The Airtight Engineering team was excited to host a Passive House Trades Training through Passive House Canada last month for the crew at Element Construction.
Element Construction, a residential construction company based in Lumsden, Saskatchewan, sent their whole team to the training in order to further their knowledge and experience with passive house principles.
“Our team was very excited about learning some new things and are looking to add them into our tool bag”, said Justin, owner of Element Construction. “As a company we are committed to providing the highest quality builds to our community. To do so, we know that continuous training of our team is the key to our success.”
The training was run by Steffen Bertelsen, one of Airtight Engineering’s Principals, who also works as an instructor with Passive House Canada. Because Element Construction already has plenty of experience building energy efficient homes, Steffen was able to adapt the content to the level and experience of the participants, and cater to some of their specific interests and questions.
The training included a theory portion as well as hands-on sections. Some of the topics covered included airtightness, insulation, high performance windows, ventilation, and mechanical systems.
The final day culminated with a site visit to a high-performance infill house that is currently being built in Regina. At the site visit, participants were able to complete an air tightness blower door test, as well as take part in a thermography assessment of the house. The participants got to learn about the energy efficiency features of the house, and to identify some of the remaining areas of air leakage in the house.
The participants were very engaged and had lots of great questions to ask, as well as their own experiences with different products and installation methods to share insight from. When asked about the benefits their clients will see from their team participating in this training, Justin said “They can be assured that our team is building them a project that is more durable, comfortable, and energy efficient than most others today.”
The whole team from Element Construction plans to take the qualification exam to become Passive House Certified tradespeople.
“We will be able to not only show potential clients our previous work to date. But show them our investment in our team to build projects to the highest quality using industry leading practices”, said Justin, when asked about the benefits of Passive House certification for their team. “If you are not continuing to learn, you are moving backwards. And in today's construction our buildings are by design becoming less forgiving. If there is no investment in education we are doing both our companies and our clients a disservice.”
We had such a great time working with the Element Construction crew, and love how passionate and engaged they were during the course!
If you’re interested in learning more about passive house design, check out Passive House Canada’s course schedule. Or, reach out to us and we would love to design a training that fits your team's needs!
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