How to properly calculate and size your ERV or HRV with Cody Farmer, Passive House Builder/Consultant

Sponsored by Zehnder, the only company that helps professionals and owners do ventilation correctly over and over again.

Let’s take your basic 4 bedroom 3 bathroom house that is 1500 SQFT.

Zehnder has an exciting new product that deserves attention and applause – the CA70!

-guest blog from Jonathan Noggle

If you’ve never driven west from Nebraska or Kansas into Colorado, you might expect grandeur mountains towering over small sleepy little towns along the Rocky Mountain Front Range. While this is typically true, and a beautiful sight especially as you near Denver, the scene I experienced three weeks ago on my trip to Colorado was unlike any of my previous trips out west.

_{(Photo Credit: https://scottmagoon.com/breathe)}

Are you stuck in a building with maybe 2 or 3 or more people? Breathing each other’s air, sharing keyboards, mice, and remotes. You might be trying to draw some lines in the sand by now and find a peaceful place to read a book or GET SOME WORK DONE. Maybe that's a closet, where you can stuff yourself in between two nice smelling button-up shirts and just let the dense-ness of the sound isolation break the monotony of the #stayathome routine we’ve all respectfully adopted.  OH LORD WON’T YOU BUY ME A Zehn Room!  (let’s face it we can’t drive the Mercedes anywhere!)

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe…but it was extremely uncomfortable full of cold drafts, her children’s allergies were always acting up, and the energy bills were through the roof!...or through the boot hole…. or whatever. She really wished that her adult children could take some of the other kids and move out of her shoe and into an apartment but all of the apartments around had the same energy and temperature issues. What’s a girl to do??!

1. You want to make things worse for the next generation.

I know, I know…I can already hear you saying, “We should be building the passive house way so that we leave a lighter footprint on the planet and make it livable for future generations!” Yuck! I mean, look…you’ve paid your dues – worked jobs, raised kids, paid taxes and your children have done nothing. Why do we owe them anything? If they want a better world, that’s their problem.

Are you Siding your Home?  Here are 3 things to get correct when siding that will save money on the life of your home and also LOWERS CARBON EMISSIONS????.  

When it comes to residing in your home before you put that Tyvek on, think about Air Tightness and Home Health. These are a few areas that often get missed in big build, big box, and code-driven construction practices and materials. 

We’re all trying to reduce our waste – we try to use fewer plastics, recycle our cans and bottles, and reuse items that can be repurposed. You might even compost your veggie leftovers from your kitchen. We often focus all these good behaviors on the kitchen alone, but did you know that all of these can be whole-home action items?  As I write this the world is witnessing Greta Thunberg’s ‘this could only be fantasy’ moment.  Certainly becoming one again with the earth can happen as early as the kitchen compost.

Unlike the government who spends every penny they possibly can on their budget every year in order to increase the budget the very next year; a real boss conserves the budget, stretches the budget, and makes every penny count! This saves the budget because what isn't spent in the budget can surely be invested in growth or put in the bank!  You can control a building’s expenses in a similar fashion. Many of our parents and our grandparents still around today knew how to run their buildings like a boss!