New Construction

Builders and developers, whether public or private, can learn from the success of Columbia County NY Habitat for Humanity, which uses Passive House methods to provide high-quality, healthy, and affordable housing. Key lessons include strategic site planning, envelope assemblies and details friendly to unskilled labor, and keeping to budget while coping with design changes, building code variations, fluctuating costs and availability of materials, and evolving Passive House standards.

Back in 2016, our team started a multiyear experiment, sponsored by Building America, on unvented roofs without spray foam or exterior rigid insulation, using an instrumented test hut with multiple test bays. The experiment examined cellulose vs. fiberglass insulation, interior vapor control membranes, diffusion vents at the ridge, interior humidification, inward vapor drive issues, and the effect of air barrier imperfections. Some preliminary results were presented at BuildingEnergy Boston in early 2018. After three winters of experimentation, this is the rest of the story.

From retrofitting a ranch built in the ’40s to conditioning massive multi-family Passive House developments, air source heat pumps are being selected as the primary method to heat and cool an ever-growing variety of housing stock. While this technology is remarkable in its affordability, efficiency, and ability to offset a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, there are often unmet challenges in selecting the most appropriate piece of equipment.

Solar, energy efficiency, Passive House – these are the tools of the clean energy transition. But who are these tools for and who can afford them? Owners, developers, and residents of affordable housing in the Greater Boston region are asking these questions, identifying the barriers to accessing clean energy and the strategies for overcoming those barriers. Meanwhile, communities across the region are exploring ways to support this clean energy transition. How do we build partnerships across sectors to expand access and accelerate an equitable energy transition?

There’s been a surge in interest in Passive House multi-family new construction in the Northeast. So what kind of differences are we really talking about from conventional projects? Can we educate our design and engineering teams to get there? Hear from two of Massachusetts’ first Passive House affordable projects: Beacon Community’s 55-unit Old Colony and POAH’s 135-Unit Mattapan Station. Find out changes in design and construction both projects had to make. Learn about incremental costs and savings.

This session will provide concrete tools and answers on how to draw down carbon in our buildings starting today. We’ll focus on low-rise buildings, where most new construction and renovations happen and which are currently under-represented in embodied-carbon design and analysis. We will present critical construction details such as band joist insulation selections and sloped ceiling retrofits, as well as whole-building design strategies.

Central ventilation systems in multifamily buildings are a vital building system with significant implications for energy, sustainability and occupant health and safety. In this session, we compare and contrast the building stock in Boston and NYC and explore a variety of techniques for restoring and improving these systems.

Boston’s pledge to become carbon neutral by 2050 will require deep energy reductions in 86,000 buildings. Among the challenges of reaching this goal are the feasibility of retrofitting at scale at a realistic cost, financing this work, maintaining affordable operating costs, and crafting incentives and requirements to make all this happen. This panel of experts in design, construction, operations, finance and regulation will discuss both the technical and policy sides of these issues, provide updates on current policy, and share lessons and real data on actual projects.

This session will explore both high level monitoring protocols and in-depth performance results of energy and indoor environmental quality measurement within PHIUS+ multi-family buildings to outline opportunities and lessons learned. The presentation team will discuss findings from a detailed monitoring study comparing two nearly identical affordable housing multi-family buildings in Chicago, one meeting EnergyStar® Multi-family requirements and the other PHIUS+ standards.

Should we be trying to electrify everything? Is it practical for existing and new buildings with the technologies we have now? Two engineers with different takes on these questions will debate electrifying residential buildings, from small single-family to high-rise apartments. Both speakers have years of experience with heat pump technologies (mini-splits, PTHPs, water-source HPs, VRF, and several types of heat-pump water heaters). They’ll present examples of buildings where these systems worked wonderfully, where performance was less than ideal, and a few absolute failures.