Prospec 2018: Passive House and Commercial Construction

Medgar Marceau, Principal / Senior Building Science Engineer, is presenting Passive House and Commercial Construction: The Evolution of Residential Passive House Building Standards and the Application to Commercial Construction at this year’s CSI Puget Sound Prospec Conference!  This session is a part of the main seminar event and will take place at 3:00 p.m. on April 10.

Presentation Overview:

The accelerating growth of Passive House across the US and Canada is leading a change in the building envelope industry across the Pacific Northwest. With Vancouver’s new mandate to meet the Passive House standard for all city-owned commercial buildings, and Seattle’s progressively stricter energy codes, it’s only natural that our industry will have new challenges and opportunities to meet on the path to sustainability.

There is a large knowledge base of how to build durable residential buildings that meet the Passive House standard; however, there are few examples of commercial buildings meeting Passive House. This presentation will help bridge the knowledge gap between residential and commercial construction. Basic principles of Passive House are high levels of insulation, no thermal bridging, an airtight building, very high-performance windows and doors, heat and moisture recovery ventilation, and optimizing solar heat gains. All of this while ensuring occupant comfort and durability are paramount. Achieving these objective in Passive Commercial will require the same.

This presentation will discuss:

• Acknowledging the challenges in translating Passive House to Passive Commercial
• Solutions for minimizing thermal bridging in commercial construction
• Solutions for an air-tight interior vapor retarder
• Thermally efficient at-grade and below-grade transitions
• Using 2-D and 3-D simulation tools to evaluate hygrothermal performance
• Impact of 3-D Passive House Envelope Details on whole-building energy use