Housing at Summer Park, located in Hanover, NH, is a new 24-apartment low-income apartment building designed for the elderly and disabled. The building has been designed to meet Passive House Standards, one of the world’s most stringent energy standards, and will be the first building in Hanover to receive this certification.
To meet Passive House certification, the design is pre-certified through PHIUS (Passive House Institute United States) prior to construction. Once construction has started, numerous site visits, inspections, and tests are done to ensure the building is progressing as designed. There are various milestone inspections along the way, including window air leakage tests and insulation inspections. Last week, the first full-building blower door test was completed, yielding exciting results. The target for 0.05 cfm50/ft² of envelope was 1,250CFM. For those who are not familiar with this metric, this is a measure of the air tightness of the building: the lower the number the better. The test results for Summer Park was 578 cfm or 0.023 cfm50/ft² of envelope! In order to achieve this level of air tightness, the ENTIRE construction team must be fully committed. For example, when screwing the exterior insulation to the wall, if a screw misses the stud, one would need to back out the screw, go inside, and tape the hole that was just made by the screw. It is a lot of effort, so these test results were great news and a testament to the dedication of our construction team. Congratulations to Ingram Construction and all of our sub-contractors for their diligent efforts allowing us to do so well on this important milestone.
