Improving the efficiency of existing buildings and eliminating fossil fuel usage are vital steps to meeting states' goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions throughout New England. Focusing on finding scalable and replicable models for building typologies, such as triple deckers, will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as well as increase tenant comfort and reduce energy bills. This session focuses on the best ideas and lessons learned from MassCEC’s Triple Decker Design Challenge.

When an experienced builder does a whole-house upgrade of their own home, you know it’s going to be done right. When that builder is Jesper Kruse, owner of Maine Passive House, you know remarkable energy efficiency will be the outcome. And when that house is the one Kruse himself built 20 years ago - the first house he ever built - well, you know it’s going to be an especially interesting adventure in single family retrofits. Kruse will explain why he decided to undertake this project.

Retrofitting vacant and underutilized historic buildings to PHIUS standards leverages an existing building’s embodied carbon, which combined with low carbon and carbon storing materials, can transform our historic buildings into carbon sinks. With careful consideration, the Federal Historic Tax Credit program can provide an additional source of funding for these ambitious Passive House projects. Currently under construction, Moran Square is one of the first PHIUS Historic Tax Credit projects in the US. The site includes a historic firehouse, a vacant lot, and historic three-story building.

Pioneer Valley Habitat for Humanity, Simple City Studio, and VEIC present PV Habitat’s award-winning experiment in affordable net-zero housing. Using data from a recent build, PV Habitat compares build time, cost, and energy efficiency between modular and stick-built construction, focusing on the trade-offs between affordability and energy efficiency, and examining where design can simplify or complicate a build.

New York State’s carbon-neutral policies and on-the-ground programs are the leading edge in the Northeast and provide a model for all communities. Come be informed and inspired by NYSERDA’s upcoming Carbon Neutral Buildings Roadmap. As part of Governor Cuomo’s Green New Deal for New York, NYSERDA has been spearheading the development of an overarching framework for decarbonizing New York’s buildings by 2050. This presentation will outline the policies and programmatic areas that will achieve radical reduction in the carbon emissions of buildings.

Sheridan Small Homes is a project that originated in the classroom at the Rhode Island School of Design. The two passive house prototype student designs were created as a solution to increase affordable housing and make use of 200 undersized vacant lots in Providence, RI. The homes were funded through a combination of energy grants and incentive programs and were built by an apprentice training program that provides valuable work experience and career opportunities for low-income diverse community members.

Multifamily buildings with good insulation, great windows, and decent ventilation systems – what's not to like? Unfortunately, over the past five years, we have received calls from multifamily building owners who are battling persistent summertime humidity problems. Comfort complaints, sweating ductwork, waterlogged drywall, and mold on furnishings, clothing, registers . . . you name it. We will discuss how we went about these investigations and the tools we used to diagnose these issues.

While there are established and feasible means to electrify space heating for many low heat load buildings like residential buildings, offices, and retail stores, all-electric solutions for high heat load buildings such as laboratories, research and development buildings, and hospitals continue to present challenges. Emerging products and strategies in the air-to-water heat pump, heat recovery and exhaust-source heat pump market are creating viable solutions to meet the majority of the annual sensible heating demand with efficient electrification.

Beach Green Dunes I and Beach Green Dunes II are two of the largest multifamily Passive Houses in the country. They are adjacent to each other in the Rockaways in NY (in the flood zone) and were completed two years apart. Although they look almost identical, they are very different under the hood. Each has a different structure, envelope (ICF vs Block), ventilation strategy (Unitized vs Centralized), and heating and cooling system (VRF vs. ground source heat pumps) along with several other differences due to changes in city regulations and varying site conditions.