The Building Science Podcast

Join Kristof as he interviews Zack Semke and Michael Ingui of Passive House Accelerator on all the great work they’re doing to build community in the building science field.

Passive House Accelerator

Mission

Together we can make a difference! We have seen the power of collaboration.

The Passive House Community is creative, driven, and Collaborative. Passive House Accelerator has been created to make it easier for others to learn about Passive House, to support the community by allowing them to share ideas and solutions, to continue and expand on the incredible conversations and sessions at conferences, and to allow those who are succeeding in creating beautiful projects and/ or solutions to share their knowledge.

Passive House Accelerator aggregates the already fantastic content from existing sites while also creating a new platform for people to share new ideas. This site will hopefully always be a work in progress.

One of the keys to the success of Passive House Accelerator is for you to contribute -

Create new short or long articles

Provide a short description and a link to an existing article on your own site

Share photos and details — lessons learned

Upload your finished Passive House Projects

Share an upcoming event on the calendar

Links to sites, people, projects, features and anything else you feel can accelerate Passive House.

If you would like to be a contributor please email info@passivehouseaccelerator.com

Zack Semke (CPHC, LEED AP) is Director of Passive House Accelerator, VP of Marketing with Zola Windows, and owner of Semke Studio, a marketing consultancy for the high performance building industry. Part of Al Gore's Climate Reality Leadership Corps. Zack writes and speaks about the role that buildings can play in accelerating the clean energy transition. He studied human biology, with a focus on human ecology, at Stanford University (BA, ’93). Since then he’s worked as a policy advocate for progressive regional planning, a developer and leader of nonprofit community organizations, a taiko (Japanese drum) musician, and an evangelist for Passive House construction.

Michael Ingui is a Partner at Baxt Ingui Architects, located in NYC. Baxt Ingui is a highly collaborative architectural design firm that consists of a number of talented architects and teams, most of which are also Certified Passive House Designers. Michael is active in the Passive House community, speaking at many national and international conferences. The team at Baxt Ingui have extended their collaborative efforts by opening their homes during construction to teach architects, tradespeople, homeowners, and developers to integrate better building techniques.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It’s been an incredible year. Let’s unpack it together and take a look at what’s coming your way in Season 6 of the show. Join producer Miguel & host Kristof for a fireside chat as the winter settles in around us.

Allison Bailes is writing a book! Allison writes the popular Energy Vanguard Blog. With a PhD in physics and thousands of hours spent in attics and crawl spaces, he knows a thing or two about houses. Join Kristof in a discussion with his old friend and colleague as they explore common myths about houses and talk about your next book purchase.

Dr. Allison Bailes III

With a background in physics and nearly twenty years of experience in many facets of the residential buildings industry, Allison Bailes has a good handle on what’s wrong with residential buildings and how to fix them. In 2001, he built a high-performance home and launched himself into a new career in the world of building science. Since that time, he has worked as an HVAC designer, home performance contractor, regional manager for a green-building program, and building science trainer. For most of this new career, Dr. Bailes has run his own companies. Energy Vanguard, which he started in 2008, is his current firm.
At heart, though, Dr. Bailes is a teacher. He taught high school science for three years prior to earning a PhD in physics from the University of Florida and then taught physics for six years at the college level after his graduate education. Since leaving academia, he has focused his teaching on the principles of building science. Through short presentations, workshops, and extended classes, he has helped thousands of people understand how buildings work.
What Dr. Bailes is most known for is writing the Energy Vanguard Blog, which gets ten thousand page views per day. He also writes regularly for Green Building Advisor and has had articles published in Fine Homebuilding, The Journal of Light Construction, Home Energy Magazine, and other publications. Dr. Bailes is also popular speaker at conferences, presenting keynote speeches, breakout sessions, and extended workshops. In addition, he is a runner, a juggler, and a skier as well as having the honor of being perhaps the only man included in Who’s Who of American Women.

The Book!

A House Needs to Breathe...Or Does It?

“Of course it doesn't. But the people in the house do! That's one of many myths I'll be exploding, along with lots of advice about how to do things right (and sometimes, how not to do them wrong). And with the coronavirus on everyone's mind now, one of the topics I'll be discussing is what's most effective at combating infectious microbes in your home...and what's not.
My goal with this book is to make it one of the most informative and readable building science books in the world. I want people who live in homes - and that's almost everyone - to know how their homes work and what they can do to be more comfortable, have better indoor air quality, and save money on their energy bills.”
Here's some of the advance praise I've gotten for the book:

Dr. Bailes is my favorite writer in building science and HVAC design because of how he simplifies and explains complex topics. This book is sure to be a must read.
~ Bryan Orr, Founder of HVAC School and host of their podcast

I am stoked to share my excitement about the upcoming book, "A House Needs to Breathe." Manufacturers, distributors, trades, and design professionals need to get it right - right now. There's so much bad BS (building science) floating around, it needs to be sanitized before society moves into more bad houses. Dr. Allison Bailes, a designer's designer, will clean house with this one - a recommended must-read!"
~ Robert Bean (ret.), ASHRAE Distinguished Lecturer, Mechanical and Building Construction Engineering

Allison Bailes makes the complex world of building science seem intuitive. He combines the penetrating analysis of a physicist with the flowing narrative of a storyteller. And the story he tells is about what your home can and should be doing to make your life better. You're going to want to read this book!

~ Kristof Irwin, P.E., host of the Building Science Podcast

“If you order this book, you'll get signed copies of the book. If you order at the Six Pack level or higher, you'll also get your name listed in the book. And the top four levels have other bonuses (free consulting, webinar, workshops, or advertising in the Energy Vanguard Blog) included for the same price per book.

Please

Now, more than ever, there is a tremendous amount of attention on how interconnected we are to our immediate environmental conditions (and to each other). As building science consultants. Our family, friends, colleagues and clients have asked us for years about information that will help them reduce their exposures to pollutants, like viruses, in their homes, offices, and other indoor spaces. So as we began contemplating this episode, we heavily considered talking more about the Novel Coronavirus and how our work can help prevent potentially worse future outbreaks. What we realized in the process is that creating the future we want to see is the only way out of the old paradigm. We have to internalize the fact that buildings can improve health outcomes, both for us as human beings and also for the health of our planet.

This podcast episode is the first of a five part series exploring what we see to be The 5 Principles Of A Healthy Home. Join Kristof and Miguel as we explore what it means to “start with a good enclosure.”

The 5 Principles Of A Healthy Home:

-Start with a good enclosure
-Minimize indoor emissions
-Keep it dry
-Effectively capture particles
-Ventilate

Engineers can fulfill a vital role in their communities through civic activism, proactive engagement in shaping public policy and leading in the civic realm. This segment of the Ideas Institute will explore the future of civic activism and leadership in the public realm for engineers. It is time for the engineering community to contribute to this re-examination in the spirit of technological and environmental stewardship. Increased leadership from the engineering community is needed to help society prepare for future crises.

Join Kristof in an interview with members of the Engineering Change Lab USA as they explore the future of engineering.