Please Note: The following is an AI generated transcript and therefore may contain some AI misinterpretations. Hi everyone, Aaron Smith and Nancy Bateman we are excited to welcome you to the EEBA webinar Podcast Series. Today, we have John loetscher, who is a certified Passive House consultant out of upstate New York. And John is going to be reviewing the prescriptive path in FIS. As many of you know the EEBA pathway zero, we recommend you get a HERS rating, ENERGY STAR indoor air plus Zero Energy Ready Home and the graduate level course is, can you go to a fi S type of certification at the end? So I'm really excited to have John talk about this. We will be taking questions throughout. We've been doing this for two years. The q&a section is at the bottom of the screen. I will be curating those questions presenting the job to John, we'll have a little bit of time at the end for questions. Quite a few people on here. So if we can't get to your question, we apologize. But we will certainly try to get all of them answered. With that, John, welcome. Awesome. Thank you, Aaron. Yeah, thanks for the warm introduction. It's great to be with everyone here. I'm really excited about the crowd and excited to talk about the prescriptive path a bit more. You know, it was before you guys joining us asking me it's in there and a little bit about the crowd and the spread. And based on their response here, I think this is going to be really relevant topic. Because I really do feel that there's a lot of hope for the prescriptive path as far as making FIA certification, a lot more accessible. One of them and that kind of shorter timeline, but also to a lot more of our professionals. So the presentation is called prescription for better buildings faster. And we'll take a look at the Vs 2021 core prescriptive path from start to plaque. So we'll go through everything about what you need to know about the program, and then ultimately ending up how do you actually certify through this program? Okay, so the overview here is we're going to look at the protocol design first, as it's called the fee is 2021 core prescriptive path, that's the long name, we can just call it the prescriptive path. It was just released in 2021. So we've been using it for about one year, so far, and it's still kind of new. Actually, there's still not one project certified through it. Although I'm gunning for the title of the first prescriptive path certification. I just submitted my first project for the second rounder view and fingers crossed. Hopefully I'll get that back in a week or two. We'll then look at criteria and development. So obviously kind of related but more specifically, what are the individual criteria that we have to hit along the way? Once we go through those criteria, we'll look at getting started. So where do you even start the process? What are the tools you need to get going, we'll look at some of the principles involved. And through the lens of case studies. So although I am on the certification team at fitness, I also have operated as a CP HC for a number of years now. And essentially, before my official term, starting a PS, I have worked on about seven performance path, I'm sorry, prescriptive path projects that I kind of wrapped into this presentation. So rather than just talking about a generic checklist, we're going to talk about it using some of these case study projects. So we have concrete examples to look at. And then finally, just some resources to know about at the very end, and then we'll take our q&a. So ultimately, we need to kind of look at the prescriptive path in the overall context of vs. Fi a started as an official certification organization in 2012, where the climate specific certification standard was developed. So we have about a decade of certifying projects under our belt, and that's specifically for this single family detached technology. Right? So you know, 1200 square feet, 2500 square feet, like kind of that scale of single family detached homes, we can do that really well. Right, and we've certified projects like that and got good feedback from all of those projects across the country. So what we're seeing here is a bunch of different climates, all certified passive houses under the FIA's protocol. And when we go through this process, great and we got a plaque on a building, but we So I've learned a lot about how do our targets work for our buildings, how easy or difficult is it for professionals in different areas of the country to actually achieve our standards? Right. So after these 10 years of going through this process, we basically said, you know, it's kind of we scaled this up a little bit. And of course, we're still going to offer our performance path, like we always have done with energy modeling all of that. And that's really applicable for large projects, non residential projects, etc. But for this typology, the single family residential that we've been doing for a while one, scale that up by kind of opening it up and making the process a little bit simpler for all of our design professionals. So we really need the amount of fee as professionals, that we have to be doing a lot of projects, and we want to remove some of the roadblocks in the way. So first, for the existing CPH sees the intent of the prescriptive path is to reduce the pre certification timeline and effort. I kind of built a career around Wolfie energy modeling. And I can understand that it takes a lot of time and investment into actually learning that program. A lot of you know, pulling your hair out and, you know, time spent on doing things and starting backup models and all of that. Or you can also spend a lot of money on a energy modeler to do the work for you, right? So either way, there's a lot of resources invested into the performance path, right, where we actually simulate the performance of our, of our building. And there's also a lot of back and forth with theists right. So sometimes I'd see it at best, maybe two