Decision Making Support
Available Outcomes
Summer Comfort Guidelines
With warming climate conditions, the topic of resilience to overheating is becoming increasingly important. High indoor temperatures are a matter of comfort and are highly related to health. This guideline for summer comfort has been written to raise awareness and aid building designers in developing a robust strategy to ensure thermal comfort all year round. The provided design aid helps identify effective passive cooling techniques and analyse potential summer comfort risks of a project.Summer Comfort User Manual
In order to prevent misunderstandings and to ensure the building will perform as intended once in use, the chosen summer comfort strategy should be sufficiently explained to the future users. This template for a summer comfort user manual already contains some general recommendations and can be expanded with project-specific user instructions, e.g. for the ventilation strategy.Decision Support Tool
With the Decision Support Tool, outPHit facilitates the planning for energy-related improvements and thus the first steps in the refurbishment process. Planners must make crucial decisions in the design phase before energy-efficient renovations are implemented. The Decision Support Tool provides the needed guidance by comparing different renovation concepts for a respective building. This makes it easier for those involved in the construction process to find a suitable approach for their building right from the start of the planning phase. The web-based tool is available in English and free of charge.
Find the manual here: DESUTO manualManufacturing Energy Evaluation Tool (MEET)
Contrary to popular belief that the manufacturing energy of building components plays a decisive role in the overall energy balance of a building, in reality, it is often the operating energy that is crucial. The Passive House Institute has therefore investigated appropriate methods for assessing both manufacturing and operational energy. This tool allows for the assessment and comparison of the manufacturing and operational energy as well as CO2eq emissions (GWP) of individual materials, opaque assemblies, glazing, and window frames. It can also be used to evaluate entire buildings. For more details on the methodology behind the tool, click here:
Methodology of the Embodied Energy Evaluation ToolThe PV economy evaluation kit with tool (PV econ)
The implementation of renewable energy sources plays a crucial role in increasing the decarbonisation of the energy supply of buildings. However, the evaluation of the possibility of directly using or storing the PV gains within the building or selling the electricity to a public grid is tricky, as these concepts depend on the energy demand of the building and the climate of the location considerably. Besides mere financial considerations, the ability to use or store PV energy within the building is also relevant for the future energy supply, and the energy prices and funding for selling PV electricity or own use vary greatly from country to country. This tool assesses the PV self-consumption potential of residential buildings, the possibility of improving the self-consumption ratio by temporarily storing PV electricity in batteries, and supports the evaluation of the economic potential of selling PV to the grid. It also allows the user to receive information to which extend RES implementation makes sense to supply the building with energy, and if the revenues of the PV electricity either saved or sold to the grid can compensate or exceed the investment costs. Download