There is no doubt that Enrico Bonilauri is a passionate advocate for performance based Passive House construction. He has recently researched and publishing a white paper report comparing twelve building standards used in the United States which concludes that current building codes and building programs fail to deliver resilient and healthy buildings for their occupants.

His conclusions are the result of modeling 50 homes to determine the minimum compliance requirements in each of the twelve building standards using the Passive House Planning Package (PHPP) software.

Enrico boils his thoughts down to why Passive House performance-based construction should be widely adopted by stating in his paper that, “… one of the greatest challenges the American construction industry faces is to start setting specific goals to how a building performs. That is, instead of setting prescriptive requirements for individual building components.”

We see all the time that builders just want to be told what to do prescriptively, if instead, we concentrated on what we must do to perform would we be in a better place?  I don’t know but we will figure it out together through my conversation with Enrico Bonilauri of Emu Passive.

Emu Passive Report on Building Standards

Emu Passive Report on Building Standards YouTube

EMU Passive Building Science

Ice Box Challenge

ANSI/ASHRAE STANDARD 228, STANDARD METHOD OF