Session 3 of a free webinar series hosted by Construct Innovate, Ireland’s National Research Centre for Construction Technology and Innovation, in collaboration with Engineers Ireland West.
Welcome everyone to the construct innovate webinar series on sustainable sustainability planning and construction uh this is our third week of the webinar series and this week we’re uh concentrating on passive house design my name is Jamie Goggins and I’m the director of construct Innovation which is Ireland’s national Research Center
For construction Technology Innovation and we’re running this webinar Series in association with Engineers Ireland so absolutely delighted uh today to have a stellar lineup of of speakers uh lots and lots of experience uh here today on the on the webinar so we have Jeff Collie who’s the founder and editor of
Passive house plus um who is going to talk to us about passive house and why we should build passive we’ve got alga mares who’s from Helen melum Architects and um she’s got a lot of experience in delivering passive houses and is going to give us some of the Lessons Learned
Um from that uh we have Hugh wery um who’s managing director of partel uh and he’s going to talk to us about the importance of membranes and ventilations so uh in that in in their company they actually develop their own membranes and ventilation and do a lot of training and
Installation um are providing the product and installation and so on and then we have stepen uh Barrett who’s the car lead at the Irish Green Building Council and he’s going to look at the whole life cycle carbon analysis of the building design so why do we need to
Cons be considered concerned about the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the products that we actually put into the buildings uh and that so without further Ado I’m going to pass over to our first speaker so our first speaker is Jeff Jeff Ki um so over to you Jeff
So yeah um look thank you for the opportunity to speak here um uh grateful to to construct innovate and to Engineers Ireland for the chance um I wanted to speak specifically I’ve been asked to speak on on you know on what passive house is and why it matters um I’ll just crack into
That so what is passive house to begin with well um I mean uh it’s it’s an energy standard um which is focused on solving the need for heating in terms of um an active heating system in our climate zone and in a cooling climate it’s it’s focused on trying to solve the
Need for active cooling too um many cases you find it’s a question of just minimizing the need and of course looking at what’s happened to our weather in Ireland this year you know um uh uh we’re facing different kinds of different kind of uh conditions for our
Buildings too uh so we may you know without care end up with cooling requirements on our buildings it was created by a physicist called Wolf Gang Feist and an engineer called Bo Adamson um unencumbered by Earthly concerns such as uh such as building regulations um or or such as
The approach building RS um I presume some many of the of the the attendees today have been privy to the process of of changing building legs as I have many times over the years and um it’s building for RS are not just about building science um you know it’s a
Political process as much as anything else you have a stakeholder uh engagement process to consider as part of that and it’s a question of trying to bring in the RS that the industry will be willing to accept as well to a point and that is not really uh an ideal
Starting point because you know building physics don’t recognize politics fortunately um you can build it out of anything I know uh for many people passive house in the past hundred of images of like a prefabricated house arriving off a truck from Bavaria and that can be how you
Build it but you could build it out of bloody animal fileld if you want I mean um so for instance um two extremes are just picked as an example this is a modular straw Bell passive house in Herford which is performing beautifully um and this is uh the dreaded 9in Hollow
Block it’s a it’s a single leaf Hollow block uh wall uh wrapped in uh mineral W external insulation um and uh um this is this as it stands is is is Ireland’s uh largest passle scheme silon Park in City West which is soon to be dwarfed it’s not just for new builds as
A standard um so um this is an extraordinary project um there is a version of in the paf suite of Standards is a standard called iner fit um and this one is uh it’s a couple of tow houses in a posh part of Manchester listed building retrofitted to enerfit
Plus um which is with a a bunch of uh of of Renewables uh and AIC Target in that regard and petrochemical free I mean the the it’s kind of one of the maddest projects and most ambitious projects we’ve ever published they they even built you’ll see on the right there uh
Bespoke uh triple glazed uh stained glass windows uh so they really kind of went above and beyond just to kind of prove that it could be done um it’s not just for houses uh this is the world’s first passive house hospital um which was uh Rec recently handed over in
Frankfurt much quicker than our own National Children’s Hospital um uh this is uh one in the long line of of schools in the UK uh we have a couple in Ireland as well but uh this is by archetype U prominent English paf architectural practice um another archetype project um
An Archive Building for Imperial War museums and this is a kind of remarkable one because um uh normally people build POS of house because you’re trying to kind of create a comfortable healthy environment for occupancy buildings um uh while minimizing energies and carbon emissions in this case um paf effect was
Chosen specifically because they had Priceless artifacts um you know papers and artifacts from uh from two world wars um and and uh they had very strict requirements to keep in very tightly regulated uh ranges in terms of temperature and humidity and paf house without any Windows was a nice way of
Being able to do that um it’s pretty old as as standards go um so back when we were all having our heads filled with the with uh with Kevin shidi and paky boner save um in Italian 90 um and when Germany uh most of Germany was uh was
Celebrating a World Cup there was one German uh obviously his his mind was elsewhere and that’s Wolf Gang Feist so he um at was at that stage uh was on uh was the first passive house in darst in Germany was was on the drawing board it
Was finished a year later um this is it here photographed a few years ago um um it’s a 4unit Terrace um and that was I suppose the kind of pro concept for for the standard um it has five kind key components in essence um and this is about you know um essentially stopping
The indoor and outdoor environments from kind of trying to equalize in terms of temperature um and dare say air quality you got got poor air quality outside um so and those those ingredients uh kind of key ingredients include uh high levels of thermal insulation uh triple
