The Bay St. Passive House was another fight with the HVAC guys. The challenge of heating a highly efficient house is nobody knows how to do it correctly. Well, there are people that know how to do it, but they are few and far between and the HVAC industry, or the heating ventilation and air conditioning, industry that serves single family residential homes is the wild wild West.

With a whole lotta guys, and a few women, doing things by rule of thumb, which means they’re making it up based on past experience and have no idea what they’re doing on these highly efficient houses. We routinely get projects that have a 10 or 12,000 BTU load for an entire house and then have HVAC guys come in and give us - 70, 80, 90,000 BTU systems. This is obviously massively over sizing them and overpricing them.

So how do we change that narrative in our industry? Slowly and one good HVAC designer at a time.