Why PHIUS+? Its A Science-Based Solution for Your Climate

Why do you build to PHIUS Standards?
Asked at the 2017 North American Passive House Conference in Seattle, WA.
Nichole Schuster, Ashley McGraw (Syracuse, NY): “As opposed to building standard code buildings?”
James Geppner, Big Yellow Cab (Cold Spring, NY): “The question really is, how do we respond to climate change in the buildings that we build?@
Schuster: “I design to PHIUS+ standards because it's an intensely rigorous energy efficiency standard.”
Geppner: “And if we're gonna respond, then, we need something that's science-based and we need something that's performance-based.
It doesn't just have one component or another, but it actually performs to a certain level. And that that performance is measurable.”
Maren Longhurst, Rodell Design (Spokane, Washington) : “My passion is using the best technology and the best in building science to model energy use in buildings and to improve building efficiency.”
Geppner: “It's one way to achieve basically, a building that requires very little energy and does so and produces a high indoor quality.”
Schuster: “I think it provides greater levels of resiliency. I think it's tailored to our specific climates that we get the maximum benefit out of it, and it can also help us achieve other standards and goals like the Living Building Challenge, Energy Petal, for example.”
Geppner: “Part of what makes it the best is that it uses what I think of, or what I call the dynamic energy model.”
Longhurst: “PHIUS provides software Wi-Fi Passive and Wi-Fi Plus that really get deep into the details of a project.”
Geppner: “The information that goes into designing a building is information from that region. It's weather data, it's climate data, so that when you have a house, it's not thoughtlessly constructed, it's constructed to the temperature of that region, the moisture of that region.”
Longhurst: “And allow us to predict what a project will do and help us to design that project to be the most efficient, and the most comfortable, and the best quality building.”
Geppner: “An option to get away from a construction method, which there's basically no technology, it's kind of a 400-year old process, to something that's more like the thinking and the modeling that goes behind constructing something like an iPhone, or a high technology product, and it works.”
PHIUS+ is the path to passive energy
music: Sabana Havana by Jimmy Fontanez/Media Right Productions