Glazed uh windows with uh uh kind of insulated frames as well and well SE Feld uh frames um and attention to the elimination of thermal bridging generally so this is to spot um cold spots uh with you know within the structure that uh that that can enable
Uh uh Vapor to kind of condense in the wrong spot by the same token air tightness um interestingly the founder bang Feist of the standard uh maintains that the reason they set a very honorous air Titans Target it’s point6 air changes per which for reference is about probably about four or five times
Tighter than the average new house in Ireland now and about uh about 20 odd times tighter than the average house built during the Celtic tiger years um and that’s not just for energy the real the principal reason the air tightness was Target was set was set at such an
Ambitious level was for structure because Feist had notice from studying early attempts at super insulated buildings um from after the Iran and OPAC oil crisis and there were a bunch all around the world including in Ireland um that if you end up letting uh uh if you insulate but you but you don’t
Air Titan you end up letting Vapor uh you know moisture Laden air um condense in the wrong places of the building and potentially cause structural damage and then the final ingredient in terms of components is uh I love this German uh this is translation this from from The
Institute um you know German into English adequate ventilation strategy um so and there is actually a grain of Truth in that because you know ventilation is one of these areas where you can have too much of a good thing you need a sufficient air change rate to
Ensure comfort and health but if you give too high an achange rate there is a risk um that that people will will sabotage the ventilation system too um so adequate is not you know it’s a revealing world word in a way uh there’s a six project in greting to which is
Quality insurance and so um uh we feature in in the magazine uh lots of projects including uh nonp passive houses um and um it’s remarkable I mean uh the difference in the quality of the information we get um from passive and non-p passive projects uh I mean it’s
Improving a little bit with the nonp passive projects these days but but what you’ll tend to find is that you get far much more information um I can think of uh you know we get folders of uh uh of uh hundreds of photographs showing uh you know measuring tapes showing the uh
The insulation thickness showing all of the kind of key details uh because evidencing and in terms of a certified pass has the evidence to show that The Works were done properly is kind of critical so why does it matter well um uh according to unap uh building energy
Use is equivalent to or is responsible for about 27% of global CO2 emissions um uh so you know uh this is a kind of a key issue given that the the world is on fire um and we need to act um it seems to work passive house seems
To work I haven’t in the time a lot it uh uh um gone into the performance Gap issue that we run into with uh with uh many you know historically we’ve run into low energy buildings but it’s a significant issue which pacif doesn’t suffer from so by way of example here’s
A lovely 1990s graph um from the first passive house um the target for space heating demand is 15 kilowatt hours per square meter perom um and uh in this case you’ll see the red bar is is the space heating the actual measured space heating they were over 20 in the first
Year and you’d expect higher in the first year given that the building is drying out and people are familiarizing themselves with how to operate the system the systems um um but uh since then it’s been in and around 10 uh give or take uh so it’s been performed better
Than than the requirement in standard um a UK study from a few years ago now of 97 passive houses um uh showed that uh um while the target was 15 in this case the the houses have been calculated to achieve 11.7 so a lot of designers will aim little bit below the maximum
Requirement and the mean measured space Heating in year one uh was less than 11 um so that’s again I guess very reassuring uh rather than just you know uh statistics I think real stories make it really make a difference this project um is uh the first uh social housing
Project and the first passive housing project to win the Sterling prize which is hopefully a sign of architecture kind of growing up and uh you know not kind of look into Garland uh monuments to the architect um but to actually uh you know look at providing high density sustainable housing um for for
Vulnerable people um and um in this particular case the guardian run uh an article on it um and the comments were just extraordinary I mean um people talking about um life that it was lifechanging um being able to save and pay back debts and pay vet bills uh that
They wouldn’t have been able to cover otherwise um uh reducing medications um you know getting away from from from from damp issues um and this this tenant saying was depressing to be told by the landlord that it was our fault with damp previously here we can dry clothes
Indoors in a day with no heating on um and then one uh tenant saying the filter system is amazing um we try not to smoke inside because the air is so nice that we don’t want to spoil it uh this is an extraordinary one again an 18 unit sheltered housing scheme um
In exiter uh built designed by a German passive architect who very kind of dogmatic I suppose stereotypically dogmatic about the approach even though it was sheltered housing very vulnerable occupants who need higher uh temperatures and who were there kind of you know more or less all the time he
Chose not to put heating systems in and most pacifist designers would put a small heating system in but he didn’t all he put in was a little battery heater on the ventilation system to boost the temperature as required five years after the project was completed uh
In nine of the 18 units the tenants reported that they hadn’t turned the posters on at all since moving in uh this one in Wales um uh couple years after moving in the boiler broke down um and when the plumber came around to fix it before Christmas the tenant sent him
Packing saying they didn’t want the hassle uh of having a trades person in over Christmas to come back after Christmas uh this one in Black Rock um was interesting because there’s an online dashboard for the ventilation system um a lot of posf house uh early adopters have been quite um you know uh
Obsessive about the the data coming out of the the homes um and in this case Steven tierne the architect and client uh logged into his dashboard um uh when he was on holiday in Spain and he saw um the uh CO2 levels the black line here
Spike at about 7 o’clock in the evening and come back down again you’ll see um next morning right you know they only got R to kind of acceptable levels at 3: or 4 in the morning his teenage son was looking after the house and he caught
Him red-handed having a par so it’s kind of George Orwell will be spinning in his grave but you know this is uh this is what uh that kind of data can tell you um it can be capital capital cost neutral as bizarre as that might seem
