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

[jfstraube]

Without seeing your face when you say yadda yadda it is hard to know how to take it:) So thanks for the clarification.

I too think that you and I, and most of the serious builder/designers, are on the same page.  This is why I take the time to critique PH: it has so many good things, I want it to succeed and roll out to a wider audience and I believe to do so it needs to accommodate that some things are different when you leave Germany.


On 2011-01-10, at 9:43 AM, Alan Abrams wrote:
> 
> 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.
> 

John Straube
www.BuildingScience.com



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