By using better envelopes and windows, building designers can reduce energy loads and avoid overheating, leading to a more comfortable and energy-efficient living space. We can optimize the power of the sun to provide energy in several ways. That means two primary goals need to be met: Passive solar design that bakes in the best strategies to collect, store, and distribute heat. Active solar energy systems that provide electrical or thermal energy (or even both!). Introduction to Renewables in Housing covers the fundamentals of both goals. Whether you’re a builder, renovator, or designer, working in the industry, or a homeowner looking to get the best out of your major investment, this course is for you! The two-module course is a comprehensive overview of the key principles and strategies involved in achieving the twin goals of minimizing energy loads and maximizing energy production.
8 Key Lessons to Optimize Solar Design for Net Zero Energy Houses
Shawna HendersonSeptember 19, 2024
Valuing the role of the appraiser in home performance
Shawna HendersonJanuary 12, 20158 comments
Here's something near and dear to the heart of anyone involved in the home performance industry: how to make energy efficiency sexy, appealing, and properly valued. When you're up to your eyebrows in insulation and you know that you are adding significant value to a house, it's sometimes hard to...
So much to know...
Shawna HendersonNovember 18, 2014
It's hard to wrap your head around the amount of number crunching that goes into energy analysis, and how to prioritize your time and effort when working on a project. There are energy modelling tools that can be used that make it easier, but in a lot of cases, the easier the modelling tool is to use, and the less actual, real-world performance testing data you input, the more likely the result will be a ball-park figure that doesn't relate to actual energy usage, or actual heating or cooling loads.
Building Science and HVAC stuff
Shawna HendersonSeptember 16, 2014
There is this disconnect in our industry. It's around building science and the ways that all the systems in the house work together or against each other. It looks like this: evaluators and raters know about house-as-a-system and can look at a house and see some solutions and fixes that...
Scaling the picture
Shawna HendersonApril 03, 2014
There is so much to focus on when working in energy efficient, low energy, high performance, green, sustainable houses: materials, assemblies, performance, HVAC, energy sources. Broad categories like these can be broken out into a dozen subcategories each, then another dozen sub-subcategories again. And there's two sets of the top-level...
Value Chain and Core Competencies
Shawna HendersonMarch 05, 20141 comment
Training in building science and energy efficiency is essential to moving the house building industry forward into Net Zero Energy, successfully. Many people in our industry do not see the entire value chain. It’s a complicated one – easy to see in this diagram how the home building industry is a hot, fragmented mess of experts and expertise, completely at odds with itself sometimes.
Net Zero Energy (NZE) Housing Paper
Shawna HendersonOctober 31, 2013