Evaluating the use of straw bales in achieving passive house certification (PHIUS+ 2015) in western Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Achieving Passive House certification requires super insulation which can significantly raise the embodied energy and carbon footprint of a project, effectively front-end loading the climate impact, especially where petrochemical foam-based products are used. This research sought to evaluate the use of straw bales - a low embodied energy, carbon sequestering agricultural by-product - to achieve PHIUS+2015 certification. A straw bale wall system was adapted to a single-family detached reference house designed to meet the Passive House standard. The wall system was evaluated for applicability across three Western Canadian cities using WUFI Passive energy simulation software to evaluate compliance; thermal bridging and hygrothermal performance were also evaluated. It was found that the proposed straw bale wall assembly satisfied the PHIUS+ 2015 requirements in all three locations - Saskatoon, Calgary, and Kelowna - with only minor changes required to the reference house design. The annual heating demand and peak heating load, the two targets most sensitive to design changes, were, respectively, 4% and 8.6% below the target in Saskatoon, 63.1% and 21.3% below in Calgary, and 63.1% and 32.6% below in Kelowna. The research also revealed that maintaining a high degree of air tightness is essential for satisfying the requirements. Overall, this research demonstrates that straw bales can be a beneficial component in creating high performance enclosures without exacting a large embodied carbon footprint.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".