What is PHPP?
Packing more Ps than a fully packed freezer at Iceland, PHPP sounds like a mouthful. What does it all mean and more importantly, what can it do?
The Passive House Planning Package is the tool developed by the Passive House Institute to achieve compliance with their standard. It is used by Passive House Designers and Certifiers to evaluate designs through the project life, but can have wider applications. Underpinned by years of academic research and benchmarked data, it is considered the most accurate energy performance tool, due in part to the fact that it cannot be tinkered with or cheated! It contains far fewer assumptions than SAP and has become the tool of choice for those who really want to close the ‘performance gap’ between design intent and actual energy usage.
The workflow follows a prescribed route, allowing the input of key data to reach the first validation checkpoint to understand how the building is performing to the standard. This includes climate data, areas of wall/roof/slab surfaces and u-values calculated from build-ups. Manufacturer’s tested components can also be used for windows, MVHR and compact systems. PHPP generates both tabulated and graphical outputs, clearly showing how the building design and energy balance work together.
One of the best things about PHPP is the ability to run scenarios. Let’s say you’ve got a design that is well developed and passes the key criteria, or perhaps is currently a near miss – how best to find the missing piece of the puzzle? The Variants worksheet allows individual parameters to be tweaked (or used in combination) to see the impact of a design decision (e.g. more roof insulation, better glazing g-value, more shading). PHPP can also contain embodied carbon and cost information, so the overall effect of a change can be truly understood.
Although essentially a very powerful Excel spreadsheet, PHPP is ineffective in the wrong hands. Passive House Designer Training courses teach new recruits how to use PHPP with working examples. The software is also licensed to individuals, not their company, to preserve the use of PHPP to those who have been trained. If you’d like to use PHPP to optimise your designs, then please get in contact to learn more.
