Do I need PHPP

[Dee J]

So our build probably can't qualify as a passive house.... aspect and glazing area don't fit. But it has been suggested that the Passive house planning package might well aid us in speccing insulation, heating etc even so, rather than SAP.

What have other folk used for designing a highly insulated airtight house?

Thanks

Dee

[Alexphd1]

I didn't bother. If it was something that I could do myself then probably may consider playing about with it, if I had to pay somebody to do it then no. 

For heating I have just copied what people have already done with sucsess on here fine tuned for my own personal needs/finances. 

 

 

Edited April 14, 2018 by Alexphd1

[Gone West]

I bought a copy of PHPP and used it to design my PH. I wanted a design that didn't have UFH or conventional central heating so I needed to use the PHPP. If you're going to have some form of heating in your house there are more basic ways of modelling space heating and DHW requirement. There are ways around orientation and glazing problems when designing a PH so the PHPP would be useful if you want to reduce your energy use as much as possible. SAP is pretty useless for low energy houses, although it is better than it used to be.

[Dreadnaught]

17 minutes ago, PeterStarck said:

I wanted a design that didn't have UFH

 

Peter, interested as to why you didn't want UFH. I searched the site but could not find where you may have referred to this before. Sorry if you've answered this before.

 

17 minutes ago, PeterStarck said:

I bought a copy of PHPP and used it to design my PH.

 

Did you feel the need to involve a certified Passive-House Designer at all, even just to check your workings? Was it easy to master the PHPP sheets, gather the need information to enter into them?

Edited April 14, 2018 by Dreadnaught

[Gone West]

13 minutes ago, Dreadnaught said:

 

Peter, interested as to why you didn't want UFH. I searched the site but could not find where you may have referred to this before. Sorry if you've answered this before.

 

 

Did you feel the need to involve a certified Passive-House Designer at all, even just to check your workings? Was it easy to master the PHPP sheets, gather the need information to enter into them?

We didn't want a house that needed any form of 'wet' heating. We have a small area of electric UFH in the kitchen and electric towel rails in the bathrooms. That and the EASHP in the Genvex Combi are the only heating we have. We didn't involve a PH designer because during our research into PH we looked at several PH and some we found uncomfortable and some were test beds for new technologies. We wanted to have a house that was simple to maintain, relatively simple to build and to have as low energy use as possible within our budget. I'm lucky in that for 25 years I worked in the area of mathematical modelling and I found the PHPP not too difficult to use. I read the manual a couple of times before starting to use it and the more I used it, the more I found it useful for tweaking all area of the design.

[Dreadnaught]

15 minutes ago, PeterStarck said:

EASHP in the Genvex Combi

 

 Does this deliver its heat for space heating via the MVHR or a few radiators?

 

EDIT: found the answer myself by searching. Heat from the EASHP for space heating is distributed by MVHR in Peter's case. And the "E" in EASHP stands for exhaust. A clever piece of kit.

 

15 minutes ago, PeterStarck said:

We wanted to have a house that was simple to maintain, relatively simple to build and to have as low energy use as possible within our budget.

 

I applaud your approach. It is my aim also.

 

15 minutes ago, PeterStarck said:

I found the PHPP not too difficult to use.

 

Encouraging. I am tempted to have a go too. But, unlike your good-selves who had no need, I might require to have an expert on tap to answer my inevitable questions. Was gathering the copious data to feed the model easy?

Edited April 14, 2018 by Dreadnaught

[Gone West]

1 minute ago, Dreadnaught said:

 

 Does this deliver its heat for space heating via the MVHR or a few radiators?

 

 

I applaud your approach. It is my aim also.

 

 

Encouraging. I am tempted to have a go too. But, unlike your good-selves who had no need, I might require to have an expert on tap to answer my inevitable questions. Was gathering the copious data to feed the model easy?

It delivers warm air up to, IIRC, 50C through the MVHR part of the Genvex Combi. As we designed the house ourselves we knew all the details about orientation, glazing, plumbing etc so it wasn't too difficult to collect all the data about the house. It's other areas of data such weather data which is interesting because there are different sources for that and it can have quite a large affect on the results.

[mike2016]

I looked at doing the PHPP course but it's a 5 day commitment and in the end due to time and money constraints I've let my Architect do it! I'm interested in getting the worksheet once it's ready and going through it to understand how it operates and challenge the Architect to try different climate sources (SE England vs Dublin for instance) to see what mitigation could be incorporate for extreme weather events. I still can't get my head around the low space heating requirements for passive houses, I'll probably still be scratching my head living in one a year later! 15 kwh per m2 per year?! That's ridiculous vs standard houses.....A guy I know down the road designed a H shaped building and then did the PHPP course. The design was a challenge and he was too far along to change it but he did a lot of value out of the course and it help tweak things he was still able to change. 

I only found out about Passive Houses by accident, until then I thought a house was a house, how much have I learned since! Good luck on your journey! 

[jonM]

PHPP also very useful to model overheating which can be as big a challenge as reducing energy consumption if the building is heavily insulated and has a lot of glazing.  

[joe90]

Personally I didn’t bother with PHPP but designed what we wanted with loads of insulation, good glazing ASHP with UFH and MVHR. I think the local envoironment has a big impact on how the house performs and not sure PHPP could take this into account!!!. I DO know that the conservatory will overheat in hot weather ( if we ever get any?) but I remember ST saying that underheating by a couple of degrees makes a big difference but overheating by a few degrees is hardly noticeable. As we are getting older we enjoy the heat of the sun and we are looking forward to sitting in the conservatory in the shoulder months enjoying the warmth without the chill of the wind. Time will tell.

[Alexphd1]

I think overheating in the NE of Scotland will be a nice novelty initially....