[Greenbuilding] Aggressively Passive: Building Homes to the Passive House Standard

[Alan Abrams]

On Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 4:19 PM, jfstraube <jfstraube at gmail.com> wrote:

> I wrote
> <A higher standard than the PH one is a NetZero energy house.>
> to which Mr Abrams wrote
> <yadda yadda. >
> Not sure what to take from that.
>
> yes, that remark was not clear, and I apologize if it seemed as dismissive
as it does now.  My journey through this subject was not linear, and I
readily admit that my admiration for PH is as much sentimental as it is
objective.

I had managed to flounder through the universe of "fine homebuilding" for
decades before discovering "green building," and had never heard of HOT 2000
or R 2000, when I stumbled over PH at a presentation at the Austrian Embassy
5 or 6 years ago.  Something clicked, and I made a point of visiting a
practicioner in Vienna a few years later, to scope it out.  Fritz Oettl and
his colleagues graciously took the time to brief me on their work, a great
deal of which involved PH retrofits of the stodgy Franz Josef era
townhouses, but also included some single family projects.

Subsequently, I got my hands on a copy of PHPP, but did not make much
headway with it (it was a metric version....)  So when I learned that PHIUS
had a traveling training program, I suggested to Stan Serson of the Green
Building Institute that they host the training.  Maybe a year later, this
came to fruition.

Whatever the limitations of PH, the training for me was transformational,
enabling me to understand energy management as an integrated system.  Even
though I have not done a full blown Passive House yet, PHPP has been a
tremendously useful tool in my work, primarily to evaluate the efficiency of
various envelope components.

I appreciate John's specific criticisms of PH, and venture to say that we
are in substantial agreement that any design system has limitations, and can
be gamed.  It's up to all of us to use our best judgment as we use these
powerful tools.

-AA
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