rounds of back and forth, or two rounds of review, we can see up to five rounds of review where the design team submits work to theists, they come back with questions, and we go back and forth like that, right. So we're trying to really compress this timeline. The other part of this is that we have a lot of fee as builders. Now, we have a lot of these builders, you run like multiple trainings every year, and we get builders from across the country, which is really great. But those builders are not required on certified passive houses. And they have no ability to certify a building on their own. Right. So they can't actually submit a project for design certification. Nor can the rater verifier. Right. So the prescriptive path, again, the checklist based path for certification opens up pre design or that design certification for builders and Raiders, because you don't have to do that energy modeling process anymore. Right. So again, we're trying to kind of call everyone to start. Just a quick question that came up, you know, we have a lot of energy writers in the group and is there are there quarterly trainings or online training if you want, if you're a current energy writer, you want to move to a fast writer, is that a pretty? Yeah, process. Um, so if you are a HERS rater, so that is a prereq prerequisite for becoming a theist rater. We can essentially check out at a theist.org. And we run about quarterly trainings for the theists Raider. Raiders are for buildings, one story to five stories. And then the verifier is essentially an additional on top of the Raider, which is for five stories and above. Perfect. So we'll talk a little bit about that in a couple slides too. So this is just summary, really, but again, we're trying to make accessibility for more CPH CES. So when we're outsourcing energy models and cetera, right. Again, there's a lot of investment in time and money into the performance path. But as we've seen through certification, like lead, and other checklist based certification processes, pretty much anyone can do that. Right. So we're trying to essentially move away from that performance certification to a checklist base certification. We're removing that investment and energy modeling and allows office professionals to submit for the pre certification. So we're trying to open it up for more professionals to certify but we also have to come kind of pump the brakes a little bit. So again, we know that we can do the single family tech call Do you really well, right? So we're focusing, at least for this first round of that prescriptive path, we're focusing on that typology. Right. So the whole prescriptive path is supported by the single family homes. And it's also very cost effective for large scale community development, right. So when we have that kind of cooker, cookie cutter model, right, where we have a model home, and we're replicating that multiple times, but still in a detached way, the idea is that we can apply something like the prescriptive path there as well, instead of providing 50 Wolfie models, right, we can essentially provide a prescriptive checklist for the model home and essentially prove that that meets all the requirements, and then can be replicated from there, right. So you can imagine the process of certifications were getting very expedited. Okay. So again, from experience just talking about that expedited timeline, I kind of roughly mapped out performance projects, to prescriptive projects. So and this are kind of two sample projects that I had worked on on my own, I don't really have a timescale here. So you're gonna have to use your kind of imagination a bit. But essentially, if we look at the top part, this would be for our performance path projects. Right? So we can see, typically, there is kind of a phase in the very beginning where we have a design, but we don't even know if it can qualify for FIA certification, right? So you kind of come up with something. But it's not until you provide the energy model in the feasibility study, that you're actually able to verify if you're going to meet all the requirements or not. So we have a whole period here. That's essentially eliminated with the prescriptive path, right? So you can see we take this design, development or concept design, and we just start there with the prescriptive path, right? Because now we have a checklist, you either hit these things or you don't. So you have to design every element of the prescriptive checklist into your project. Right? So that's one time reduction here. Typically, when we kind of move on from that, we have to kind of go back and forth and adjust things with the architects, right? Assuming architect energy model, kind of relationship. Now, that's also greatly reduced, because again, we have the checklists. From here, we would submit to theists right, so we have essentially, right here pre cert review pre cert review, right? So after we get all the documentation together for our projects, that would be drawings, data sheets, specifications, for the performance path and energy model, the prescriptive path, a checklist, we submit that all to theists again, I am anticipating as a CPC that I'm going to get design certification within just two rounds of review. That's really great. For many of my projects, I'm up to four rounds of review five rounds of review, at best three rounds of review. With every round of review, you get about six to eight weeks, right? So every single time you have to submit the fetus, you have to wait six to eight weeks, it gets a little shorter as you go. But as you can imagine, this really starts to spread the overall timeline. Alright, so now a little bit more about the specifics of the prescriptive path. Again, this was just developed and released with vs 2021 protocol. So it's been around and in play for about a year now. And the big update here with 2021 Was that we essentially split our certification, where we can either pursue vs Corp certification, or