Certification. All the Way.

At some point in time during your Passive House journey, you invariably need to decide whether to certify your project or not.

For us it was a no brainer, if we're going to build to Passive House standard, we're going to get certified. The certification process isn't cheap so there are homeowners who choose to apply the Passive House principles but not seek certification. Also with inevitable overruns to construction cost, the funds set aside for the certification and the associated technical analysis, documentation and blower door tests are typically the first to go. Despite the additional costs, very early on in this process, we sat down and made the commitment to certification. We decided, if necessary, that we would cut back on interior finishes to get certified.

We're a big proponent of sustainable green living and it was important that we put our money where our mouth is. With our house, we hope to show that the increased energy efficiency passive houses provide will improve our quality of life and comfort and that a high performance design can still be a beautiful and stylish design.

New Jersey, We Can Do Better!

We want to do our part to promote sustainable green living in New Jersey.  Crunching through the numbers in both the Passivhaus Institut (PHI) Database and Passive House Institute US (PHIUS) Certified Projects Database, I discovered that New Jersey sits squarely in the middle of the pack in terms of number of passive house projects registered across all 50 states.

Here are some interesting facts:

• With 5 registered passive houses and only one of them being certified, New Jersey ranks #21 across all 50 states in terms of certified and in-development passive house numbers.  New Jersey's only certified house is located in Teaneck and is certified through PHIUS.
• New York State, with 74 projects, has the largest number of registered passive houses in the United States. This includes 18 PHI certified buildings and 20 PHIUS+ certified buildings.
• New York, Pennsylvania, Oregon, California, and Virginia account for nearly 47% of the registered passive house buildings in the Unites States. Across these 5 states, there are a total of 194 registered passive house projects. 
• The top 5 list is nearly the same for certified passive houses. New York, Oregon, California, Washington and Virginia, with a total of 106 certified projects, account for nearly 44% of the certified passive house projects in the United States.
• There is a recent surge of passive house development in New York and Pennsylvania, both with 30 or more registered in-development passive houses.
• There are 8 states with 10 or more certified passive house,  25 states with 1 to 9 passive houses and 18 states with no passive houses.

PHI or PHIUS?

Now that the question of certification has been addressed, the next decision is whether to certify your project through the Passivhaus Institut (PHI) or Passive House Institute US (PHIUS). Practically speaking, this will likely be decided based on the professionals you hire. For us, working with Ryall Sheridan Architects meant getting our house certified through PHI.

For those that want to better understand the differences between the two organizations, here are a few key data points that I found useful:

• Organization Size and Reach
• There are just over 280 registered PHIUS passive house projects. Most of them are in the United States with a little more than a dozen in Canada and one in Japan and South Korea. 
• PHI has 4,313 registered buildings globally. More than half of them are in Germany with another 20% from Austria. The United States ranks #6 in the list of countries with just over 2% of the PHI registered passive houses.
• The 179 PHIUS+ certified projects account for 67% of the certified passive houses in the North America. There are only 64 PHI certified projects in North America and half of them are from New York and British Columbia.

• PHIUS+ Performance Standards & Measurements Changes from PHI
• Airtightness measurement basis was changed from the volume of house to surface area of the house.
• Source or Primary Energy measurement was changed from a per square foot basis to a per occupant basis.
• The Annual and Peak Heating and Cooling loads was changed from a global target to a climate specific target.

In all honesty, I don't think you can go wrong with either PHI or PHIUS. The overall Passive House  philosophy and principles used by both organizations are the same but performance targets and how they're measured are a bit different. In both cases, you still end up with a high performance airtight super-insulated house that's many times better than code. In fact, before their split in 2011,  PHIUS and PHI were essentially the same  organization, PHIUS being an American 'branch' of the European PHI organization. In my opinion, this division creates unnecessary confusion and is an unfortunately distraction from the already difficult job of promotion the Passive House standard and educating the public on it.