PHPP Enhanced: PHribbon 

What if your PHPP tool could do more than calculate the energy expenditures of a building? U.K.-based Tim Martel has developed a PHPP plug-in—PHribbon—that has several tricks up its sleeve. Including, he says, saving architects and consultants significant time and effort.

The PHPP program is at the heart of the Passive House process, but its very thoroughness demands hours of effort. Martel’s program cuts through the time-consuming aspects of PHPP, such as manual data entry of windows, and also adds functions that account for embodied carbon, cost, and whole-life expenditures, as well as preexisting structures for retrofits. The outcome is not only a more streamlined process but also one that facilitates retrofit planning and calculating embodied carbon.

The U.S./imperial version of PHribbon is still in the beta phase. Martel says that the beta testing for the imperial system has been successful thus far and is available to test on current projects.

Martel has had an eight-year career in England as a chartered architectural technologist, a Certified Passive House Designer, a retrofit coordinator, and a tutor for the Association of Environmentally Conscious Builders (AECB). PHribbon first came about as a supplemental tool for students of a Passive House retrofit training course taught through AECB.

Since then Martel has spent the last few years developing an add-on to the existing PHPP program that has built-in functions and modeling processes that can run anything from cost to embodied carbon. Currently, PHribbon offers a base module for £45 and additional modules, such as the cost module, daylight factor module, and embodied CO2 module, for prices that range from £30 to £75.

PHribbon is a user-focused tool, giving architects more control and accuracy in the building process compared to other tools on the market. If you are interested in beta testing the Imperial PHribbon plug-ins, visit www.phribbon.co.uk or reach out to Tim Martel at [email protected]