The Challenges of Certifying Warren Woods, the Passive House Lab
Over the course of the last six months, we have been working with the Passive House Institute in Germany to design the Passive House-level Warren Woods Ecology Field Station for the University of Chicago in Michigan. The Passive House Institut asked that we work directly with them on this project in order to guide the process because we were heading into uncharted territories. 
We knew that the relatively small 2,200 square foot building would have higher internal heat gains than your average residence due to the use of lab equipment. Internal heat gains come from all electrical appliances, lighting, and equipment, as well as people, cooking, and activities that utilize hot water. One of the most common ways to describe a passive house is to tell people that a Passive House can be heated with a hair dryer. When we found out that the required equipment included an -80° F freezer running year-round, we realized the building would pretty much heat itself in the winter. We were ready to dial back the insulation levels of the building because of the high level of internal heat gains. We communicated this information to the Passive House Institute and they let us know that in order to certify the building, we would need to apply a cap to the amount of internal heat gains that we could use to assess and certify the building. In other words, we couldn’t use the heat produced by all of the equipment in our energy model of how the building will perform. The assumption that the Passive House Institute made was that the use of the building could change, and the heat-producing equipment could be removed or replaced by more energy efficient equipment, that produced less heat, in the future. As a result of the prescribed level of internal heat gains from electrical equipment, the building insulation levels remained comparable to our other cold climate Passive House’s and the Warren Woods Ecological Field Station will be a building that is ready to perform efficiently well into the future.
Example of an elevation of Warren Woods, submit to the Passive House Institut for certification.
