Passive House Podcast

In the run-up to this week’s Passive House Canada Summit (Dec 8-10), Passive House Podcast co-host Zack Semke interviews Vancouver-based Cillian Collins about his path to Passive House, the groundbreaking Passive House projects Cillian has in the works, and the Passive House educational programming on tap at the Summit. (Registration for the Summit is open until 12pm Pacific/3pm Eastern today, Monday, December 7.)

Cillian is a Senior Architect with Perkins&Will Architects and a Certified Passive House Designer with over 10 years of experience across a range of project types, including Passive House projects in Canada and Ireland. He’s also Chair of the Passive House Canada Education Committee, giving him an insider’s view of the upcoming Summit.

With Perkins&Will, Cillian is involved in a number of Passive House projects at varying scales, from a stunning off grid mass timber cabin to a large scale university student housing project, both of which he and Zack discuss in this episode. Cillian also spoke about the opportunities and challenges around address embodied carbon in high performance buildings, and shared takeaways from Perkins&Will’s primer, “Embodied Carbon in the Built Environment.”

At the end of the show, co-host Matthew Cutler-Welsh and Zack discuss several upcoming events, which can be found in Passive House Accelerator's Week in Preview article. 

Thank you for listening to the Passive House Podcast! To learn more about Passive House and to stay abreast of our latest programming, visit passivehouseaccelerator.com. And please join us at one of our Passive House Accelerator LIVE! zoom gatherings on Wednesdays.

In this week's episode of the Passive House Podcast, host Matthew Cutler Welsh interviews Andy Marlow. Andy is passionate about design, sustainability and affordability. He trained as an architect at the University of New South Wales in Australia and throughout his professional career, he’s been working to incorporate ideas about sustainability into his work. As a Director at Envirotecture, Andy has been influential in providing design and consulting services for people who want buildings that work well, feel good, and are culturally appropriate.
 
At the beginning of 2020, some of the team at Envirotecture created Passivhaus Design & Construct with the purpose of focusing solely on providing Passive Houses for the Australian market.  

“…if you must be inside a building, it should make your life better; a passivhaus does that!”
 
 The firm aims to create affordable, healthy, beautiful, comfortable, quality, quiet, future-ready buildings. They rely on skill, passion and relationships to continually improve and to deliver innovative design solutions tailored for Australia's climate.

Andy is also the Education and Training Director at the Australian Passive House Association.

At the end of the episode, co-host Zack Semke mentions several upcoming Passive House-related events. Find them in Passive House Accelerator's Week in Preview.

Thank you for listening to the Passive House Podcast! To learn more about Passive House and to stay abreast of our latest programming, visit passivehouseaccelerator.com. And please join us at one of our Passive House Accelerator LIVE! zoom gatherings on Wednesdays.

This week host of the Passive House Podcast Zack Semke interviews Tessa Bradley (previously Smith), a pioneer of Passive House in the Pacific Northwest. In her 20s Tessa became co-owner of the Artisans Group, at the time a design-build firm, now a design-only firm. Artisans Group quickly became a leading designer and builder of beautiful, modernist, yet financially accessible Passive House homes in the Northwest, winning many design awards in the process. Tessa has won multiple Best Project by a Young Professional Under 35 awards from PHIUS.  

Beyond being a talented designer, Tessa is a great communicator about Passive House with clients and non-designers. Her entrepreneurial nature and hard work have paid off, with Artisans Group enjoying an expansive portfolio of work. Tessa talks with Zack about the presentation by Katrin Klingenberg at a Seattle library that launched Tessa into Passive House, her early days in Passive House design, and her sales pitch to clients (it’s just a good building wrapped in a big wooly sweater). Tessa also dives into her firm’s forays into prefab.  

Visit the Accelerator's Week in Preview article for links to the events that Zack mentions near the end of the show. 

Thank you for listening to the Passive House Podcast! To learn more about Passive House and to stay abreast of our latest programming, visit passivehouseaccelerator.com. And please join us at one of our Passive House Accelerator LIVE! zoom gatherings on Wednesdays.

