ABSTRACT
Brooklyn row houses are classic New York City buildings, often dating from the late 1800s. When Jane Sanders, architect and certified PH designer, bought a distressed brick row house, she immediately started planning its PH retrofit, or EnerPHit, makeover. She initially came across PH through reading a blog by Jeremy Shannon of Build with Prospect, when he was undertaking his first PH retrofit of a Brooklyn brownstone. New York City has a mixed climate, hot and really humid in summer and cold, sometimes incessantly and bitingly cold, and snowy in winter. For mechanical ventilation, Sanders had an energy recovery (ERV) installed to help conserve moisture in winter and exclude it in the summer. The ERV is ducted separately from the ducted mini-split heat pump that provides supplemental heating and cooling. The insulation covers the drainage mat, and the membrane rests on top of that and is taped to the slab, which is the airtight layer at the foundation.