theist zero certification. And really the difference between those is just our primary energy. So the amount of energy consumption in our building, right? VS core which includes the prescriptive path, just basically preferences all of the passive conservation methods of passive building, but it does not require renewable energy, right? The only difference is that phase zero requires renewable energy to prove you're at net zero, right. So as you can imagine, without an energy model, we are limited to only fee as core certification for the prescriptive path. So that is just one thing to note, it's not to say you can't put renewable energy on your prescriptive path project, it's just you cannot account for it and say that you have a fee as a zero or a net zero building, because we have no way to verify it without energy. Right? We are looking into in the future, essentially monitoring, right, achieving prescriptive certification, and then after a year or so showing that you produce enough energy on on site to offer. Was that a question? No, I was just sorry, I had my mute off. And I was making comments. Oh, okay. That's great. So you could you could do a year of certification. And, you know, if your solar meter spins backwards, your net meter, you could technically we're pursuing that as an additional kind of badge, add on certification for the future, for sure. That has been one one item that a lot of people have said, Hey, I liked the prescriptive path. But I am really interested in that zero, how can I bring them together? So we're, we're listening. Okay. Okay. So just to again, look at the two paths in comparison, we've already talked a lot about timeline, we're past that now, about the requirements for each, we have the performance path on the left prescriptive path on the right. So what we're really eliminating is anything that's involved with energy modeling, right, so we have the net source energy target at the bottom, we can't model that, right, we can't model how much energy it's going to your building will consume. So that's being eliminated here. And the space conditioning target. At the same level, we can't model that unless we plug in our building in an energy model with the climate data set. So rather, what we're doing for our space conditioning targets is just a climate specific, right. So instead of having to go through this whole energy mode process, you can simply plug in your project size and location into a calculator. And it will spit out what your required our values are for your wall, for your roof for your building slab, as well as a few other things. Again, so these two things are based on what we need to eliminate in order to get energy modeling out of the equation. So the types allowed within this, as well as the single family detached, we are making an exception for side by side duplexes as well. So we can see this still is kind of fallen within that same kind of single family detached technology while starting to move towards some notion of multifamily, right. So this is a rendering from Barrus, wedlake Architects, that Habitat for Humanity project here in Columbia County, New York. And we can see two single family residential projects with a shared party wall. Right. So we see a lot of economy and building like this. And the essentially, the ratio of interior floor area to exterior envelope is still similar enough to that single family detached technology that falls within the kind of same building science principles. Okay. So some other criteria that are included within the prescriptive path, we have a limit on the size of the building or the compactness of the building. So within this, we're really talking about complexity, right? Do we have a lot of bumps ins and outs on the building? Is it a very compact l envelope, like very square, and kind of the, you know, efficient? Or is it really long and drawn out? Right, with a lot of surface area of exterior? Essentially, again, that calculator, the snapshot that we will put in the building size, and it will give us a limit to how much exterior envelope we can have. Right? So by doing this, we're controlling the size of the building that we can actually certify through the prescriptive path. Right? It kind of works against what we would call For the big mansion, right the very large, lacking density, kind of building typology of favoring dense, energy efficient buildings from a passive kind of compactness perspective. working hand in hand with that we have a limit on the occupant density. So we have about 900 square feet per occupant. Essentially what that means is that, again, we're trying to limit the amount of like McMansions, which large kind of open spaces with very low occupant density. Some of the other limitations with the no fossil fuel combustion equipment in these projects. At this point, we've seen enough advances in heating and cooling equipment, specifically with domestic hot water, that there's really no problem with completely decarbonizing our mechanical systems in the building. Similarly, no jetted tubs or indoor pools are allowed because these create extra vapor problems within the building, right when we see paper problems, we want to simulate those with energy modeling, right. So in order to get the energy modeling out of the equation, we need to say no jetted tubs or indoor pools. Similarly known natural draft fireplaces, we saw this with certification to begin with, we do allow sealed woodstoves. That's with a dedicated intake air and a dedicated exhaust. Okay, and the air tightness just like the performance, certification is still critical here, in fact, a bit more critical in the prescriptive path. So if you notice the airtightness limit point, 04 cfm per square foot, that is a bit more strict than what we typically allow for the performance path. So, John, I, John, I would just a question here for because our audience is so used to the 50 Pascal's, right. Can you convert that to? Is it? I always