In this episode, Passive House Podcast host Matthew Cutler-Welsh interviews Peter Bielski, owner of Ethos Homes in New Zealand, about his experience building single family Passive House projects in a construction industry landscape of bare minimum building energy code requirements. Peter cut his teeth in construction in Germany, where he built homes with a major prefabricated homes operation that delivered over 900 homes per year. When he returned to New Zealand, Peter initially experimented with prefab in New Zealand, always guided by Passive House principles. Hear his story about his journey back to custom stick-built construction, and his full commitment to Passive House performance—its challenges and its rewards as a homebuilder and small business owner.

Visit the Accelerator's Week in Preview article for links to the events that Zack mentions near the end of the show. 

Thank you for listening to the Passive House Podcast! To learn more about Passive House and to stay abreast of our latest programming, visit passivehouseaccelerator.com. And please join us at one of our Passive House Accelerator LIVE! zoom gatherings on Wednesdays.

In this episode, Passive House Podcast co-host Zack Semke interviews Dr. Diana Ürge-Vorsatz of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They dive into the findings of  Ürge-Vorsatz's recent paper, "Advances Toward a Net-Zero Global Building Sector", including implications for both new construction and deep energy retrofits as parts of the transition to zero emissions in buildings.

Visit the Accelerator's Week in Preview article for links to most of the events that Zack mentions near the end of the show. Here are the links to the Pattern Language from Passive House course and NAPHN's save the date announcement for its 2021 conference.

Thank you for listening to the Passive House Podcast! To learn more about Passive House and to stay abreast of our latest programming, visit passivehouseaccelerator.com. And please join us at one of our Passive House Accelerator LIVE! zoom gatherings on Wednesdays.

In this episode, Passive House Podcast host Matthew Cutler-Welsh interviews Ken Levenson, Co-Founder of 475 High Performance Building Supply and Executive Director of the North American Passive House Network (NAPHN). The conversation explores Ken’s early architecture practice in New York in the 80s and 90s, his climate awakening after watching “An Inconvenient Truth,” and his later discovery of Passive House in 2009. This discovery fueled Ken’s drive to co-found 475 with Floris Keverling Buisman and later NAPHN with a group of other North American advocates. 

Describing Passive House as “an approach to building and architecture that's actually proportionate with the crisis that we're facing,” Ken shares both his bullishness about the growth of Passive House as well as his deep alarm about the climate crisis. It’s both sobering and empowering, and well worth a listen. 

Visit the Accelerator's Week in Preview article for links to the events that Zack mentions near the end of the show. 

Thank you for listening to the Passive House Podcast! To learn more about Passive House and to stay abreast of our latest programming, visit passivehouseaccelerator.com. And please join us at one of our Passive House Accelerator LIVE! zoom gatherings on Wednesdays.

In this episode, Passive House Podcast co-host Zack Semke interviews Kimberly Llewellyn of Mitsubishi Electric Trane HVAC US, a founding sponsor of Passive House Accelerator.  An engineer by training, Kimberly spent 5 years with Positive Energy, a highly regarded engineering and consulting firm that specializes in Passive House work as part of a broad portfolio. Zack and Kimberly discuss her journey to Passive House, the "in the dirt" training she received while in the field at Positive Energy, and her pivot to Mitsubishi Electric, where she works to accelerate a virtuous circle of Passive House-friendly product development, Passive House adoption in North America, and consequent increased demand for Passive House mechanical equipment by the marketplace. After the interview, Zack and Matthew reflect on the interview, attempt to explain the science behind heat pumps, and share upcoming Passive House events from around the world. For event details, reference last week's Week In Preview article on the Accelerator website.

Thank you for listening to the Passive House Podcast! To learn more about Passive House and to stay abreast of our latest programming, visit passivehouseaccelerator.com. And please join us at one of our Passive House Accelerator LIVE! zoom gatherings on Wednesdays.

In this episode, Passive House Podcast host Matthew Cutler-Welsh interviews Harley Weston of Solaire Properties. Harley spent twelve years drilling and exploring for minerals beneath the earth, mostly around the North Eastern part of Australia. When he wasn’t operating a drill himself, he was managing people who did. Mineral exploration is big business in Australia. It’s made a lot of people very wealthy, but doesn’t exactly conjure up images of sustainability, healthy and well being or even energy efficiency. 

