Reimagine Buildings News

Hello, and welcome to episode three of Reimagine Buildings news, the podcast of the Reimagine Buildings Collective. I'm Zach Semke. I'm a member of Al Gore's Climate Reality Leadership Corps. I'm director of Passive House Accelerator, and I'm host of the Reimagine Buildings Collective. And I'm so excited that you've joined us here for this episode three.

By the way, if you are a building professional who's stepping up to tackle climate change, the Reimagine Buildings Collective is the place to be. It's where we gather online to connect and learn so that we can create the healthiest buildings with the smallest carbon footprint, deliver them cost effectively and headache free, sell their benefits so they get built, and make a good living while doing it. If you're not already a member, head over to reimaginebuildings.com to learn more. Speaking of joining the collective, I I wanna celebrate this week's new members. A big welcome to Jordana Vluker, John Rogalski, Andrew Steingeyser, and Lois Arena.

We'll be hearing it a lot more from Lois, in this episode, but I just wanna take a moment to welcome Jordana, John, Andrew, and Lois to the collective. Okay. This past week was a great one on the collective. We were joined by Ed May, the acclaimed Passive House modeling and consulting expert for both an Ask Me Anything session on Tuesday and a fireside chat with Michael Ingwe, founder of Passive House Accelerator, on Thursday. Then on Friday of last week, the renowned Passive House engineer and consultant, Lois Arena, was our expert in the hot seat for Ask Me Anything Friday.

So replays of each of these events are live now in the Reimagine Buildings Collective. So head on over there to check them out either in the, Mighty Networks app or in your web browser at collective.reimaginebuildings.com. But in the meantime, I've gathered clips here for your listening pleasure, and they are full of cool insights. So let's start with Ed May and his fireside chat with Michael as part of our next level secret of the pros course in the collective. 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.

Monty Paulson 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 Passivhaus standard or eventually came upon the Passivhaus standard. And 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 dock and trade and commercial buildings, energy modeling and the like. But those kind of techniques were like relegated to a very small set of buildings and really a small group of practitioners.

And in many ways, the past 12 standard kind of broadened that out and said like, no, 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 now you guys can use them on, like, single family homes out in the up the woods someplace. And that was 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 designing.

So in the beginning, 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 I like to think that's still why a lot of folks gravitate towards the Passive House frameworks and RASA 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. And And you can use whatever metaphor you want and there's a million different examples of that. I always go back to my Dilder days of the flathead screw and the Phillips head screw. The flathead 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. The Phillips head screw, your screw fails to the center every single time.

And that sort of dichotomy between tools that make you feel like a chump and then tools that make you feel like a superhero is added through 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 passive house 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 I guess 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 P H P P, the passive house planning package, which is an Excel, document And Wolfie 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. Right? So those two calculators are the core of the work of a passive health 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 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. And it's fairly mature at this point. So that's what we use for all of our our work.

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 goes 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 in there.

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 Reimagine 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

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 going to have a much you're going to have an inflation and an expansion at the high end and an expansion and an inflation at the low end and you're going to 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. If I saw the agency, whether at the state, federal, the local level.

And so you can have 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 definitely food for thought for production building, and that's one of the reasons that Phius, for example, 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 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 2,009, was a social housing project, for a lady in Washington DC through Habitat for Humanity and everybody did. We did all the Passive House engineering and the PHPP and had it all dialed 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 HRV 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. 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, 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 a 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. The 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 was like 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 wealth of knowledge. And don't forget, you can access Ed's PHPP modeling course at any time in the collective. That's eighteen hours of top notch video instruction just waiting for you. He'll also be doing another one of his monthly Ask Me Anything sessions on Tuesday, February 25.

So mark your calendar and prep your questions. 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 super 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 advertise 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 of this 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 our 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 was like, seems like you're you're no. 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. You know, most people, like, I would say 99%, especially developers, something less 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 made around things, then then they go. Because after we did Cornell, our our work went like that.

You know, it was an exponential curve up. But until then, it was very minimal. You know? Mhmm.

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, Sam was just so committed to making it happen and excited. And so They're so successful.

Yeah. They and then and then Brandon and k Architects put us 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 in 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, wisps. It'll look like hair growing, and that 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. Like, they're not they babysit you.

Right?

Some great empowering words from Lois Arena right there. I've seen folks from all sorts of educational and career backgrounds enter this world and really thrive. So ask yourself, are you committed? 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 these 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. It's really great to have this weekly cadence of Ask Me Anythings. Really, they're group coaching sessions when you think about it. And it gives all of us a chance to get that burning question answered or to just hang out and learn from everyone else's questions.

So really great stuff. This coming week on the collective, we are joined on Tuesday by my dear friend and former colleague from our hammer in hand days, Dan Whitmore. Dan is a passive house builder, trainer, and developer who will be answering all questions details related as this AMA is a technical Tuesday detail session. So got a construction related question in the realm of building decarb or passive house? Join us Tuesday.

And then our Ask Me Anything Friday session is with a special guest who I can't quite reveal yet, but she is amazing. She's a leader in passive house architecture, carbon accounting, low embodied carbon practice in New York City. And I'll be announcing her name on the collective very soon as our newest expert in residence. But for now, I'll just have to prevail upon your curiosity. I hope you'll join us on Friday.

Details are in the collective for all of our ask me anything sessions, so head on over there for info. With that, thank you for listening. That wraps up episode three. As always, please 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've built all of this for you.

So feedback is super, super valuable. Also, if you're enjoying your experience on the collective, please invite your friends and colleagues to join us. We'd love to have them be part of it. Thank you, and have a great week. Be well.