Closing the Gap Between Design and Operation: A Mixed-Methods Post-Occupancy Evaluation of Passive House and EnerPHit Multi-Unit Residential Buildings in Cold-Climate Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
High-performance building standards, including Passive House and EnerPHit, aim to deliver substantial energy savings, yet discrepancies between modelled and operational outcomes lead to performance gaps. This thesis examines the energy performance gap through a mixed-methods post-occupancy evaluation of two multi-unit residential buildings (MURBs) in Hamilton, Ontario: Building A, an EnerPHit-certified deep retrofit, and Building B, a newly constructed Passive House certified building. One year of utility and sub-metered data was compared with Passive House Planning Package (PHPP) predictions under standard (for both Buildings A & B) and Canadian-adjusted assumptions (for Building A only). At the whole-building scale, Building A consumed 86% more total primary energy than predicted under Canadian conditions, with ventilation systems operating at twice their design airflow and significant additional loads in non-metered categories, while the space conditioning and DHW performance aligned with the PHPP model. Total Building B consumption was similar to the total PHPP energy use but recorded space conditioning demand was 158% above modelled values, driven by elevated cooling loads linked to occupant behavior and control sequences, while DHW performance was overestimated in PHPP model by 33%. System-level analysis revealed unmonitored loads, labelled as “Other”, and ventilation are the dominant contributors to performance gap in Building A, while in Building B, space conditioning is the major contributor. Semi-structured interviews with designers, contractors, and operators identified recurring drivers of these gaps, including commissioning limitations, operational constraints, and design challenges, and highlighted the importance of integrating operational realities into early design, maintaining rigorous quality control, and supporting adaptive building management strategies post-occupancy. The findings provide evidence and practical directions for improving alignment between design intent and measured performance in cold-climate Canadian MURBs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".