Harley has also spent time flying around in a helicopter. After gaining his license, he established a helicopter charter company and lived one of his dreams as a commercial pilot. 

But in 2017, Harley teamed up with brother James and Paul McElhenny and together they formed Solaire Properties with a mission to disrupt and redefine the building industry. As Harley puts it, Solaire Properties is about buildings that are equal parts luxurious, eco-conscious and technologically advanced. 

Their first project, Vanquish certainly embodies these aspects and has garnered a lot of attention, not just from the Passive House community. 

Matthew starts the interview out by asking Harley a bit about his background and how he went from helicopters to housing. 

After the interview Zack Semke and Matthew discuss a number of upcoming Passive House events. Find details in Passive House Accelerator's Week in Preview article.

Thank you for listening to the Passive House Podcast! To learn more about Passive House and to stay abreast of our latest programming, visit passivehouseaccelerator.com. And please join us at one of our Passive House Accelerator LIVE! zoom gatherings on Wednesdays.

In this episode, Passive House Podcast host Matthew Cutler-Welsh interviews Bronwyn Barry, board chair of North American Passive House Network (NAPHN) and the “International Keynote” speaker for the upcoming South Pacific Passive House Conference. Bronwyn recounts how she first discovered Passive House, her stint (post-Great Recession) selling European high performance windows to architects by educating them first about Passive House design, and her leadership in the North Passive House movement, including tireless policy advocacy work.

Matthew and co-host Zack Semke discussed upcoming events and trainings:

• This Wednesday (Oct 14), Amy Egerter and Martha Campbell from the Rocky Mountain Institute's REALIZE initiative present at the Happy Hour. REALIZE has the goal of standardizing retrofits that are affordable and convenient using semi-industrial approaches. Come drink in Passive House knowledge at our weekly Happy Hour. Learn more.
• PHIUS 6th Annual Design Competition: This juried competition recognizes fully certified passive building projects of all types and climate zones. This is your chance to showcase your work and celebrate the great strides being made in the field of passive building!  Submissions are due by Tuesday, October 13, 2020 at 11:59pm ET. Learn more here.
• South Pacific Passive House Conference (Oct 12 - 16)
• passivhausMAINE Fall Forum (Oct 21- 23)
• Platforma PEP Conference (Oct 21, 22, 28, 29)
• PHIUS Hootenannies + Design Competition (Oct 26-30)

Questions or comments? Email us at [email protected].

Thank you for listening to the Passive House Podcast! To learn more about Passive House and to stay abreast of our latest programming, visit passivehouseaccelerator.com. And please join us at one of our Passive House Accelerator LIVE! zoom gatherings on Wednesdays.

In this episode, Passive House Podcast host Matthew Cutler-Welsh interviews Giorgia Tzar from the International Passive House Association (iPHA). Giorgia and Matthew catch up on the world-class content at the (ongoing) 24th International Passive House Conference and virtual “matchmaking” networking opportunities. Giorgia reflects on recent conferences in China and Germany, and talks about the ups and downs of going virtual. Hear about iPHA’s “global and local” approach to information and knowledge sharing, as well as the virtual Open Days Passive House project tours coming up in November.

Matthew and co-host Zack Semke discussed upcoming events and trainings, which can be found in the Accelerator's "Passive House Week In Preview" for October 6, 2020. Included in those announcements were a couple upcoming Passive House Accelerator events this week:

• Global Passive House Happy Hour with James Geppner of NYSERDA's RetrofitNY program on Wednesday, October 7; and
• a special Roundtable Event: Passive House on the Frontlines—Wildfire Smoke and Indoor Air Quality on Thursday, October 8.

We hope you'll join us at one or both!
Questions or comments? Email us at [email protected].

Thank you for listening to the Passive House Podcast! To learn more about Passive House and to stay abreast of our latest programming, visit passivehouseaccelerator.com. And please join us at one of our Passive House Accelerator LIVE! zoom gatherings on Wednesdays.