AECB News

AECB’s Tim Martel plays key role in US Passive House Network and Building Transparency launch of PHN PHribbon in North America market

25 January 2022 by

ECB’s Tim Martel plays key role in US Passive House Network and Building Transparency launch of PHN PHribbon in North America market

Building Transparency  partnered with The Passive House Network (formerly known as NAPHN) and the Association for Environment Conscious Building (AECB) have launched the PHN PHribbon toolbar add-on for Excel that enables Passive House designers to calculate the embodied carbon of a given design within the Passive House Planning Package (PHPP). The US PHN PHribbon leverages existing information beyond just energy, pulling from Building Transparency’s EC3 database, and EPA carbon figures for electricity, the end-of-life of materials, and the end-of-life pathway.

Tim Martel, Certified Passive House Designer, Chartered Architectural Technologist AECB expert and course tutor on the AECB CarbonLite™ Retrofit Course wrote PHribbon.

Andrew Simmonds, CEO of AECB said: “Collaboration with PHN and Building Transparency marks a step-change in the AECB’s strategic goal to build more and stronger international partnerships.”

Ken Levenson, Executive Director of PHN said: “As more leaders across the building industry are prioritizing a positive climate impact for their structures, by utilizing the PHribbon, designers can tackle both operational and embodied building carbon emissions within the PHPP tool, and comprehensively push for carbon neutral and negative buildings across the US.”

Stacy Smedley, Chair and Executive Director of Building Transparency said: “Building Transparency’s mission is to provide the open access data and tools necessary to enable broad and swift action across the building industry in addressing embodied carbon’s role in climate change. Partnering with PHN to support programs like the PHribbon furthers that mission. We are proud to work with PHN to integrate EC3’s 50,000 materials records into the tool to help clarify whole life carbon emissions for a building’s design and influence positive procurement decisions.”

The UK version of PHribbon Version 4.04 is available through the AECB please click here

Tim Martel says: “The UK version gives PHPP and non-PHPP users a simple and quick way to check their designs against LETI and the recently updated RIBA targets. US and Canadian versions give PH Designers quicker and easier access to their EC3 database within PHPP.  In each case the advantage of using the version in PHPP (PHribbon) is that it also calculates the Operational CO2 and combines that with the Embodied on to a single graph.”