Blog Archives

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

Last week we ran our accredited PHI course to become a Certified Passive House Tradesperson. Builders from all over the country joined us at our office in Arvada (Denver), Colorado, for five days of intense learning and growing. We’ve now had several alumni describe the experience as “drinking water from a firehose“, based on the… Read More

As the construction industry pushes forward to solutions that are absolutely necessary for the future of sustainable life on this planet, there is an essential conversation that has to take place about the role of energy balance in the context of durability and resiliency. The short version is that Net Zero, as a goal on… Read More

Meet the latest development in our hands-on Certified Passive House Tradesperson (CPHT) builder training class and workshop: The Emu Passive Pod Throughout our upcoming advanced CPHT course this Feb 19-23 in Denver, Colorado, student builders will apply their learning to the construction of a self-contained mini Passive House Pod. In keeping with the class learning… Read More