Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

WIRL achieves Passive House certification

The Wood Innovation Research Lab has achieved Passive House certification, University of Northern British Columbia said Thursday.
WIRL-passive-house.13_71220.jpg
UNBC handout photo

The Wood Innovation Research Lab has achieved Passive House certification, University of Northern British Columbia said Thursday.

Located next to the Wood Innovation and Design Centre in downtown Prince George, it is the first educational-industrial building of its type in North America to meet the internationally-recognized standard for energy efficiency, according to the university.

Certified Passive House buildings use up to 90 per cent less energy for heating and cooling when compared with standard buildings and use up to 70 per cent less energy overall.

"We pulled off something really amazing here," UNBC Associate Professor of Engineering Dr. Guido Wimmers said in a statement. "This building has caught the attention of Passive House researchers around the world because it demonstrates how an industrial structure, constructed with wood, in Northern British Columbia's cold climate can be a global leader in energy efficiency."

Certified Passive House buildings use up to 90 per cent less energy for heating and cooling when compared with standard buildings and use up to 70 per cent less energy overall.

WIRL also the best North American result of any building using the passive house standard for air tightness. The testing protocol involves both pressurizing and depressurizing the building and measuring the number of air changes per hour that result. With a score of 0.07, WIRL surpassed the Passive House requirement by nearly a factor of 10.

The building's large bay door was the biggest challenge in that regard.

"It is very difficult to find a manufacturer who can deliver a well-insulated and air-tight product," Wimmers said.

The big red door was sourced from Germany and the other doors and windows hail from Poland. European parts were required for those aspects of the building because Passive House manufacturing is still in its early stages in Canada.

Other components of the building were locally sourced, including the trusses used vertically in the design of the thick exterior walls.

"Using trusses as a vertical component is something unique," Wimmers aid. "I have been working in Passive Houses for more than 15 years and I have not seen any kind of technical system like this before."

The 50-centimetre-wide walls are rated R-80 and contain blown in mineral wool insulation. The roof is rated R-100 and required special certification from the Roofing Contractors Association of British Columba. Even the floor sits atop 20 cm of expanded polystyrene insulation.

"The entire envelope needs to be really well insulated," Wimmers said. "Everything has to be nicely wrapped with a warm blanket."

Even with the air-tight design and extra insulation, the building also needs to be breathable so that any moisture that may accumulate is not trapped inside.

Wimmers and Master of Engineering program graduate Stephanie Wall produced a comparative life-cycle assessment, looking at the wood-based Passive House design of WIRL and comparing it a wood structure, built to standard building code requirements; a steel structure designed to be a Passive House; and a steel structure built to code.

The wood designs contained much less embodied energy - or energy consumed during the production of building materials and the construction itself - compared with the steel buildings. The Passive House buildings use much less energy operationally, and the wood-Passive House design scored the best overall.

"A Passive house building outperforms a code building substantially in the long run," Wimmers said. "It's about a third of the environmental impact compared to a code building over 60 years."