The North American Passive House Conference opened with a reminder of why our work is so important and ended on a retrospective on why North Americans need to repatriate ‘Passivehaus’. We were reminded that we’re “spending our carbon allowance” and that ambitious goals like Edward Mazria’s 2030 challenge are needed to curb our buildings’ need for energy. The closing speech delved into the huge climatic variance in North America and also reminded us that a few Canadians played a crucial role in the development of the techniques of ‘passive home’ and even coined the phrase.
Joseph Lstiburek warns us all about “pulling numbers out of … [their/your] ass” and drew our attention to ‘over ventilation’ and why 10CFM per occupant plus a small area allowance was likely the best ventilation rate. Sorry for the fuzziness, I was shaking in the presence of the great one!
If you can only attend one conference…
The conference, held at the very grand Omni William Penn hotel in downtown Pittsburgh, was vibrant and focused on cutting edge details to do with building efficiency. It was my first PH conference and already I can say if you want to be cutting edge, you need to attend this conference if you can only attend one conference.
Panelist fielding a questions at the Hootenanny: Chris Senior, Brandon Weiss, Tessa Smith , Natalie Leonard (The green one) and Skylar Swinford and moderated by Dan Whitmore.
There were plenty of Canadians at the conference and two towering participants need mention here; Natalie Leonard and Dr. Russell Richman. Natalie is an east coast builder and has more North American passive homes under her belt that anyone. I heard her as a panelist at the hootenanny and her plain talk set her in the pantheon of the best high efficiency builders in North America.
Ryerson University and Building Science
Dr. Russell Richman also gave a talk, but more importantly, two of his graduate level students, David Hawkins and Matthew Tokarik were in attendance and David gave a talk on building quality. It bears mentioning that no other academic on Canadian soil is advancing the super high efficiency agenda more that Dr. Richman.
Other notable Canadians in attendance at the conference included architect Terrell Wong, builders Sylvia Cook, Ed Marion, Matthew Schiedle, Kathy Garneau and window manufacturer Stephen Thwaits.
L-R at back: Shervin Akhavi, Mike Anderson, Front: Ed Marion, Peter Amerongen, Natalie Lenard and Greg Labbé.
In the end PHIUS President Katrin Klingenberg, long suffering and doggedly determined, shared her thoughts on the necessity for keeping the performance high while being flexible on the future requirements of a new PH standard. For example, one can build a PH in California with insulated 2×4 whereas the climate makes things significantly more complicated in other climates. So the concept of a North American made, equally stringent but flexible climate specific.
PHIUS President Katrin Klingenberg and Oakville Builder Ed Marion pose post conference.
Fianlly, Katrin presented evidence that Rob Dumont coined the term “passive house” in his paper circa 1973 entitled “Passive Solar Heating – Results from two Saskachewan Residences.
Which stated in the introduction “Considerable interest has been shown in the use of passive solar heating. Two conferences and numerous papers have dealt with this tpic. The pioneering work of Trombe, Balcomb and Anderson has led to a greater recognition of the cost-effectiveness of passive solar heating. For Canadian imate conditions little detailed work has been done in this area. A number of recent papers by Cooper, Gilpin and Jones and Tymura present theoretical studies of the performance of windows and passive houses in Canadian conditions.”
Apparently both Katrin and Dr. Lstiburek had to dig information for their respective presentations from “stacks” in a place called a “library”…