For for people to to to uh to comprehend this project was done about six seven years ago um madira Oaks and then the scorey by Michael Bennett uh uh seasoned enough pass Builder he was able to compare against previous phases of the scheme that were built just to building
Rags um and in this case um the he sold first four houses you believe this um to a builder finish 102 square meter 3 bit semd um for € 170,000 each um and there was an independent study comparing the cost um with a with an with an independent Qs
University of oler study led by Shane kley um the cost uplift per unit over the 2011 regs was Quantified at €31 Euro uh which is scarcely believable but that’s that’s with with a good Builder and and uh and bit of cuteness that this is where you can where you can
Get to um in that particular project it was timber frame with cellulose as well so a low embodied carbon build even the party wall there is was uh was cellulose um and with an airtight board made by met smart FL um and uh the we have to test the the noise transmission levels
Across party walls under Part D of the building regulations and the acoustic consultant Ted Dalton told me I’ve never seen a result like this the results they got 69 DB Akin the kind of sand insulation we attempt to design into walls between commercial Cinemas extraordinary stuff um it’s low risk and
It’s built to last um so this is uh 25 years after the first passive house was finished a destructive study was done um to check what the performance was like uh the external insulation was cut off the walls bone dry behind it um the windows the u values are measured again
And they were they would have been bespoke rather than kind of you know um of mass produced you know with all of the the kind of the the quality control that would have gone into that um all bar one were perfect I think they and they reckoned the one that one pain
Where where the uh where one section window where the U valy wasn’t right they weren’t sure whether it had lost its gas uh in the manufacturer or over time and the doctor work was checked um as well they’d never been cleaned um and clean as whistle um the the basically
All of the components uh including the mvhr system again which would have been a pretty primitive system the ventilation system system bar the electronics the academic study predicted that all of these things would last at least another 25 years um it’s simple um so I just just to conclude now because I
Know I’m running over time I mean what we’re talking about is um you know uh in some ways going backwards um in the 19th century we had very simple houses um where you know we had no central heating you put an open fire and a jumper on on
The occupants to keep them warm um then in the 20th century we started started getting very complicated with the Advent of central heating and some of the responses frankly to trying to go sustainable have added to that kind of complexity there’s a kind of a w Heath Robinson element you know if anybody
Knows the kind of Victorian uh uh cartoonist um and now we’re we’re in the 21st century it’s about going back to Simplicity now I would say in conclusion any Engineers uh among you uh you know service Engineers for instance particular I wouldn’t be worried you’re not to turkeys voting for Christmas in
Going for pive um there’s still design work required to to to prove concept and you still have mechanical ventilation systems in in these homes you still need hot water um and it’s a it’s a rare client who’s brave enough not to put a heating system in but what you can say
With these buildings we have enough information to know you can have confidence that when you uh hand over building like this that it’s going to perform boringly well for decades um and uh and I think that is it’s an extraordinary thing to be to to to be
Able to say so thank you very much I’d just like to conclude by saying um Hawking myself for a minute um for the magazine uh you can subscribe for just 40 quid for the year or request a free copy um uh at passive plus. also I
Haven’t included it here but I have a a podcast called zero Ambitions um which um hopefully people tend to find it’s it’s engaging enough um and it’s available wherever you get to your podcast that’s called zero Ambitions thanks very much BR thanks Jeff and both the magazine and the podcast highly
Recommended excellent really high quality very informative all the time okay so we’ll uh we move on to our next speaker so Al guys next so going to give us some lessons learned from passive house design so AA would you like to be able to share your screen hopefully H so
Thank you Jamie for inviting us uh to be here today my name is Olga and I’m a project architect at Helena maill Architects and today we’ll be talking about our experiencing in delivering passive houses in west of Ireland and so we are based in gallway we have projects
Throughout west of Ireland in a mix of residential commercial and public realm and we have three in-house certified passive how designers uh myself included and all our residential projects are currently being designed to the pass house standard uh why and uh I think Jeff has gone through quite a few of the
Wise already but this is our wise it is a way that that we are sure to deliver comfortable healthy houses to our clients that are extremely uh energy efficient and that uh achieve the environmental responsibility we set out as a goal for our practice and in doing
So we’re also food appr proofing our buildings uh we are also very keen that it is a validated and benchmarked high construction standard and has Jeff mentioned it’s all about quality insurance from very early on stages through uh through construction to completion and in our case as well post occupancy
Evaluation uh we are also very keen that it does require strict standards uh both in the design phase and then in the construction stage and and then it usually involves uh the inclusion of high performance systems and materials and it goes through a very rigorous uh process of testing and certification at the
End how exactly do we do this how does it differ from a more standard architectural project well uh there’s a lot of investment needed in training so all of our um team members all of my colleagues here have been trained in the passive house principles so that they
Can be applied very early on in the early design stages uh which just makes it easy to comply with the standard later on and then in terms of tools we like to use the design pH which is a plugin you can install into our 3D software SketchUp so it was very easy to
Incorporate into our workflow and from there we export into the more formal passive house planning package which is Excel based and that’s where we like to find tun details things like final window sizes and actual materials that went into the build and then depending on the construction type we would have
To go into our thermal Bridge software which we have actually started doing in-house as well it just allows us to run quite a few more scenarios than we would if it was done externally uh yeah so we’re just just uh gone through the tools that we use and then next
