Over 25 people attended the PHAI briefing “How best to implement NZEB” last Wednesday at UCD. The PHAI Director Martin Murray from MM Architects introduced the evening and presented to the audience the panel of expert speakers including Oliver Kinnane, lecturer in Architecture at UCD; Jeff Colley, editor of the Passive House Plus Magazine; Shane Colclough, Research Fellow at University of Ulster; David Murray, Innovation Manager at MEDITE SMARTPLY.
Oliver Kinnane has an architectural and engineering background and is interested in investigating the relationship between buildings and individuals from the view point of a building scientist. With his presentation titled “Trying to understand buildings” he presented the insights from his research work, which focuses on thermal mass, its impact on the overall energy performance of the building envelope under different climate scenarios, and its measurement. The results of his study and the related academic article “The impact of thermal mass on building energy consumption” can be downloaded from this website Member Area, together with all other presentations.
Jeff Colley is a well-known journalist, publisher and editor of the third most read magazine in the building industry, Passive House Plus. With his presentation on “Our current buildings” Jeff introduced the audience the outcome of the analysis he conducted on the SEAI’s National BER database, which collects all Irish BER’s for dwellings. Jeff showed the progress of new builds in Ireland between 2011 and 2017 moving towards the NZEB requirements, with respect to primary energy, CO2, windows and doors U-values, heating systems, renewables, ventilation, airtightness and thermal bridging.
After the overview on the current conditions and progress of the Irish building stock, Shane Colclough presentation “The Passive House, the Nearly Zero Energy Buildings and the Cost” examined the upcoming scenarios of NZEB dwellings and cost effectiveness. Shane showed, based on the monitoring conducted on case study dwellings, how the combination of the Passive House method with the NZEB standard proves extremely beneficial in terms of quality of the building fabric, indoor air and comfort, at zero additional cost.
A quality-driven implementation of the NZEB standard must take into account high-quality building products. David Murray from MEDIATE SMARTPLY, market leading manufacturer of timber products in Ireland and the UK, concluded the evening highlighting the relevance of the embodied carbon of building products. David prided his company on the commitment to improve energy efficiency of building systems using low-carbon materials and practices, beyond the “net zero” target. MEDITE SMARTPLY is an award-winning brand for sustainable top-quality products and PHAI Patron Member.
