:37
It's a nice, it's a wonderful group of people just to say that reiterate that.
11:39-11:51
And I will say this, if you are actually going for certification, whether you make the final or not, the buildings are performing very consistently, no matter which standard you're in.
11:51-11:59
So if you need that extra oomph and proof that you are going to get the savings that we're predicting, we've got data now.
12:00-12:08
Michael, tie it up with if you're doing a Passive House or not a Passive House project, still think that the Passive House framework is incredibly useful.
12:09-12:12
We design better, we build better, there's better QAQC.
12:13-12:18
Exactly to Lois's point, the certification shows you that it's the end product is what you delivered.
12:18-12:22
So don't narrow down on the stamp only.
12:22-12:34
Think that the skills that you're learning through your Passive House journey, Yes, apply them to Passive House projects, but if you don't have your first Passive House project ready right now, you can still use the framework and it is robust.
12:35-12:41
It is guiding you as to where the industry is evolving, how tomorrow everybody will have to design.
12:41-12:44
So also don't narrow down just on the stamp.
12:44-12:47
And if you don't have the stamp, it doesn't useful or whatever.
12:48-12:49
The industry is moving there.
12:49-12:52
So I only wish you Passive House projects for 2025.
12:53-12:59
But if it's not, rest assured that this is still extremely good learning and being put to good use.
12:59-13:00
Okay, so don't lose the bigger picture.
13:01-13:02
Great advice from Maureen there.
13:03-13:07
Okay, now let's pivot to Friday's Ask Me Anything about fire resilience.
13:08-13:18
Here, Mary James, Passive House Accelerator's senior editor, asks building fire hardening expert Steve Quarles about insulation as fire resilience.
13:19-13:22
and Steve offers a primer on ember ignition scenarios.
13:23-13:36
What about a combustible insulation product like, I don't know, cellulose or something in the framing, and then just a stucco coating on top if it's applied really well.
13:37-13:45
Do you feel like that's a vulnerable fire, a vulnerable assembly from a fire resistance point of view?
13:46-14:05
And a related question to that is, so if you put mineral wool on the exterior, let's say you really didn't need it from an insulation point of view, but you were worried about fire resistance, you wanted to cover it up, would one inch be enough, two inches?
14:05-14:07
What are we talking about here?
14:08-14:15
So I think let's just step back and talk about how homes ignite or how buildings ignite.
14:15-14:22
And also the fact that we have sort of two things we can adjust when we're trying to reduce the vulnerability of a building.
14:23-14:32
And those two things are we can do something to the building itself in terms of materials or sort of design features and how the materials are put together.
14:33-14:37
And we do something about the combustibles on the property.
14:38-14:41
So the embers can ignite something directly.
14:43-14:49
For example, they can land on a wooden deck and ignite it directly without the help of any other things in the way.
14:49-14:57
If a home happens to have a wood shake or shingle roof, then it can ignite that roof directly without help of anything else.
15:00-15:04
I think that's a relatively small part of these ember ignition scenarios.
15:05-15:12
The other ignition scenario that involves embers would be what I call an indirect ember ignition scenario.
15:12-15:15
So embers ignite debris and gutter.
15:16-15:19
Embers ignite mulch next to the house or next to the building.
15:20-15:23
Embers ignite woodpile near the home or building.
15:24-15:33
So indirect ember ignition scenarios really result in a flame contact or radiant heat exposure to the home.
15:34-15:38
This next statement, I think people understand, but people keep saying it.
15:39-15:42
So maybe people don't really understand, but it's not really the wildfire burning to the home.
15:43-15:48
It's embers from wildfire that ignite things in on around the home.
15:50-15:52
That is the cause of ignition.
15:52-15:57
You see this just by looking at homes that are destroyed.
15:57-16:01
Often you have live vegetation around this home.
16:02-16:16
So I don't really think that having cellulose insulation in a wall with stucco cladding, particularly if it's a traditional three-coat kind of stucco, I don't think that's really a problem.
16:17-16:23
If the house ignites and burns to the ground, then clearly the cellulose insulation will be a part of it.
16:24-16:26
But it's not going to be the start of it.
16:26-16:31
You're going to have a neighbor that's very close that's burning, that house burns.
16:31-16:33
You're going to have a large wood pile.
16:33-16:58
You can have a tool shed, something that provides a pretty long and relatively high radiant heat or flame contact exposure to the side of the building such that either you're going to break the glass in a window on the wall, or you're going to have such an intense exposure that the stucco is going to undergo a lot of dehydration cracking.
16:58-17:42
you're going to have little voids opening up in the stucco and then convective heat transfer in, igniting, sheathing, then getting in. But it's a fact that you had such an intense exposure outside of the home that resulted in this kind of scenario where the insulation and the stud cavity had a role. So then your question about using mineral wool, whether one inch or two inch, there's a number of fire resistant materials that can be used. Mineral wool is one. There's a gypsum fiberglass product that I'm pretty sure you've heard of. It's the Dins Dins, that kind of a product.
17:44-17:51
These are all fire resistant materials that provide protection to the wall or to the roof.
17:51-18:03
But if you take that approach and you use that approach to put any kind of combustible thing on the outside, then you've really not addressed the other thing you need to be worried about, and that is flame spread on the wall.
18:05-18:10
By neglecting flame spread on the wall, then you bring the fire to other things that might be more vulnerable.
18:11-18:14
A window, a vent, a gable and vent.
18:14-18:39
If you're going to use these strategies of minimizing the ability of fire to move from the outside to the inside, then you need to also make sure that every other vulnerable component on the wall provides comparable protection or else that's going to be the feature that results in ignition and loss of the home.
18:40-18:42
Or loss of the home, the ignition's already happened on the wall.
18:43-18:51
Okay, so a big thank you to Steve, Mary, Maureen, Lois, Ed, and Skyler for sharing their insights with us this week.
18:52-18:54
As always, these clips just scratched the surface.
18:55-19:00
So if anything piqued your interest here, please do dive into the full replays of these sessions.
19:01-19:04
And if you're not a member of Reimagine Buildings Collective, please join us.
19:05-19:07
You'll get direct access to experts like these.
19:07-19:14
You'll get to know them, ask your burning questions, and expand your mind and your practice by engaging with these thought leaders.
19:15-19:17
Head over to reimaginebuildings.com to join.
19:18-19:22
Speaking of joining the collective, I want to celebrate this week's new members.
19:22-19:28
A big welcome to Thomas McWalters, Zach Wilson, Arthur Hurley, and Joshua Wujek.
19:29-19:30
Welcome to the collective.
19:31-19:39
With that, thank you for listening to this third episode of the Reimagine Edit, a production of the Passive House podcast by Passive House Accelerator.
19:40-19:45
As always, don't hesitate to DM me with anything Reimagine Buildings Collective related.
19:45-19:52
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.
19:52-19:54
So feedback is super valuable.
19:55-19:58
And don't forget to invite your friends and colleagues to join us.
19:59-20:01
Thanks and have a great week.
20:01-20:02
Be well.
20:13-20:31
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