Slide so it’s the three residential projects and we thought it would be interesting in doing this also showing three ways uh two three building FS uh that we’ve used so next slide thank you so the first project is a four bedroom house about 200 uh square meters of
Treated floor area and you can see there we’re uh meeting the passive house standards and heating load and heating demand and the family has actually moved in it’s a lovely family of six they moved in in December and and they’ve sent us their first es bills so then
They’re very very close to what was estimated in the passive house planning package which uh we think it’s very reassuring and it’s also in fact meeting the Royal Institute of Architects 2030 climate challenge Target for operational energy uh next slide maybe thank you uh so this house uses a tradition
Additional masing cavity cavity wall construction so two block work leaves one inner one outer forming a cavity which we filled with pump insulation and the only difference here it’s a slightly wider cavity than thear conventional build at 200 millimeters now the system is easy enough to describe and it does
Seem to be easy enough to construct maybe next slide shate but once you get to details uh it doesn’t really lend itself to the more thermal Bridge free or the air tightness that is a the requirement for the passive house and you do have to go into a bit more
Complex detailing than your more conventional detailing and and in this case for example it’s just the window seill and we’ve gone through quite a few different scenarios just to see how we could mitigate effects of creating a tho Bridge there and still comply with the passive house standard so we ended up
Using a few different types of installation in that one small area there and also proprietary wall size with low conductivity next slide thank you um and this is while we’re delivering on passive house we’re also still delivering on architectural detail of course H and it is entirely uh possible uh it just takes
A little bit more care in how you think about sequencing the words and just making sure that everyone on SES is well aware of that precious continuity of the air tightness layer and insulation so here we had an exposed ceiling and you still have to think of how do you
Connect back to their more standard ceilings and living bits of membrane and tape so that they can all connect back eventually next slide thank you H here we’re seeing a corner window detail and uh we’ve gone to great lens with our structural engineer to find a
Way to sport the outer Leaf while not creating a huge sto Bridge with like a crazy steel plate Bridging the cavity for example so we’re using steel angles that are thermally broken and just slightly customized to allow a little bit of overlap between the insulation and the window frame as well next slide
Thank you H here we’re seeing just a fraction of the about a million uh heat recover ventilation ducts that go into a passive house as I’m sure H will tell you all about um we usually work with the suppliers to ensure the least uh the smallest um the lowest flow possible so
There’s no noise in rooms so that just adds more and more ducts it’s one of the first things that we actually uh set out to discuss with the structural engineer because quite a few of those actually end up needing structural openings through the produ work next thank
You uh one of the other steps we take in designing a passive house is to ensure Comfort throughout the year so that’s also in summer and indeed it wouldn’t be certifiable if it was expected to be overheating uh by a great amount uh so the strategies that we like to
Incorporate uh go with natural ventilation for summer and in this case we had quite a few opportunities to have a high uh level windows that just help create a a great air flow in case it’s needed and we’ve also used mostly uh sliding doors for the internal doors of
The Living Spaces we just ensure those could be left open and there’s a really good air flow going through the house we also in most projects we like to incorporate blind niches so they do get installed by the users and because they’re just good a good uh shading
Strategy and in some projects where we have very large glazing areas we go back to the numbers and see how are they actually balancing the views with the overheating and if needed we can resize them or go back to the windows suppliers and just uh try and come up with a low
Gains uh glazing specification next slide thank you so our next project is uh the smallest of them all it’s a three bedroom house about 170 square meters and it’s been occupied for a while uh we did receive uh some bills as well from our clients it was from that period that
We were all still uh locked up inside so it might have been getting a bit more intense use and we’re it might explain that difference there from the estimation to the actual use uh we should be getting new bills actually to see if that kind of came down or if it’s
There’s something there that needs to be uh thought through uh next slide please so for this case we’ve used a slightly more simple build it’s a one single uh block word Leaf laid on flat and wrapped externally with insulation uh this does make for a lot more simple uh detailing of thermal
Bridges and uh next slide thank you uh just a easier quality control on S side because you would actually see any gaps in your insulation layer next slide um you still have to take great great care of course with all the Junctions and uh places like Windows
That you still have to tape but it is easily manageable usually with the builder that’s experienced on site thank you and next slide and Architectural detailing was also a bit easier to manage as you’re not trying to hold that uh external blockwork Leaf so things like recess panels and coroner windows were just
That slightly more simple in terms of detailing next slide so our last house uh is uh the largest uh of all of the projects today it’s on a spectacular site here on the gway Bay and that’s why you’re actually looking at a huge amount of glazing south facing which of course goes with
The client wishes of being able to take in all of those lovely views that they have over the bay um now this is already a bit of a reduced version of that glazing um and in on top of that we’ve looked at creating a lot of overhangs
Where possible and and on top of that we’ve also gone back to the suppliers and specified a load G glazing and we have achieved um comfort throughout the year next slides thank you and the clients initially came to us also with the brief uh asking us to look at uh
Reduced embodied carbon energy uh which we were delighted to hear because that’s where we’re trying to head head the practice and so we specified a timber frame with natural as much natural insulation as possible so this is uh what we came up with it’s a there’s plas board the surface cavity protecting the
Very precious AER Titans membrane and then there’s the timber stud work filled with cellulose insulation OSB and externally placed wood fiber board breather membrane protecting all of that and vented cavity and then in some areas cement port and in some areas uh blockwork now this system is pretty much
