Items Tagged with 'Passive Houses'

To minimize the resulting effect of full sun on the south side of the building, the project team introduced sunshades along the lengths of 13 floors. Each 100 foot-long sunshade, however, presented a potential thermal bridge where it attaches to the interior building slabs via steel brackets. The team avoided the problem by specifying structural thermal breaks.

In many cases, building envelope design is mostly a matter of aesthetics and costs. As attention to environmental issues grows, however, sustainability and energy-related concerns play an increasing role in these decisions. The push to reduce urban heat island effects is one of the most prominent of these concerns.

A typical building loses up to 25 percent of its heat through the roof. Industry-leading Elevate roofing and insulation systems by Holcim were thus instrumental in the construction of the world’s largest Passive House-certified office building: the Winthrop Center in Boston.

Although both wet-bulb globe temperature and Heat Index take into consideration dry-bulb temperature and relative humidity, Heat Index is calculated specifically for outdoor shaded areas and does not consider conductive heat transfer from wind speed or the heat stress added by direct sun exposure.  

Sto Corp., the innovative world leader in complete single-sourced solutions for the building envelope, has teamed up with Pratt Institute and Passive House for Everyone as an advocate sponsor for the first-ever US Collegiate Designed and Built rendition of the International Passive House Ice Box Challenge.

RESNET announced its recent collaboration with Passive House Institute US (Phius) to promote the construction of sustainable and affordable homes.

With increasing evidence of a shifting climate, many building project teams are confronting the compounded threat of increasingly severe heat waves and the vulnerability of our country's electrical grid.

Whole-building pressurization testing is becoming standard practice for building projects. Many common energy conservation standards and model codes now exhibit requirements for enclosure airtightness, which are to be achieved through measured air leakage rates.