Research-Practice Gap in Passive House Standard

Throughout human history there has been occasion where people faced challenges and issues that threatened the normalcy of life on earth. On those occasions, paradigm shifts have occurred in the way people govern and conduct their livelihood, often changing technology and cultural norms. Our generation is unique in this respect as we face both catastrophic challenges alongside hopeful positivity. On one side, the harnessing of energy has increased the sophistication and comfort of our lives via technological advancements. On the other hand, the way we produce and use energy has brought devastation to the environment we live in, and may have the potential to make earth an unlivable place for future generations. The passive house standard has emerged as an encouraging engineering approach to mitigate and solve many energy related issues. Conceptualizing innovative solution techniques and providing modeled evidence for the feasibility of those ideas is unquestionably a major step in the solution process. Equally important is testing these ideas and approaches in practice with physical implementation. Physical evidence often involves many challenges, and may require multidisciplinary teams to resolve these challenges. The contributions in this paper relate to this style of multidisciplinary coordination. What we learned through this work is that the practical implementation of a well modelled system that appears to work in theory can be quite challenging. These systems may have large amounts of theoretical evidence, but often are not tested extensively in practice. These experiences are valuable, and should be shared among both researchers and industry practitioners. We would like to share our experience in one such ongoing project: installing a sensor network system intended to monitor a building constructed to passive house standard in an academic setting.