Ventilation Certification with Michael Franco of PHIUS

I'm well, thanks guys for having me.

All right, well, I believe you on that. So I'll give as much info as I have. I'm pretty sure I was born on a Friday, and then after that it was kind of just not so smooth sailing. I think I was noisy, but that's fine. My brother was quiet, so it evens out. But yeah, I've been with PHIUS since October of 2020. Happy to be a part of the team. It's really a great group of people that work here, very passionate about what they do, and it's just a joy to be a part of their organization. My background, I used to sell industrial supplies, MRO components, so I love digging into the details on what things can do. And it's been a real treat to sort of get my hands around as quickly as possible, kind of a crash course, the kind of components that go into a passive building. So the most of what I've been working on so far has been helping tighten up the window program that our senior scientist Graham Wright has come up with, same thing with the ventilator program. It's Graham's brainchild, and I'm happy to usher it along as best I can. So I'm here to hopefully give some good background on it, answer any questions, and get everybody ready for when it's fully ready to roll out and you can start getting some ventilators listed and certified.

Right. So like Mark said, coolers are great. Who doesn't love a good Igloo or a good Yeti to keep your fish nice and fresh? But we're still alive, and we like to stay that way. So it's part of a healthy building is being able to breathe well. And that means pulling fresh air in. When a building is so well insulated and sealed, it's not like we can get away anymore with just cracking the window or having air get in however it wants to, because that sacrifices some control over how that air is, the kind of energy that it takes to keep it comfortable, and the filtration to make sure that you can keep different particles and allergens at bay, which is really what makes a building really nice to live in. So part of what you need to do with that is have a mechanical system, hopefully as small and appropriately sized as possible, to bring in that fresh air and make sure that you don't lose any energy while it's making that exchange, because we all know it costs money and resources to make that air comfortable. And so we are looking at what kind of units offer the best solution for passive buildings, since it is a different type of building compared to what just conventional ventilation might call for. So what Graham wanted to do was make sure that we're giving a comprehensive look at what a ventilator should do if it's to perform properly under the circumstances around passive building.

So yeah, it is a little different. We aren't going to be going and commissioning systems or anything like that. This is not PHIUS trying to come up into your project and start poking around. That's for our raters and verifiers to do. This is different. What we're going to be doing is taking a look at products and just kind of how they perform when looked at from a laboratory test perspective. So you may ask, why bother with PHIUS certification? Or as I like to say, why this isn't just another competing standard. So the obvious point is that PHIUS focuses on passive building applications. There's a lot of existing standards that do a really good job of evaluating products, but sometimes they just don't go quite far enough for passive building, and they might miss out on opportunities for some more granular data or some different categories for evaluation. And sometimes we would like to see a little bit more stringent requirements, just because passive building is supposed to be pushing the envelope, literally and figuratively. So we aren't trying to reinvent the wheel. There's a lot of existing standards that can be adapted or combined to get us that full picture that's necessary for looking at how a ventilator will perform when applied to a passive building. So the data from our certified projects is a direct fit for designing the standards for this program. So we really wanted to look at what does a ventilator need to do and do well in order to actually fit well into a PHIUS project, because it is a very specific demand. So just to give a little bit of an overview as far as the kind of things that we'll be looking at, I have here a little snapshot of our certificate mockup. This is not a real machine, not a real company, but just so that you can see, we would ask for data about some information about the machines, and we would look at how they perform as far as thermal performance, electrical performance, how well they handle air quality and defrost. And then we would also, based on their recovery percentages, give our endorsement as to what climate zones we think they would be really extra suitable for. So as you'll see, there would be green check marks for places where the unit is endorsed by us. And in this case, on a real certificate, you wouldn't see any X's, because that's what makes this a certification program rather than just a rating program, like our window program where we don't exclude products from being included. This is more of actually we need a certain level of performance before we will stand behind it. A quick example of that is air quality. It's extremely important that we have clean air coming into the building. It's good to recover as much energy from that air as you can, but clean air is critical. So we require at least a MERV 8 filter on our units. Eventually we'll be phasing in MERV 13, that aligns with Energy Star, and it's something that we'll need to see in order to actually have a unit listed with us.

So there's a couple things to take into account with air filtration. One is obviously what kind of particles you can catch, and the other is how much energy it takes to pull the air through that filter. It's kind of like a straw. Maybe the wider the straw, the easier it is to pull something through it. But once you really get the weave down tighter, it can sometimes take more energy or require more out of the fan to pull everything through. And then you play a delicate balance between air quality and how much power you use, which is important in a passive building is to keep that power consumption low.

Sure. So we offer that. That's most of what PHIUS does, besides maintaining the PHIUS building standard, is all of the training and education programs that we have for our CPHCs, the Certified Passive House Consultants, and also the Certified Builders, and our Raters and Verifiers, which are the people who are on the ground doing the quality control and actually running those blower door tests and checking penetrations and doing everything that you need to do to make sure that what is on paper for that great passive building design is actually what's going on. So from the product certification side, we work with manufacturers who are interested in having their products listed, and we have them submit a lot of data to us. We want laboratory test reports, we want manufacturer authored information that really goes into detail on how this unit performs under a variety of circumstances. So the two tests that we're looking for in order to submit a unit right now is CAN/CSA C439 or AHRI 1060 or 1061 according to ASHRAE 84, plus some additional electrical performance calculations if you're choosing the AHRI path. So that's what we're looking for out of there, to evaluate how the unit performs with regards to the amount of electricity that it uses at its max rated airflow at a reference external static pressure, the standby power consumption, and for package units that come with fans, things like the filter face velocity at max. We understand that some units are not pre-packaged, and we have a way to address those sort of larger commercial or multi-family units. We understand not everything is going to be aimed at single-family building.

