There are many great things that came out of the Passive House debate on Tuesday night, now doing the heated rounds on social media. But among them was the dramatic lift in knowledge about this typology that has raised the temperature of debate around the ideal building systems in this country.
We say that because of the vote we took on audience sentiment before and after the event.
And here’s another rarely contested fact that we picked up at the Planning Institute of Australia congress in Canberra last week, where The Fifth Estate moderated a session on AI and planning (far more nuanced and advanced than we could have imagined by the way).
The proposition of the debate was:
- Passive House is the ideal solution for future fit buildings.
Before the debate started, a massive 33 per cent of voters did not have an opinion one way or another. They voted “don’t know”
After the debate, just 6 per cent said they didn’t know.
Images: Evan Maclean
We consider that a major win and a great way to measure whether the event had a real impact because people learned enough to vote one way or another. And in the world of contested ideas, as all things sustainable must absolutely be because we’ve never been here before, knowledge and insights are gold, or emerald as we prefer to say.
On those who agreed with the proposition, before the event, the number was 40 per cent True, with 26 per cent saying False, and after the event, it was 61 per cent True and 33 per cent False. Which, of course, is a win for the PH people.
So, what were the gems that poked their way out of the conversations, hot potatoes and near outright arguments?
A few things.
Architect Tone Wheeler bedazzled as always with an esoteric reference to Brandolini’s law and angels dancing on pinheads.
He cited Italian programmer Alberto Brandolini, who said that
The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
Wheeler was keen to make sure we focused on the big picture – the elephant in the room – rather than the nuanced discussion of building physics or science and how to create the most viable building that would withstand our withering climate.
Things are so bad, we can forget the perfect indoor comfort, clean air and excellent acoustic performance that PH offers.
“Australia has 11 million homes and 10 million households,” Wheeler said.
“We’ve got 11 million homes in this country that don’t work. The issue is not supply; it’s ownership. How do you get people to own a home? Because if you own a home, not rent it, you’ll be much more interested in its performance, and that’s what we need to do.”
Fair point.
Later in the night, we heard from Aysh Venkatesan from Team Catalyst, who said her own 300 square metre house, a multigenerational family home, is relatively well built and survives comfortably on 6+ kw of solar power on the roof.
Her friend’s house at Marsden Park though cost $1.4 million, is 7 star NatHERS rated and has many multiples of solar panels on the roof but is dreadful to live in with condensation and poor comfort levels rife.
Philip Oldfield, who is head of the School of Built Environment at UNSW and a professor of architecture, opened with a nod to the intensity the debate had already stirred up on social media.
He had his own exposure to the methodology through a design studio he ran at the University of Nottingham that focused on a competition for a passive house high rise that he and his students won, and which led to working with Wolfgang Feist, who built the first Passive House in Germany, and other leaders.
“I learned a huge amount about the potential advantages of Passive House, but also some of the questions that arise about Passive House and its application that we’ll touch on.”
Thing is, he said, there’s a lot of a lot “gets written or talked about the kind of housing affordability crisis we face, but I don’t think enough gets written or talked about the housing performance crisis we face.”
The coldest some international visitors have felt, he notes, has been in a Sydney winter. And some of them were from Scandinavia.
That’s in a pattern that sees most of us spending up to 70 per cent of our time indoors. But personally, we’ve heard it’s an even higher percentage.
Julian Sutherland of JLL said as an engineer, he had used many different methodologies and modelling systems, but in his view, PH was the only one that delivered what it promised.
He’d proved the methodology with a 2400 student secondary school in the UK and a block of more than 300 apartments next to a noisy rail line.
Promising quiet, clean and comfortable interiors was the only way those apartments would be sold, he said.
Which reminds us of a comment made by a planning professional ahead of the Planning Institute of Australia Congress in Canberra last week – all the good sites were gone!
The argument about using natural ventilation and allowing sea breezes to cool a building works great if you are fortunate enough to live in a great location.
But even in Queensland, where the famous Queenslander house with generous airy verandahs took root, new housing is brick on slab with aircon.
Adrian Taylor, BVN, noted the “very privileged position” we (in the room) were in to be talking about the “health and well-being being about the amount of carbon dioxide in the air when most people are struggling to have clean water”.
Maybe we need to give up a few things he said and think holistically about how the planet works in the future.
Right now, we have fuel poverty, and we could soon see climate refugees on our shores.
Richard Hyde from the University of Sydney said, “Do we need to really seal up our buildings this much?” (PH is well sealed with minimal air changes).
“You know, you know, I live in Brisbane, and we’ve renovated an old 1949 house…we just put some shading on it, some decks.” It has insulation and is open most of the time. “We live in the outdoors. It’s a fantastic building.” Solar on the roof completes the picture, and it has no moisture until tenants moved in and kept the airconditioning on “all the time, and the bathroom went mouldy.
Jenny Edwards of Light House ArchiScience in Canberra said PH was not necessary. Her own business and her building science expertise could deliver excellent houses at much lower cost ratios. She’s used blower door testing, thermal cameras and thermal performance modelling. The results have been fantastic, she says.
“The big question is, is Passive House the ideal solution for future fit buildings in Australia? The clear answer is no. There is no one size or standard that fits all.”
Jesse Clarke from Pro Clima focused on health. There are concerns about highly insulated houses around overheating. “You can overheat a passive house in Antarctica if you make the windows too big and collect too much sun,” he said. “There were problems in Germany when they started to build air-tight houses. They started to create perverse health outcomes with moisture inside the houses.”
“But we need to insulate our buildings to higher levels. We just got to do it right. There’s a lot of learning that sits within the passive house market, because they’ve already stuffed it up and they’ve fixed it. And when you look at this debate, it’s not a new debate; it’s a very old debate.”
In the US, the issues are being addressed, and PH standards are now being pushed through ASHRAE.
Andy Marlow of Envirotecture is a well known advocate for PH and admitted he was a “control freak”.
PH, he said is a “fantastic design tool, and it means that I can do the things that I want to do, because I get answers which are accurate and allow me to design better buildings, because I can do almost anything, because everything is a trade off, and it’s science based, as Jenny well pointed out, and science is awesome because it’s reliable.”
What Jenny Edwards forgot, he said, was the importance of getting third-party quality assurance for a PH building. Because although her system was “awesome”, it was not a national system.
“Designing buildings and delivering buildings that don’t work unless you operate them in a very precise manner is a fairly suicidally stupid way to approach a national system.
“We spend billions, if not trillions, of dollars on these things. It’d be nice to not get it wrong. Did anybody try to buy a car without a seat belt recently? No, funny that because you can’t.
“The point being is that QA (quality assurance) is incredibly important. Passive House fundamentally is what delivers all of these things, and so when we come to the proposition of the evening, which is, is passive house the ideal solution for future buildings? I would suggest it is currently the only viable solution we have, because it’s actually currently the only solution we have that delivers on what it says.”
There’s more. So much more. But get the recording here – listen and watch for yourself. See if we can make you change your mind.
MODERATOR: Philip Oldfield, UNSW
Panel
Adrian Taylor, BVN
Jesse Clarke, Pro Clima
Dr Richard Hyde, University of Sydney
Jenny Edwards, Light House ArchiScience
Julian Sutherland, JLL
Andy Marlow, Envirotecture
Thank you to our venue host, BVN.