heard that equates to what? At fifth? Ach? 50.3? So point three ac 3.6 point 60. Yeah, so before you panic, everybody, that's about that's what we hear is that conversion is about a point six ACH. 50. So point 06 cfm square feet roughly equates over 2.6 Ach. Right. So we are still talking with point 04. We're still talking a bit tighter than that. Sure. Right. So but not unreasonably tight. Actually, most projects that I see single family residential, again, have no problem hitting this airtightness or better? Yes. And you're doing that preliminary blower door before she arrived? Generally, John, see that as is actually going to be kind of case by case depending on the project and the phasing. Yeah. So the rater will work with the builder to determine what is the construction sequencing? And when does the preliminary blower door tests make the most amount of sense? Great, thank you. So one important thing about this performance path only requires a final blower door test. The prescriptive path requires a preliminary and final. So the conservative air tightness and this preliminary blower door tests are working to ensure durability, essentially, right? So they're built into the program to make sure were catching quality control issues as soon as possible in the process. Okay. And within this, we're also looking for again in relative to durability, moisture RISK COMPLIANCE, right? So whatever we're installing Windows, we want to make sure that they're going to be free of condensation risks. We are also concerned with the condensation or the dewpoint temperature in our wall assemblies, right. So from experience, we know when we add insulation and airtightness we can actually invite the dewpoint temperature right into the center of our wall assembly. So the prescriptive path allows us to enter our wall assemblies into the checker That's, and it will actually verify if we're in compliance with the theum fee US moisture control guidelines. Okay. As with all FIA certification, we also include the high performance staircase. So Eric, I mentioned this earlier, essentially going from building code building on that ENERGY STAR, Zero Energy Ready Homes, you know, indoor air plus water sets, etc. And then building on that going to face core certification. So this is what is being verified by the theists rater when they show up on site. Okay. So now that we've kind of go up gone over this overview, we've discussed some of the limitations and some of the intentions of the path. We'll go into getting started like, I will I have a project and I just want to get going on it, what do I have to do first? So first thing that we can look at most helpful, like I said@ces.org, there is the prescriptive snapshot. So this is the early on calculator. Essentially, what we can do is type in our location. Right, so we have our statements city. This aligns with a number of pre approved theist climate datasets that we've used throughout the years. It tells us our ASHRAE climate zone, which will tell us essentially later on about our moisture control guidelines, and then the size of the project. John, can you define icfa? For us again, please? Yes, interior conditioned floor area. Got it. Thank you. So essentially, it's just the interior surface of the exterior walls within the building. Right, it's all of the condition of volume. So we have a size of the building, governed by the icfa, the interior condition, floor area, number of bedrooms, number of stories. Once all of this is filled out, it populates all of our information down here. So this is a high level overview before we actually get into the checklist that gives us all of those design requirements. Right. So we can first see that General tab and the compactness tab. Those are giving us some of those high level kind of limits, right. So we have the calculated density 375 square feet per person in this particular building. And that's based on the icfa and the number of bedrooms. And yes, okay, that meets the limit of 900 square feet per person, right? So we kind of progressed down the checklist just like this. And John, can you just reiterate for the audience, we have a question about how do you come to the limiting 900 square foot icfa number, and I think you said it earlier, but can you reiterate that. So the 900 square feet is a limit that is set by theists. So every building within the prescriptive checklist has to be within 900 square feet of occupant density. Yeah, and it's the anti McMansion formulation is how you described it, right, exactly. We're trying to and it's not just whatever, if you want to build a McMansion go for it, you know, I want everyone to be happy. But what we're trying to limit is from an energy perspective, buildings that have a lot of building envelope, and very, very little internal. Right, right. compactness is similar, right, so we have a total maximum area of the building envelope. So for 1500 square feet in this particular climate, the maximum compactness would be 4989 square feet. Right. So we're starting to talk about a ratio of floor area, which is indicative of internal heat gain, versus our building envelope area, which is indicative of heat loss, right? So it's essentially setting up this ratio between internal heat gain and heat loss to the exterior of the building. And we do have some case studies. In a little while, we'll calculate that go over exactly how that's calculated. The snapshot also gives us specific values that need to be achieved for our windows. So solar keeping coefficient, right point two, five. That's by climate zone that you put in for your project. Exactly. So when you change that climate zone, it's going to change this value. For instance, we'll see later that, actually, some of these don't even apply, depending on what climate zone you're in. So if you're in climate zone seven, we're not going to require you to put fixed overhangs on all your windows. When all the heat we want all the heat we can get up