New software takes Passive House planning to a whole new level

The Sketch­Up plu­gin con­tains a vari­ety of cli­mate data as well as a data­base of suit­able build­ing com­pon­ents with their key para­met­ers. U-val­ues can also be as­signed to trans­par­ent build­ing com­pon­ents. This way, vari­ous com­bin­a­tions of win­dow frames and glaz­ings can be eval­u­ated in terms of their thermal per­form­ance at an early design stage. Ad­di­tion­ally, thermal bridges can be defined; and the ef­fect of each change in the build­ing design on the en­ergy bal­ance is dis­played dir­ectly in the 3D tool.

"The new design­PH will com­pletely change the way we work with the PHPP. Check­ing a new design’s com­pli­ance with the Pass­ive House Stand­ard has nev­er been easi­er, faster and more ac­cur­ate," says Har­ald Kon­rad Malzer, mem­ber of the design­PH de­vel­op­ment team at the Pass­ive House In­sti­tute. The need for such a 3D tool – not only for the young gen­er­a­tion of de­sign­ers – be­came in­creas­ingly evid­ent through feed­back from PHPP users. Now, it is fi­nally avail­able.

The new design­PH tool was de­veloped as an add-on to the PHPP plan­ning tool which has been well-es­tab­lished in­ter­na­tion­ally for many years. The first ver­sion of the 3D tool is avail­able in com­bin­a­tion with the new PHPP 8. This latest ver­sion of the Pass­ive House Plan­ning Pack­age of­fers a vari­ety of new and im­proved fea­tures in­clud­ing ad­vanced op­tions for the cal­cu­la­tion of re­new­ables, en­hanced com­pat­ib­il­ity, new com­pon­ents and new cli­mate data sets. Mak­ing use of all these fea­tures is even more con­veni­ent with the design­PH tool. De­tailed in­form­a­tion about the 3D tool and or­der­ing can be found on­line at: www.passivehouse.com