Thermal Bridge free in practice there’s one tricky Junction usually which is where needs the foundations uh which can become a slide thermal Bridge next slide thank you H which is where why we went and looked at an insulation foundation for this specific project now rafts are the
Most common form uh of foundation that we’ve been using here in West and this is a raft as well it’s just insulated externally and it does tend to use a bit less concrete um than just standard more conventional raft and on top of that our structural engineer has helped us
Specifying a 50% ggbs use reducing a bit the impact on the embod energy and carbon of this specific project next slide thank you so a few final thoughts uh designing passive houses has allowed us to be designing and constructing for performance and our ongoing post occupancy evaluation is actually
Demonstrating uh how close we are to what was estimated which is very assuring um and many passive buildings from ourselves and our colleagues are being uh shown to be very close or meeting already the Royal Institute of Architects 2030 climate challenge for operational energy and so it’s great
It’s also a great system to demonstrate that we are meeting because you can actually input the exact appliances that the clients have chosen to install in the house uh because operational energy actually accounts for everything not just heating so it’s your actual kilowatts on your ESB Bill and now which
Form of construction and Jeff uh had already mentioned passive house is a material agnostic one could say you could build it out of anything and we’ve shown you we have delivered out of anything it’s just how complex it is for us Architects and for the builders on site to actually achieve the standard
Traditionally masonry cavity um does land itself to bit more complex level of detailing um and more issues to be solved on site just with sequency of Works uh external wall insulation does become easier to deliver but it’s still very high in embodied energy and then timber frame construction ter it is a
Termal bridge- free design mostly um and the air tightness is easier to manage and can be uh easily um uh accessible again if remedial work are needed and it generally has lower embodied carbon as I’m sure stepen will uh review in his presentation uh so next slide that was
It for me thank you very much and there are few links there if you want to find out more about it thank you thanks a lot alga okay so without further Ado we’ll hand over to Hugh wski um from part L who will talk about the membranes and ventilation what you here
Okay um hope everyone can hear and see the screen okay thanks Olga and Jeff some really interesting presentations and points made um so today I’m going to try talk a little bit about why we use membranes um not just what we have to achieve with passive house but what else
They do and a short overview on ventilation as well there there is a little bit more to it so lowering energy costs is the one we kind of clearly associate air tightness installation with um but for me there’s a lot more to it and we find sometimes with people and
Um I guess Olga has seen this as well and different types or sizes of projects it could also be to improve Comfort levels um there’s related benefits within that so that could be two houses you know built in the same location with the same form um one built to the
Passive house standard and one not and you’ll find that the interior temperatures for the house that has good um detailing and air tightness will need to be heated to a lower maximum temperature so it means feel comfortable at a lower temperature um then when we look at air quality um generally that’s
An area that’s really um broadening in terms of people’s access to controls or monitors so we’re starting to understand um what’s going on with our houses and um that’s an understanding of um PM 2.5 or could be the mle spores U relative humidity voc’s all that kind of thing so
An air tightness membrane is absolutely critical in preventing off gassing of certain construction materials into the building and the last one um I’m a member of Engineers Ireland myself um and I um I suppose I focus a lot on the structural integrity and what that means
And I’m going to talk a little bit more about um why and how we need to watch the layering and construction um to have solid buildups another key reason that we introduce air tightness layers is because we have to it’s mandatory as part of our partl partf building
Regulations so we need to be below five um we um which is interesting as Jeff has kind of mentioned at different times our average air tightness in Ireland I think it’s about 2.2 right now so we’re exceeding regulations and it’s because we’re introducing air type membranes and
Systems that are proven to to work um we do need to be aware that um a ventilation system needs to be me mechanical if we’re below three air changes per hour this works you know perfectly in passive house and the next one in Part F where all ventilation
Systems must be validated by an independent competent person certified by nsai that’s proving to be a real change in the industry so essentially we have a blower door test we have a beor and now we also have this ventilation validation system um it’s really shining a light on issues with installation so
Each room hit the required flow rates um and it’s making people revisit um ventilation and now in order to comply it needs to be correctly designed so right from the start um we need to have an appropriate design all get touched on that where you do this early in the
Project that’s really important and gives you a much better chance to get a good quality design and a subsequent install um so it can’t be a secondary decision you know where does the inst the system go you know let’s put it in the Attic that’s not a good idea so
Early um design helps a lot I want to just talk a little bit before I start to talk about the structural Integrity of buildings why we um need to consider our air tightness membranes and their other benefits um so the word breathability um most misunderstood word in construction um it
Refers to water vapor not to air so air type membranes are more commonly known as an air and VAP control lay so they’re really critical about managing that moisture Ingress into the building Fabric and Jeff you had mentioned that a little at the start but really we need
To be careful so we can have breathable construction we can have non-breathable construction um air tightness systems um you know can be either one and work well in a passive house the ventilation system is needed in each house so breathable construction isn’t a compensation for fresh air it’s independent it’s just water vapor
Um there is different ways to look at how each of these systems are measured so if we take a a breathable membrane on the outside that could be an STD value of 0.1 to 0.5 so it’s a measurable figure something we can check and air tightness membranes then can be a vapor