here. Right, right, exactly. Similarly, we'll go into our our values down here for our different assemblies. And some mechanical ventilation requirements as well for all those mechanical engineers out there. So again, the prescriptive snapshot is like that first step that we can take, just to get Okay, based on my climate and my size and building, what are all the checks that I need to be aware of? Right. And just a quick question from somebody, Japan, they said, They're loving the program, I think, and they said, If I had scrupulous construction oversight that was documented, can I do fee as certification after occupancy? So the old theoretical Yes, the catch up, the kind of hold up there is going to be you need documentation of certain things along with the construction process. Right. So you could, if you had good documentation of sub slab insulation, then theoretically, you could work with the Raider to kind of post occupancy certify your building. But you do need to verify a bunch of things that are probably hidden. Great. So probably the advice for Dan there is reach out to your fitness rater, and have a conversation with them as a first step. Right. Great. Thank you, John. Yeah, of course. Okay. So just kind of process overview, we just talked about that snapshot. So where do we go next? Right. So from that snapshot, we can move directly into our design. We're taking all of the requirements shown in that snapshot. And were making sure they're the building is designed with those volumes, right from the design. Now we can, we're ready to download the full checklist right with each of the individual detail points. And based on our design work, we're going to fill out that checklist. We gather those two things, the drawings and the checklist along with any data sheets, and we submit them to theists for pre certification. Right. So once we get the thumbs up from theists after maybe two, three rounds of review, we can go on and build it and then have the Fiesta Raider involved, verify everything is built the way that it was designed. And then we get the real final plaque, you know, to install on the building. So that's kind of the oversight, again, really similar to the performance path, only thing differences, essentially, you're swapping out that checklist for the Wilkie energy model. So the documentation, like I said, the checklist, drawings and the data sheets, data sheets are going to be just like the performance path or just like any other certification, right, you're literally finding the corresponding data sheet, highlighting the necessary information submitting that exactly as it is. The construction drawings become very important, but more so than not become the takeoff drawings. Right. So for instance, in the snapshot, we're going to enter the icfa, the interior condition, floor area of our building. Now we want to show exactly how we came up with that value in our takeoff drawings. Right. So actually, what you can see here we see the architects construction documents with my kind of notes overlaid on top, right. So this is one particular takeoff looking at window to wall ratio basis, basically the area of each of the windows, right? But we might do the same thing for our floor area for our envelope area. Right, each of the individual kind of specific pieces of information in the checklist. We want to show where we're getting those values from the takeoff drones And then we can go into the checklist. So the checklist is essentially organized into nine sections, the project information, general information, airtightness, compactness, solar protection, thermal protection. And there's a few others that aren't on the page. I don't have it memorized yet, I apologize. But this is a smart spreadsheet, right? So when we fill out some of the general information at the top, it's starting to kind of move ahead down the spreadsheet and fill out other information for us. Right. So again, if we go back to the core of FIA certification, that climate specific quality is still really important here, right. And that's going to as we're setting that in the checklist, it's going to factor into all the other decisions we make as we go through the process. Okay, so going through each of these nine sections of the checklist, again, looking at some of my case studies, we can see yes, I'm mostly in the Northeast here, but there is one case study in Virginia. So at least we have climate zone four. So we get a bunch of case studies ranging from climate zone four to climate zone six. And we can also see a bunch of varying complexities, right, so we can see a bunch of more kind of very efficient compact volumes, some dormers some less compact volumes, right. As you can imagine, through the different climates, we're also going to see solar conditions, changing insulation conditions changing, right, so each of these ends up being an exercise in itself. So to give you the kind of high level overview, before we get into the specifics of each, we have four of these projects are pursuing via certification, out of the seven, the first three are at the top, they're all by the same designer designbuild North River, in upstate New York near me, and all of them should be certified, in fact that GCC residents will probably be the first prescriptive path project to be certified with this. The project from the bottom in Blacksburg, Virginia, ended up being certified but not through the prescriptive path. And the reason why was because they really wanted that source zero certification. So again, reminder, if you're looking for the certified source source zero, we can't do that with the prescriptive path at this time. The remaining three projects Wellfleet Riley residents in Pleasant Hill did not meet the prescriptive requirements to because of compactness issues. Right. So again, we're looking at the total size of the same the banana belt comment in the chat. We have so when we're dealing with compactness, we're talking about that