The Passive House Planning Package (PHPP) is a trusted, effective tool and is critical for Passive House Certification. However in many circumstances it can be useful to pair the PHPP with a multi-zone, dynamic tool such as the US Dept. of Energy’s EnergyPlus engine which can output sub-hourly time step results. In the past, if a designer wished to utilize both of these valuable tools, that meant duplicate modeling and wrestling with finding equivalencies across the two platforms which can add time and complexity to the process.
This session will present a new software tool kit (freely available) and workflows which allow designers to create PHPP and EnergyPlus models in a streamlined fashion from a single Building Information Model. These new tools open up the entire suite of EnergyPlus optimization plugins and processes, such as the existing library of OpenStudio ‘Measures’, to the Passive House community for the first time. This also means that without any additional work, the Passive House designer now has access to a fully dynamic energy model to utilize, while at the same time producing the consistent and reliable PHPP excel model: all from a single base BIM.
