Our guest at last week’s Construction Tech Tuesday was Daniel Kress, founder of the Australian-based Smart Plus Academy. Smart Plus Academy looms large over the Passive House landscape in Australia because over 50% of the Passive House practitioners based in the Land Down Under received their training from the organization or even from Daniel himself. Given his involvement with the community in Australia, it might come as a surprise that Daniel was not immediately attracted to Passive House. It took him many years, as well as three degrees (including a Master of Engineering from the University of Applied Sciences in Germany and a Master of Engineering from Ryerson University in Canada), to come to the conclusion that “Passive House is the foundation for healthy and sustainable buildings that are affordable.”
Daniel’s presentation is an exploration of the technique, the technology, and the technical sides of cooling in Passive House, with special attention to HRVs. While Passive House is more common in colder regions, Daniel argues that Passive House is extremely well-suited for any climate, even the hot and humid South Pacific, and that heating a space will become more expensive than cooling a space as our energy grid becomes more reliant on renewables.
As Daniel notes at the beginning of his presentation, the amount of information contained in the presentation may make you feel as though you’re trying to drink from a firehose, but that’s what the rewind button is made for!
The four learning objectives for Daniel’s presentation are:
To understand why cooling is not an issue and that hot climates are even easier to design for than cold climates.
Why cooling is cheap and heating expensive in an economy where the energy is renewable based.
To understand the limitations of HRV for cooling.
Why we want to use air as our conditioning medium.
You can watch his presentation by clicking on the link at the top of the page.