maximum amount of thermal envelope. And for the rise of the Reilly residents, we have a very specific example, within the thermal enclosure. So we're going to go into those specifics on a few slides. Okay, so we spoke about the air tightness requirements, we're going to skip the slide. When we go into compactness, again, we're looking at a ratio of the interior to exterior, right. And it's based on this notional compact building. So essentially, it says every icfa per level is evenly distributed. So if you have 1000 square feet, floor one, and it's 1000 square feet floor, 212 feet per story. So that's governing the height of the building. And we have a window to door aspect ratio of about three. So again, this is the notional compact building that we're basing our certification on. Right. So we can see as we increase the height of the floor, this diagram on the bottom were increasing the envelope area, but not increasing the floor area, the usable floor area right. So if we look at some of these case studies, we can see the one project and Sally way that did not meet this compactness criteria. It was done for two reasons. Essentially, we have a total floor area with We can see on the bottom right here of 1500 square feet. Right. So it's actually a pretty compact, it's not a massive building. But when we do a take off of the total envelope area of the building, we exceed the limit. And we ended up with 6340 square feet. Now there's two things going on here. The first thing going on is we have a lot of inside quarters, right, so we have a couple in the back, we have one in the front here. And we also have lofted ceilings, right. So essentially, we're keeping the floor area of the building the same, but we're increasing the envelope because we're creating that larger ceiling height, and more complexity in our building envelope. So this was a project that at the beginning, I thought for sure, would meet the prescriptive path, because it has very good insulation levels in all of its assemblies. But because of that complexity, it did not meet the envelope requirements. Moving from the compactness requirements to the solar protection requirement, which is number four, this is based on climate zones. So depending on what climate zone you're in, you're going to have to deal with different combinations of solar protection characteristics. Essentially, five, closed climate zones five through seven will only have to deal with a net gain score. So we take the area of all of the openings, and it will calculate a net gain score for us that we need to meet or exceed. For climate zone for we're dealing with a maximum solar heat gain coefficient, and that net gain score. For climate zones zero through three, we're dealing with that same Max solar heat gain coefficient, and instead of the net gain score, we're dealing with a fixed overhang requirement. So in summary, climate zones zero through three are hot climates right there, heel heating dominated. So we have a maximum solar heat gain coefficient, and overhangs are required. So essentially, there's two requirements that help keep solar heat out of the building. climate zones five through seven are heating dominated climates. So they prefer solar protection, they actually prefer solar heat gain coming into the building. So of course, we're going to do away with the fixed overhead requirement, right. But instead, we're going to make sure that our window glazing area is enough that we're essentially taking advantage of that solar heat gain of the building. Right? In climate zone four is right in the middle. So you get one of each one, solar keeping kind of invitation, and then one shading element that's keeping it off the building, right, the the net game, I'm sorry, the max solar heat gain coefficient. So when we fill this out and checklists, it's going to essentially give us these different requirements that we need to satisfy. Within our thermal enclosure, this is probably the most time consuming portion of the prescriptive path. Essentially, we fill out each of our individual assemblies and what type of assembly it is. In this case, we're looking at that Riley residence, which didn't pass a prescriptive path. And the reason it did not pass is because we entered in a double stud wall, right? Project was drawn as well as this slide. It's not there. Sorry, guys, I thought there was a slide that showed the detail. But essentially, we've entered that in and notice there's a blue note that says only interior load bearing types allowed. Of course, this was an exterior load bearing, so it didn't qualify. But regardless, we enter in the different wall types that we're looking at here. So we have a bunch of user defined entries, double stud entries, ICF sips cetera, right. And again, this will all tell us if we're meeting the thermal resistance values that are required. And if we're meeting the moisture control requirements. Moving on to point six, excuse me The moisture risk limitation. Again, this is going to happen as a result of our windows and doors that we're inputting into this requirement, right? So if we see this green, yes, we're looking good. Essentially, all that happened here is up above, we've enter in the U value of the window. And again, the calculator, the checklist actually calculates if you're satisfying the criteria or not. And I know we're kind of running out of time. So I'm just making sure we're hitting all of the requirements here. So we can go a little bit over. So I'd rather have you go through it in detail, people have to go off that. So feel free to take extra time and go through every slide that you'd like. Okay, now, I think we're actually in a good pace. But I do want to make some time for q&a, too. So we only have really one left, which is kind of a group between all of the mechanical systems, right? So we have mechanical ventilation, and mechanical systems, principles seven and eight. As you can see, again, there are specific climate