Kent Browning, PE is a principal of KWR Engineering Services, Austin, TX and has been commissioning buildings before commissioning buildings was called commissioning buildings. Kent keeps seeing the same kind of problems over and over again. He has several guidelines that general contractors and normal folks can use to indicate if a building will have issues. Kent promises not to charge a commission for this information...
Bruce Harley has an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and was the technical director of the Conservation Services Group for many years. Most of his recent work is related to heat pumps. He points out that heat pumps can accomplish a lot, but there are many potential pitfalls; we need to get it right and avoid a "heat pump gate"...
Steve Baczek is an architect who understands communication, communication, and communication. Did I mention communication? The communication is verbal, graphical, artistic and sometimes "telepathic". There is a beauty in the details. Also note that sometimes the devil is in the details.
Andrew is an architect with RDH in Boston and a graduate of the School of Architecture at Syracuse University. As Passive House is applied to multi-family buildings things get interesting...that is an understatement...there is more...wait till we look at schools...Phius and TEDI do not always get along...Andrew will help put things in focus...
Preservation of Affordable Housing (POAH) is a nonprofit developer, owner and operator of 20,000 affordable homes in multifamily buildings in twelve states and the District of Columbia. Julie is an architect and Vice President of Design and Building Performance for POAH. She has been involved in the retrofit and rehabilitation of thousands of existing homes and multifamily buildings and the design and construction of thousands of new affordable homes and multifamily buildings. Julie will discuss lessons learned and how to preserve affordability through high performance.
Duncan Prahl is an architect and the Director of Technical Services at the CUNY Building Performance Lab. He will share research projects and results conducted by the team at CUNY BPL...such as how well do those thousands of buildings in NYC actually perform and are those energy audits in NYC actually leading to any retrofits?
Keith Simon, FAIA is an architect, VP of Design Phase Services for Salas O'Brien, and adjunct faculty at the UT-Austin School of Architecture. He has some thoughts on how to design buildings to last for an extremely long period of time. As a Fellow of the AIA, he has some strong opinions on some of the priorities of architectural firms and architectural schools.
Drainage is the key to life in general and pressure equalization—if it applies at all—is for joints and not for entire wall assemblies. Claddings need to be drained. Ventilated if you must, but first and foremost they need to be drained. Whereas joints in insulated glazing units, pre-manufactured windows both residential and commercial, joints in precast panels and connections between windows and wall assemblies can be pressure equalized but regardless they have to be drained.
We can build a house so tight even Germans would be impressed. And then we forget about how to deal with a clothes dryer. Or we put in a kitchen range hood. Or we build a house with a fireplace. Or then we attach a garage. What are the odds that a house will have a clothes dryer, a kitchen range hood, a fireplace or an attached garage? I have news for you installing a cheap exhaust fan does not fix things. Installing an expensive one does not fix things either. Sucking does not work.