Tips to pass the Pass­ive House ex­am

We can ad­vise the fol­low­ing:

• Go through the Ex­am­in­a­tion Reg­u­la­tions & Learn­ing Tar­gets care­fully and re­flect on your con­fid­en­ce with each top­ic. Mind the gaps - then go ahead and bridge them.

• Study the Pass­ive House Concept and its defin­i­tion, cri­ter­ia and prac­tic­al im­ple­ment­a­tion to de­tailed level. Sketch Pass­ive House suit­able de­tails for dif­fer­ent con­struc­tion meth­ods; reg­u­lar build-ups and of course joints, win­dow in­stall­a­tions and the like. Cus­tom­ers will ex­pect you to ac­tu­ally design such a build­ing and be aware of all im­port­ant ele­ments.

• In­tern­al­ize the “rules of thermal bridge free design” and their ra­tionale. They are straight­for­ward and in­valu­able guid­ance in every­day prac­tice.

• Get fa­mil­i­ar with the im­port­ance of air­tight­ness, design and im­ple­ment­a­tion of air­tight lay­ers and air­tight­ness test­ing (meth­od­o­logy & prac­tic­al ex­e­cu­tion)

• Study PHPP and en­ergy bal­an­cing in gen­er­al. What en­tit­ies are re­quired to com­pose the en­ergy bal­ance of a build­ing? What is their re­spect­ive im­pact? How does the bal­ance re­act on changes of dif­fer­ent para­met­ers?

• Get pro­fi­cient with ac­tu­al PHPP use by en­ter­ing a num­ber of ex­amples from A to Z. How can you make them a Pass­ive House? Get valu­able ad­vices from the PHPP hand­book! To un­der­stand what hap­pens in PHPP you should also know how e.g. U-Val­ues are cal­cu­lated. Make use of the pos­sib­il­ity to re­trace the main al­gorithms in the spread­sheet for­mula.

• Get fa­mil­i­ar with ba­sic eco­nom­ic life cycle as­sess­ment (present value, an­nu­ity). Are you able to e.g. cal­cu­late the re­sid­ual value based on giv­en bound­ary con­di­tions?

• Gen­er­ally: Re­peat and re­hearse any cal­cu­la­tions, sketches… Dur­ing the ex­am, you must be able to quickly ana­lyse what is giv­en and re­quired and set to work.