Sure. So I know we've got a couple programs in the works that our Education Programs Manager, Josh Rudin, is working on, where we're trying to get some PHIUS education material, whether it's just stuff aimed at passive building in general or trying to work in what we do into things at the university level. So it's something we're looking into to try and make sure that we can have that next generation ready to go. It's important to us to make sure that this keeps going forward.

I think I might actually ask for your help on this, Mark, just because I've had a little bit of time to get situated here, but I think our beards might be indicative of our experience level in the field. So I think you may be the black belt here. But acknowledged, most of the air that's coming in does pass through that heat exchange core, and I don't know of anything offhand that sometimes that may not be the case, but I'm pretty sure that's correct.

Sure thing. So given that I just made the bold claim that PHIUS isn't just another competing standard, some people might ask why, why go certified through PHIUS, why not other existing standards? And I think there's a few big benefits that for manufacturers especially is that we offer a source of trusted third-party verification that's aimed at passive building practitioners and the high performance market. So when it's got PHIUS behind it, you know that it's been really well evaluated for this specific purpose. The data that comes out of it is near plug and play for practitioners. It saves them a lot of time and effort spent on certain calculations. You know that manufacturer claims, not that we don't trust everybody, but it's important to give something more than one look. Or it helps with adapting another third-party standard to passive building. We'd essentially do that for you. It also gets listed on the PHIUS website in our product database. It's going to be undergoing a little bit of a revamp, so as it looks now, like Mark said, with the yellow and the orange, that's going to start fading away into a much different looking and I think easier to navigate and clean blue with all kinds of data ready to go. And the benefits to practitioners are essentially those but in reverse. It's got everything that you could need to plug it into your project and not have to do a ton of leg work. It's trusted, it's verified, and it's something that is kind of just turnkey. It's all set, it's ready to go. And as people continue to get into the passive building market and it grows, a lot of the questions we get is, where do I find these products? Who even makes something like this? Well, your answer will be the PHIUS certified product database. It'll have all kinds of things listed ready for you to start looking and seeing, plugging them into your project, see how it looks. And for manufacturers, it's a great way to capture a new market share. As people start to shift to this style of building, they're going to need to know what to use, and if they have your product listed there ready to go, it's been looked at, and there's a lot larger chance that it's going to be appropriate for your application.

So I don't have the numbers on our certified professionals, but I do know that those are growing rapidly, especially the builders program. That class has been full. I took it back in January for some background, and even during COVID remotely, it was packed, it was at capacity. And it's looking great. We're doing our best to expand it, keep the ball rolling, and make sure we can still turn out more qualified professionals. Product certification is definitely full steam ahead. We're looking to start adding more windows to our database, and as soon as we can get this ventilation program fully off the ground, it is almost there. We're really looking forward to starting to certify some units. We've got a few manufacturers who are already well into the passive building market lined up, ready to go to be part of the first pilot. I know as you would expect, one of those is Alex. So thank you, Alex, for being an early supporter of the program. We saw them at the Mechanical Summit, and there was a lot of interest there. So we know that people are going to be lining up ready to go, and we're excited about it.

Absolutely. So we have a variety of programs available. You can register for them on the PHIUS website, that's phius.org. You can head over there and check out the Certified Passive House Builder. That's definitely appropriate for anybody who's in the trades, even if you don't intend on fully getting that CPHB. It's excellent background and very useful for context if you really want to understand the differences between building a conventional code building versus what it takes to actually execute a passive building properly. If you want to go for the real full deal, CPHC, it is extremely informative. You'll learn about the building science behind it, the math, the real nitty-gritty, in addition to just how the building goes up. It's how it goes up from paper, so really starting out.

Absolutely. So what PHIUS does for their energy modeling is we are big into WUFI Passive, LBNL THERM and WINDOW, and really doing everything that we can to ensure that the building is modeled appropriately so that before ground is even broken, we know that it's going to perform as designed, because it's just super important to get it right before you start actually swinging any hammers or doing anything.

Yeah, sure. No, that's a great question. Because we are really not trying to just add another thing for people to chase for no real return. This is different because it is specifically through the lens of passive building. So sometimes, as with the window program for example, we know some of us may know the NFRC does a great job of evaluating and rating windows' thermal performance. And it turns out on the back end they do a lot of the same calculations that we do. What matters is how it's presented. So sometimes we need to give the data a little more as like ingredients rather than a finished dish, where you may have how a ventilator performs under certain test conditions. But what's important is that we have the full view of what this would be like under the more stringent passive building requirements, because we demand a lot from our ventilation units when put in a very cold climate, for example. It's not just as easy as any machine will do the job.

Sure. So the quick answer is that when we're looking at a commercial application, because everything is a lot more bespoke than just this package unit that goes into a single family house, there's a limit to what we can reliably evaluate because the program would just balloon beyond our ability, quite frankly. So I would encourage you to send me an email. I'll get in touch with Graham and I'll get back to you with more specific info on that.

Yeah, I think that came from when I was learning about the wall assemblies with our own Dan Whitmore. And he was talking about air barriers and vapor retarders, and talking about how more is not always better. Where you don't need necessarily the sandwich barriers because then you trap moisture. It's kind of like shoes. Sometimes maybe you need one of those little stretch booties over your shoes so you don't track something in, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to pull a giant size 14 sneaker over your size 9 because more is not better. It's not necessarily the best solution.

Thank you very much. I really appreciate you having me on and that you guys do this. It's fantastic. Love the outreach.