requirements. So we have things like sensible heat recovery, efficiency, total energy, recovery, efficiency, etc. Right. So depending on the type of project and where the project is located, it'll tell us exactly where we want to hit. It's really that simple when it comes to mechanical systems. Last thing on mechanical systems is we have some specific things that are a bit new when it comes to electrical consumption. And that is that we are now requiring Evie readiness. So essentially, we require an Eevee charging station. I'm sorry, we don't require the Evie charging station. But we require the ability for a future evey charging station. Right. So that can be found in Section nine here in the prescriptive checklist, the specifics of that look like panel box with an empty breaker. Right that's labeled and says, for future Evie, charging station, ideally, the empty conduit from the panel box to your parking lot. And a parking lot. There you go. Your Evie ready. Okay. So again, that's like a very high level overview of the actual checklist. Again, we're looking at nine sections of the checklist. You're going through with specific takeoffs of dimensions from your drawings and filling out that checklist right in order to show compliance. Before I open up for q&a, I just want to share a few resources. Again, this is the type of thing that it's great to just dive in. But it's nice if you have some things that tell you exactly what to do. Right. So we have that fiesta.org With the certification guidebook. This has been updated for prescriptive path kind of step by step instruction, right. So make sure you're getting the new FIAs guide book from theists.org. For the prescriptive path step by steps, that's really helpful. We also have a number of trainings, right. So if you're interested in the prescriptive path, or you're interested in general training in general, check this out@phys.org number of Wolfie trainings as well. But we need to focus on the prescriptive path workshop. So this is a new training we've only offered at once. So far, we'll be offering again over the summer. Does this sound like an advertisement kind of is I'll be teaching the training. And I would love to see you guys there. But we'll go through this kind of the general overview. But we'll also get to dive deep into the prescriptive checklists. So we have a sample project. We open it up, we open up the checklist, answer questions, and we go through it all together, we fill out a checklist together, right. So if you're really interested in it, that is a great resource where you can really get some first hand experience with a sample project before you go and try to do it on your own. So I'm just going to put that out on there and look for the dates@theists.org. And with that, I'll leave you guys when I open it up for q&a. Thank you so much for having me. And looking forward to seeing you guys certifying projects. Yeah. Thanks so much, John. One of the questions we had is with the new prescriptive path, does it decrease the need for a fifth rater coming alongside the project? Or do you see it as being about the same? I think it's the same for Raiders. I think it it probably decreases the need for CPH. C, actually. But in a way, that's what we want to do. We want to free our CPH C's up for bigger and more complicated projects. Okay, so we have an architect attending that said, they're considering the fee is certified design consultant training. Perhaps the rater? Well, they're both great. Right? Yeah. Both great. So I may diminish the consulting part, but increase the rating part. Yeah, I mean, I think generally right now. I mean, it depends where you are in the country. But there generally are more consultants in the country. And there's, there's a great need for raters and verifiers, right about the country to just to put that out there. I would personally love to see more readers and verifiers in New York where I am. But that's just the knob kind of a side. Yeah. Great question. They came up is the the house that you showed that failed on prescriptive volume, when it just switched to performance, then? Yeah, exactly. So in that specific example, the house that I showed that failed because of the volume, essentially, we tried it and performance pack. There were some design decisions regarding site shading that kind of prevented that. And we'll just leave it at that. But yes, in general, if you do if you're not able to certify through the prescriptive path, for instance, the double stud wall example, you can just move into the performance path instead. That's great. question came up, is there a markup house for people to practice using the prescriptive path on? Or is that something you cover in your training this summer? That's something we do in the training. So we have a sample drawing set. And we kind of go through that in detail page by page, and we discuss how to take the correct information out and actually fill out that prescriptive checklist. Fantastic. Yeah. Another question. Yeah. How much does it cost for the goofy software? To share? This is actually an important question. Yeah. So a lot of people go to the front of offer website that their developers are looking. And they say, they look for like Wolfie Pro, or what we pass it, which is expensive. It's a couple $1,000 I'm sorry, but looking passive, which is designed specifically for PA certification, things like $6 million a year. So it's pretty fair, considering the other versions are like, triple that for a year. But isn't, if you join as a certified consultant, or a rater, don't you get isn't there some sort of break on woofie? While you, when you go through your training you get, you get a free version of the software for a certain period of time. So that's, you know, so you can look at, yeah, I can get the software or why not go through the training, how to use it, and you get it for free for a period of time. So John, are you up to date? Or do you know about the carbon? Don't