Over 60 people attended the Passive House briefing held in Waterford Institute of Technology on Wednesday, 18 May. John Carney, who has headed up the Passive House local chapter over the past year lined up an excellence set of speakers from both within Waterford Institute of Technology and also industry.
An overview of the Passive House standard in Ireland was provided by Shane Colclough from the University of Ulster, with particular emphasis on the current status of the rollout of the Passive House standard in Dun Laoghaire Rathdown. This was followed by Brian Dempsey of WIT who gave an excellent overview of the avoidance of thermal bridging, highlighting the role that BIM can perform.
Jeff O’Toole, of Passive House solutions (and a recent graduate of WIT), gave a practical talk on how to achieve good quality control and gave a demonstration of airtightness testing. David McHugh of Proair, followed on from the airtightness theme concentrating on best practice installation of heat recovery ventilation systems, including their PA600pli which received official PHI certification the previous month.
Another company which achieved Passive House product certification is MEDITE SMARTPLY. Their innovation manager David Murray spoke about how the timber panel products are incorporated into a system, which is also certified.
Finally, Seamus Mullins quantity surveyor with Michael Bennett group demonstrated how achieving Passive House certification needn’t cost any more than building to the current building regs.
The Passive House community is indebted to John Carney, for his active support and the Passive House Association of Ireland would like to wish him every success as he takes early retirement from WIT next month to pursue his very many and varied interests.