Check a vapor barrier or vapor tight so looking at how we assess how air tightness membranes might fit into a typical construction this shows a timber frame Construction using um in this case OSB on the inside and the outside um with a brick out exteror of that and
Wood fiber insulation in between so we know from our experience that this type of construction isn’t Optimum because the OSB layer here and here have the same breathability the same SD value ideally we want the construction to become more breathable as it goes to the exterior so this is what our wolfy model
Looks like we build all lay out we introduce the ventilation shown in the cavity um and we get these types of outputs where we can assess the water content over a period of time so the first one is what the OSB is doing on the outside layer um in summer and
Winter that’s why you see increases and decreases so it becomes quite dry in the summer um and much higher almost 177% moisture content and the reason to show this slide is this shines a light on the moisture content being a little high um higher than we should need it to be if
We change that outside layer to a medite vent board it drops the moisture content much lower um so increases the degree of safety dramatically in the building um when we look more at at membranes and start to learn about um their breathability it brings us into
The section or the area where we’ve got variable technology so this is smart membranes that can um give us additional drying functions in our construction so essentially there are a range of products that can become quite vaportight in Winter um and Vapor open in summer so it gives us an increased
Possibility for drying these products are necessary in flat roofs um you do need to do a woy design on that to establish the safety but broadly speaking they’re a good idea to help the building dry a little more they typically come as a full system so that
Could be the type membrane to fluid applied to tapes um so it’s a full system and it’s a good idea to say look you know I want to take a saf approach and I’m going to look at specifying the virus system for all of my interior airtightness then on the exterior I want
To touch a little um on the types of products we use on the outside um we at partel are focused on monolithic membranes that’s a Next Generation type of exterior membrane um there is still a breathable membrane that is more commonly used called microporus technology microporus products have um
Actual physical holes that facilitate the breathability of those membranes that does um bring with it um some manufacturing aspects that mean these products don’t last as long um so really when we look at an an exterior monolithic membrane there are things that can last 15 to 30 times longer than
The other products so there is a an acceptance that a breathable mem is a breath of a membrane that they don’t change but a short amount of time or consideration on specification can actually dramatically increase the lifespan of your passive house building or any construction it can also help with the air
Tightness um testing is a really important area for us um thankfully we’re happy to say we’re going to be working with Jamie and his team on this side of things as well um but it’s something we’re experienced with and we do a lot with the type of
Test you you see here is a Shear test of a membrane or peeling test um or of a tape so you can see in this instance that the tape facilitates a lot of movement in the building um the adhesive itself is also able to do that um on the testing of systems
Overall um we’re one of the most tested passive house Institute overall System test um we have three out of the top five best performing results which we’re really proud of but we do like the system test because it’s covering the a type membrane the tape the adhesive um short look at the structural
Thermal bridging all guys mentioned these products they’re something we do a lot of in partel they’re recycled products so actually from plastic bottles we are producing almt structural insulated panels so they can take the weight of windows and doors and could be a really good way to separate in a a
Number different types of construction I’m conscious that we’re uh running a little overtime as a group so I’ll keep this a little bit shorter but on ventilation um it’s a slide I’ll often use and I like it because it what we want to do is get people to start
Thinking about ventilation as a as one of the first principles of design so as humans we’ve got five basic needs that’s the air food water um shelter and sleep so it’s a absolute core a necessary product for us to consider first and foremost and um it has enormous benefits
To our health we need our ventilation systems to remove CO2 Supply the oxygen that we breathe reduce the harmful voc’s pm10 2.5 they’re a contributor to how we save energy um they help with dust and pollen and also to control water vapor they all do this whichever type of
System It Is by mixing so we’re mixing fresh air filtering it and mixing it with the air internally the rate of mixing is what determines our air quality one of the main reasons we want to work in this um relative humidity Optimum zone is because it makes um
Things like bacteria virus fungi or um asthma um creating things really suffer so they they struggle in that area so your ventilation system is critical um not just for the passive house but um energy saving aspect but also for your health there is um really clear you know thankfully in Ireland we’ve got
Excellent um design standards so it’s um if you like easy enough to work out what we should be um and it’s easy for us to check at the completion of a project is it compliant um there’s a couple of different routes towards compliance for ventilation that could be a decentralized ventilation system using
The e260 from lunus that is a fan that’s in external walls um it works on a push pull basis so while one fan is supplying air its partner is taking stale air out and it does this on a continuous recycling Bas or recirculation basis so each fan is doing 70 seconds in each
Direction um it basically does everything that a centralized system does albeit in a different way um there is an ego which is a bathroom fan it’ll Supply and extract um two wetrooms on centralized systems um this is a nice example of what a centralized system could and should look
Like um not up in the attic that’s where we see them all the time and people want to put them they are much more efficient inside the heated space they’re easier to access um easier to maintain um so really we need to you know at design stage acknowledge that it needs some
Space and think about the overall design um yeah I’ve probably rushed a little but I know we’re short on time so um yeah I think that’s me for now and take questions at the end Brant thanks will here cheers okay so move over to our fourth speaker so fourth speaker for today is
Step Barrett so stepen bar is the lead um car lead of the AR green Council so over to you Stephen okay um I’ll try and be quick because I’m very aware of the time so um reasons why we should be looking at our buildings from a whole life carbon point