you have a carbon accounting software that you're working on it for us as well? So if the US does not have a carbon accounting software, we do have like a very light version of a carbon calculator@theists.org In our resources. But is this about embodied carbon or operational carbon? Well, my it's my question. So I think people are starting to think about operational and embodied carbon. And I had noted that on your site, you're starting to have some tools there for people to use. Yeah, for sure. More to come. Yeah, more to come. And it's certainly something regarding retrofit projects. We are developing a revive protocol, which is essentially a specific protocol for retrofits to make it a little bit easier and more accessible. And that embodied carbon question is really important, right? It's very tempting to use closed cell spray foam all over the place. In retrofits, so like as we get into retrofits, more than more and more, we're looking into environment carpet as well. Right? Great. One question is on the surface area, or I think the floor area to volume ratio and that, perhaps that favors larger envelopes. Does okay. And that's kind of a glitch in the blower door test as well. Right? It kind of favors larger envelopes, does it not? Well, it's it's less about the size of the envelope and less and more about the density. Right. So if you have like a six storey building, but there's only two people living in it, then you have very low density, but you have a high envelope. Typically the what we're kind of, we're starting to always see these big buildings paired, they're always multifamily, right. So multifamily just by nature have a very dense building occupancy. So although yes, we're getting it's easier to achieve passive building certification in building up and large building envelopes. It's not about the size of our book, it's actually about that density. Got it? We have a question on what is the issue with double stud walls? But I think it wasn't, it wasn't actually an issue with double stud walls. It was that the support beam was transferring thermal loss to the outside. It wasn't inside of the envelope. Is that right, John? Exactly. I'm glad this question was asked, because I don't want to poopoo on double stud walls. Oh, they're great, right? Yeah, they're totally great. So the there's this is very specific for the prescriptive. So essentially, we have a concern with exterior load bearing double stud walls in certain climates. Because essentially, if the exterior cord is is load bearing, we there's a good risk of your dewpoint temperature occurring in that exterior stuff, which would cause the studs and foul the structural, you know, building goes down, right? It dripping at that condensation point down into that cavity, you're transferring too much thermal energy from outside to in, right. Double stud walls. Good. But you want interior load bearing in the building envelope. Right? Right, exactly. So then you're moving the structural load and the dewpoint temperature away from each other. And then you're totally safe. You don't need energy modeling, you don't need anything like that. But in that particular case, we would want to look at that more closely to make sure it's safe. And we're not doing energy modeling. prescriptive path. So we just say sorry, you can't do that. Make sense? So you could perhaps default to the performance path. Exactly. And make some amendments to that assembly and be fine. Okay. Well, I've got a doozy for you for a final question. Okay. It says, Can you give some insight on Wi Fi as approved airtight wood burning stoves, since that adds atmospheric carbon? And I think I can help you out here. I mean, that, you know, it's just a cultural expectation. People really want these these wood burning stoves. It's related to the question about recirculation, rangehoods, right, or direct vent dryers like, we have expectations, and we don't we want to make buildings that people want to live in. Right. So we're trying to accommodate like the general markets and make our buildings not weird. Right? Right. That's kind of a short answer. And having taken some carbon accounting courses myself, one would say that there's a net balance between wood embodying carbon and then releasing that carbon from wood. It's not perfect. But yeah, I think that's a nice, it's a nice balance for folks because it particularly up by you, and I lived in New England, it is really hard to get people away from there a lot of wood burning here. And frankly, though, a lot of the people I've installed a lot of wood stoves and in certified passive houses, and really don't use them that much. Well, you have to be careful on your BT you load into a passive house, don't you? I mean, you start to get too many BTUs into the envelope, right? Yeah, you'll overheat in the second. Yeah. Make sense? Well, John, I want to thank you on behalf of oh, we have one more question. Camilla. No, I just didn't click answer. Okay, well, I want to thank you on behalf of EEBA and I hope that we've caught some great engagement and you know if you're a HERS Raider today and you want NBFCs Raider tomorrow, please read out reach out to John and the team at at FIAs. And again, the way that government programs are set up is really that that, you know, it's that pathway. I love that stepwise that you show, John, that if you're you know, if your ENERGY STAR today, we want you to be into our plus tomorrow, if your indoor air plus we want you to be zero energy ready, if you're Zero Energy Ready, this is what you want to start learning about you want it really steps pretty naturally up into the 50s. And they've got great programs, great education, great local groups. So, John, thank you again, and thanks to everyone and yes, yeah, and I put my email in the chat. If anyone wants to reach out I'd be glad to speak with more. Fantastic. Thanks a lot, guys. It's really nice speaking with you all. Okay. Thanks, John. All right. Take care.