Blog Archives

We are pleased to share some exciting news from our home city – Denver, Colorado. In the City’s efforts to push forward its 80×50 Climate Action Plan, and with the goal of Net Zero new construction by 2035, City Council has approved a voluntary, incentivized “Green Code”. Having identified Passive construction as a critical part… Read More

How is Passive House growing and evolving outside the US? Enrico reported to the PHRM/NAPHN regional call on the state of the PH-sphere with regards to policies, projects, products and training in different continents around the world. With this being the first International Passive House Conference taking place outside of Europe, it is interesting to… Read More

We are pleased to announce that today, PHI accreditation exams for Passive House construction professionals are being conducted simultaneously in Denver, Minneapolis, and Oakland. Through Emu’s partnerships with excellent host organizations like the North American Passive House Network (NAPHN), Home Energy Services (Steve Mann), and Green Building Alliance (GBA), we have been able to license… Read More

A quick check in with our builder partners: Beartooth Passive House in Red Lodge, Montana As our first Pilot Project, we cannot speak highly enough of how wonderful the process of working with Beartooth has been. The house is now getting internal partitions and finishes, and the bulk of the Passive House envelope work has… Read More

This is the story of a lucky, very timely coincidence. Back in February 2018, as part of our curriculum development for North American Passive House training, Emu Systems added a hands-on workshop to the  Certified Passive House Tradesperson course. After collecting feedback from participants in our 2018 Colorado and Montana courses, we upgraded 2019 workshop… Read More

As Passive House specialists, we often get chunked into a niche of the construction industry usually reserved for extreme “greenies” and mad scientists. However, it’s interesting to see how mainstream America is having many of the same conversations we are – only in a different context and slightly different vocabulary. In an effort to continue… Read More

Moisture in buildings has become increasingly worrisome for construction professionals in recent years. American buildings are subject to a wide variety of defects related to water in its different forms – liquid, vapor and sometimes snow and ice. These range from thermal discomfort, poor indoor air quality and health hazards (mold), all the way to… Read More

With a desire to share lessons learned from the process we’ve been going through over the past couple years in offering advanced builder training in North America, we submitted a paper for the International Passive House Conference, scheduled for September in Gaobeidian, China. We are honored to announce that not only did our paper get… Read More

With U.S. building codes now starting to address air tightness with respect to energy efficiency, many builders find themselves struggling to meet the defined ACH50 values (air changes per hour at 50 Pascal) required by their local codes. This measurement is an assessment of air leaks as monitored via the pressurization of the whole building… Read More

Notice: please read to the END of this article, and note the date. #thingswethoughtwedidnthavetoexplain 😉 Gally Tullagher, a builder in Red Lodge MT, was court ordered to refund $5k in damaged testing equipment to the company performing the blower door test — a procedure designed to measure air leaks in a building. “We set up… Read More