Of view um the csrd is probably the main thing right now so for anyone who’s not aware the corporate sustainability reporting directive um requires larger companies and all listed companies except little micro companies to report on a range of sustainability factors including not only their only their own
Environmental impacts but also those of their suppliers um their scope two and scope three so your scope two is the uh the carbon footprint of the energy that you use essentially but your scope three um that is the emissions caused by the value chain that you benefit from
That a company uses so the emissions that your suppliers are responsible for now in the building industry that would be the emissions associated with the assets that you commission and that you pay for so large corporate investment vehicles looking to uh fulfill CSI D requirements and now starting to ask for
Whole life carbon assessments of buildings so that they can fill out their scope three reporting reporting requirements um for the csrd um and I think that’s that’s something that’s only just starting to uh starting to become clear we’re certainly seeing a lot more inquiries people saying why are
They asking for whole life carbon assessments and this is the fundamental reason csrd um now how they’re doing that is the EU taxonomy so the EU taxonomy is a classification system that aims to Define which economic activities are environmentally sustainable um and which ones AR it’s a tool for the
Financial sector to agree identify and invest in sustainable activities so uh there’s obviously a lot of activity going on to invest in so it does this through technical screening criteria um within building um and within whole life carbon specifically the technical screening criteria it looks to is levels the European framework for Sustainable
Building um now within levels it’s got various um definitions of what a Sustainable Building is but from a carbon perspective it has this indicator indicator 1.2 which is uh carbon emissions over the life cycle of the building so levels defines how you measure the carbon emissions of a
Building over its lifetime that’s within the taxonomy the taxonomy is the framework for financial decision making if you like and csrd is the requirement to report on these things so they all kind of locked together but these are the things that are driving investors to ask building designers what is give me a
Whole life carbon assessment of your building Design This is where it’s all coming from um so what it’s doing what these things are doing together I guess is they’re creating this increased demand for knowledge in this area I can hear my Kettle boiling um standardized methodology for doing this measurement and better data
To underpin Whole Life carbon assessments so the key indirect effect of all this will be increased investment in low carbon building products and production processes to produce better scores in those whole La carbon assessments so what it’s doing is it’s kind of sending a signal up the supply
Chain that if you provide the information behind your products um and obviously the better the scores in that information better the reporting uh the better the access to uh financial terms for investors this is kind of a chain of information next to a chain of Supply if you like in order to
Access better financing so that’s why we’re starting to see whole life carbon assessments being asked for particularly on bigger projects there are a couple more things pushing this but I think those two are the key things today they’re being asked for today we’ve got the epbd recast which is going to start
Pushing this from a regulatory point of view probably from 2027 but possibly earlier um currently um the European commission Council and Parliament are in trialogue trying to agree exactly what the epbd recast looks like but they are all agreed that it will have some form of whole life carbon reporting in it um
And just when will it be required and for buildings of which size is the is the kind of the only question so uh as well as the finance which is already pushing these decisions we’ve got the actual regulation coming behind it the CPR the Construction Products regulation
Um similarly is being recast and it looks like that’s going to require um Building Products to um declare their carbon footprint of their production when they’re placed on the European market which is really important for doing whole life carbon Assessments in a very simple terms if you know the carbon
Cost of producing one concrete block just multiply the number of concrete blocks you’re using by that carbon cost of one block you’ve got that part of your jigsa if you like so when the CPR is forcing manufacturers to declare what’s going on in their factories then hopefully we’ll start to see competition
There too as they try to compete to produce uh good materials at as lower carbon cost as possible so um for me that could happen fast enough Ireland’s response then um the climate action plan I’m just really conscious of time um so the key things here is a methodology for
For um measuring this whole life carbon assessment how do you know exactly what to measure so we’re working on that right now um with the seai we’ve produced a methodology and it’s out for testing we sent it out to must be 40 or 50 building design teams at this stage
Who are using it trying to apply it to their live projects to um to calculate the footprint of their current projects and in that way we can figure out where we are today what’s our kind of Baseline today as long as the method as well as the methodology we we’ve also provided a
Database of average carbon factors generic carbon factors for different building materials to help them and it helps them in two ways um often you can’t get that carbon information for a product because the manufacturer doesn’t Supply it alongside the product there’s no epd um or uh or there may be an epd
But it’s not in the right format for you or you may just not be aware or familiar with epds environmental product declarations so we’re providing alongside the methodology a database of uh Construction Products that gives you an approximate indication of what the carbon footprint of each element of your
Building is going to be um the aim being you can you can construct your Olive carbon assessment use that database of products to inform it and send it back to us and we get a kind of a consistent uh set of Assessments back so uh once we’ve created this um
Methodology the aim is to use it to discover what our baselines are how what is our typical building in Ireland today what does it look like from a carbon perspective and from there we can start to set Targets on um lower emissions in the future sorry I’m just trying to
Speed this up a bit and the methodology once we’ve done more testing on it it’s going to be sent back to the seai um with the recommendation that this is the single method for doing carbon Assessments in Ireland um driving that awareness that we’re now measuring the carbon Footprints of the materials that
