Following up on our earlier post celebrating our most recent award-winning project, Harvey and Kay’s “Pleasant Future Vision” PHIUS+ Zero certified passive house home, we continue to take you behind the scenes revealing some of the high performance assemblies employed on this amazing project. In this post we are bringing the “V” in “HVAC” to the fore. When we build these incredibly tight, high-performance, energy-efficient homes a key component is the air tightness. Of the three paths for energy movement in a building, conduction, convection and radiation, we place a great deal of emphasis on conductive energy loss and focus on the R-Value of our assemblies. R-Value (the resistance to energy flow) is important for sure, however it may surprise you to learn that the DOE suggests that upwards of 30% of our energy loss can be attributed to convective loss- air flow through cracks and holes in the envelope. The old adage of “a building needs to breathe” is false… however, people need to breathe! In an air-tight home we need to create a system by which that can happen with a minimal energy penalty: enter the ERV! Learn more here: https://bit.ly/41jt9L7