Let’s Clear the Air: Ventilation, High Performance, and Passive House

In designing and building high-performance buildings, building ventilation is often an underappreciated component. The pandemic has made the health implications of good ventilation more obvious but the energy impact remains largely obscured. 

Yet when we target radical whole-building energy efficiency, ventilation energy impacts become significant and obvious. The Passive House Institute has helped lead the effort to advance ventilation testing, protocols and certification of components to ensure that high-quality ventilation is a core solution of high-performance building outcomes. 

Why does the Passive House methodology demand certain testing and how did we get here? What’s next? What are the implications for whole building systems design and long-term performance? 

This symposium tackles these questions, providing a common frame of reference, greater clarity and shared understanding, in the pursuit of growing high-performance building and Passive House markets.

As carbon emissions goals tighten, efficiency demands grow, and Passive House performance levels are normalized, this focus on building ventilation performance is an opportunity for the ventilation industry around the world and in the US. If component testing outputs can provide Passive House modeling data inputs, and products can meet Passive House targets, there is an emerging high-performance global market that can be served to the benefit of everyone.