Go into into your building sending a signal at the supply chain that lower carbon products will be preferred in the future so just quick bit on the methodology levels provides um a material scope so what parts of your building do you need to be including in your assessment because obviously the
More parts you use the higher your score is going to be um but also the more transparent your score is going to be so we need everybody conforming to that same level of scrutiny if you like so that we can start looking at projects and comparing them comparing them across
Organizations across the EU and again against that taxonomy um to access better funding terms um this is the scope I just thought I’d show that quickly the scope of what you should be including in an assessment of a building so everything from the foundations to the Landscaping railings um and everything in between
Currently it’s a bit of a wild west you’ll see some really good scores saying oh 200 kilos of CO2 per square meter but the first question you should ask is what’s included in that scope and you might find out that they’ve left out uh the fittings and Furnishings all the
Ventilation systems the wiring and everything else so this kind of says you have to have all of this in it um for a consistent and fair measurement um levels provides a template for doing this it tries to reduce everything down to masses so um kilo of different parts of your building
If you like you can assign a carbon factor to a kilo of a particular material and again it’s just that kind of summing up then how much of this are you using in your building um so we need product data um and if we
Don’t if we don’t get it we can use uh generic averages that we’ve already got um I’m just trying to speed this up where else the completeness and the consistency the last two things on that list the things that get overlooked make sure that everything in that scope is
Used um and that you’re consistent in your assumptions about the lifetime of that building in the future I just want to show you this slide that kind of um that kind of uh proves that if you like um so we carried out an assessment on a building using one click and this
Indicate methodology and you can see in the different stages of a building’s life cycle which is the A C across the top there massive variation um we’re able to explain the variation but the point is uh we need consistent assessments um the variation came from different assumptions about the carbon
Footprints of materials different assumptions about replacement rates and different assumptions about what will happen at the end of life we need those all to be standardized so that we’re comparing our buildings fairly um we know what they are in the indicate methodology um we weren’t too clear what
They were using one click um indicate is consistent in speaking to levels um and to the Irish context of the materials that we use um what else do I have to say on this uh yeah so we’ve got 15 done so far um we’re just checking them for
Completeness and quality but we do want lots more so that we can check the methodology is reasonable and create a baseline that will tell us what building in Ireland today looks like uh using this methodology and then we can start setting targets for buildings using the same methodology so that uh we’re
Comparing where we want to be with where we are today um very quickly we’re starting to see platins so um this is just a bit of a bit of a result that we’ve got back from one of the assessments um this is really important total mass per square
Meter of the building total MEP per square meter this can tell you uh what’s plausible in a building so you you’ll have a range if you like um of what’s plausible in the building and the more assessments we do that we’re happy with the more we can um trust that range that
We’re getting plausible data in in future assessments so that’s really key um the completeness what how much of that scope has actually data being provided on um is really important too so we can see very quickly how how much of that building has been included and of course the the all important embodied
Carbon per square meter um the pie chart just shows you there um you can see we have almost a third in the operational energy the B6 the passive house aims to reduce but you’ve got twoth thirds here in the actual construction of the building so we’ve got regulations on
Operational energy but nothing on what you build the building out of so the other bad thing about this is most of this happens at year zero when you build the thing the operational energy happens um slowly over the years as you use the thing so it really highlights a massive
Carbon footprint that’s um that’s not being addressed and that’s what we’re aing to do here with this methodology so once we’ve completed it uh we can refine our base lines so this is where we are today give the methodology back to the seai the aim then is to try and
Integrate it into Bim for Speed and accuracy and because this has more of an effect in a building design if it happens at the beginning of the building design than towards the end when you’ve already made all your decisions so the easier we can make it uh a kind of integrated um
Automated uh application running next to your building design if you like then the more you’ll be able to use it to compare different designs to try and lower that embodied carbon um we’ve also obviously got a lot of training and awareness work to do um if you have any building designs and
You’re curious about their embodied carbon uh get in touch with me because we want to test this on as Manning projects as possible so um any building at all I’ll share the methodology with you and um and you can contribute to the project um I think we may be out of time
How we going brilliant thanks a lot Stephen okay so we’re we’re just um running out while we have run out of time plenty so what I just want to do to just uh I suppose uh close out is just to uh thank all our our speakers so Jeff
Alga Hugh and Stephen A lot of knowledge uh here today from all the speakers so really thank you um for that and answering all the all the questions as well afterwards so so thanks to our speakers the recording will be made available um up online in the next few
Days as well um so we this is part of the sustainability planning construction um webinar series by construct innovate our next webinar is on next Tuesday the 10th of October um and that is all around the design and operation of facade systems for better indoor environment um some great speakers there
Three great speakers um all based out of the Netherlands um Peter Magda and R uh in there so lot of experience there that to share um the first two uh webinars are up online already available up online if you go on the engineers irand um TV you’ll find those there and
This one from today the passive house will go up online uh and then the remaining four webinars of this uh series are there so we move into transport circular economy Heritage culture communties and stand we