NESEA, Mike Duclos and HeatSpring Launch Passive House Design Training

If you’re a professional in the building industry, you’ve probably heard of the growing Passive House movement. You may even be familiar with the basic principles. If you have clients who want to apply the Passive House standard to an actual project, and you’re looking for a crash course to get yourself up to speed on the basics, “Passive House Design” is the perfect solution. This new course in HeatSpring and NESEA’s Building Energy Masters Series is designed as a solid introduction to the knowledge and skills you’ll need for Passive House construction or consulting work.

The course starts on September 22nd. The course is capped at 50 students and we’re providing 30 discounted seats. Click here to read more about the course and reserve one of thirty discounted seats.

This intensive, six-week course is taught by Mike Duclos, a founder of The DEAP Energy Group, a firm providing a wide variety of deep energy retrofit, zero net energy, and Passive House related consulting services. Mike has real world experience with the design, construction, certification and delivered performance measurement of Passive House, and is a Certified Passive House Consultant.

Mike’s course covers the history of Passive House design, a detailed explanation of the Passive House standard and how to meet its requirements, the social and environmental context, energy modeling and the Passive House Planning Package (PHPP), and real-world examples of buildings constructed to the Passive House standard. And that’s all in the first week!

Subsequent weeks delve deeper into the application of the Passive House standard on real-world projects. Sample floor plans and a variety of design tools and calculators are included. Students who complete the course will design a simple Passive House “lite” using a simplified version of the PHPP.

The material and exercises will challenge you theoretically and practically, but Mike will be there every step of the way to provide insights and direction through the course discussion board.

Graduates of Passive House Design will walk away with:

1. A detailed understanding of the history and hidden challenges of very low energy home design and different approaches that have been used successfully.
2. A simplified version of the PHPP designed as a basic introduction to Passive House modeling and to provide quantitative feedback on key architectural design decisions critical to a successful Passive House design—without all of the labor-intensive detail required by the full PHPP.
3.  A capstone project: Successful design of a home using the simplified PHPP to get a taste of meeting some of the most difficult challenges of Passive House: Space Heat Demand and Primary Energy.

About Mike Duclos

Mike Duclos is a principal and founder of The DEAP Energy Group, LLC, a consultancy providing a wide variety of Deep Energy Retrofit, Zero Net Energy and Passive House related consulting services. Mike was an energy consultant on the Transformations, Inc. Zero Energy Challenge entry, and has worked on a variety of Zero Net Energy, DER and Passive House projects, including two National Grid DER projects which qualified for the ACI Thousand Homes Challenge, Option B, the first National Grid DER to achieve Net Zero Energy operation, and the first EnerPHit certified home in the USA. Mike is a HERS Rater with Mass. New Construction program specializing in Tier III design and certification, a Building Science Certified Infrared Thermographer, a Certified Passive House Consultant responsible for the design and certification of the second Passive House in Massachusetts, holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from UMass Lowell, and has two patents.