Profile in Innovation: This article is one in a series that will highlight new and innovative technologies as well as profiling people making a mark in support of the passive house community’s efforts to decarbonize buildings.
By Lia Grainger
Though it began in what she describes as a “typical” way, Ruffy Ruan’s career path has been anything but a straight line.
“I was born in Shanghai, I was good at math and logic, so I followed a typical path and decided, why not engineering?” Says Ruan with a smile and a shrug. She may have started by simply following her aptitudes, but Ruan’s perhaps traditional beginnings have since carried her around the world. And her work experience has been as varied as the places she has lived — from sustainability consulting and energy modelling in London, England, to mechanical engineering on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada.
Today, Ruan’s combined knowledge of energy modelling and mechanical engineering has left her uniquely prepared to close the gap between two fields that are key to the Passive House movement.
After completing her undergrad at Tong University in Shanghai, Ruan felt ready to continue her education outside of her home country. Her dream? The University College in London, where an environmental design engineering Masters degree had piqued her interest.
“The course was so much more than engineering,” says Ruan. “It incorporated so many aspects of sustainability — how we can reduce energy use in both active and passive ways. To focus on sustainability made my studies so much more meaningful.”
Ruan completed her masters degree and got a job right out of school at Building Design Partnership (BDP), a global integrated architecture, engineering and design firm, where she started as a sustainability consultant, using energy modelling to replicate the performance of existing buildings. She quickly narrowed in on schools, and the unique needs of educational facilities and their occupants.
After three years in that role, BDP decided to take advantage of Ruan’s diverse educational background, and put her to work as a mechanical engineer, still with a focus on schools. Thanks to ample public funding for sustainable new schools, Ruan had her hands full coming up with innovative ways for UK academies to reach carbon targets, improve indoor air quality, and passively reduce overheating.
For Ryan, it always felt like a balancing act: finding solutions while also staying within budget.
“Unfortunately you can’t always have everything, you have to choose,” says Ruan. “I found that often the best path was to consider the needs and desires of the stakeholders — the kids, the builders, the administrators — and then pick the top three things that would be the most important to those stakeholders.”
It was during her seven years with BDM that Ruan first became aware of Passive House. Her first impressions?
“It’s a lot of work, a lot of things you don’t usually consider,” says Ruan. “It gets you thinking holistically about a project.”
She began working on projects actively incorporating Passive House principles, and ended up as the engineer for Harris Academy Sutton, the UK’s largest passive school, and by some accounts the biggest in all of Europe. Today, the project encompasses a 10,000m2 academy, and was awarded Building Magazine’s “Building Performance Award” in 2020.
Harris Academy Sutton, the first secondary school building in England to meet the Passivhaus energy performance standard.
For Ruan, it was a massive learning experience.
“It was a big lesson in collaboration — there is so much interaction between the work of the mechanical engineers and the architects, and then again, a lot of collaboration with the contractors and designers. You want to get them on board early, because once they see the actual design, it’s not like a normal building. You want everyone to be prepared for that,” says Ruan.
The experience left her a Passive House champion.
“I saw that it went beyond energy. It also considered comfort — no mold, the health and well-being of the students, providing an optimal learning environment,” says Ryan. And she was also impressed by the modelling, how over and over again the Passive House prediction model would turn out to be quite close to the real world functioning of the building.
It was a productive time, but after 12 years working in London, Ruan was ready for a change. Her boss at BDM helped her get an unusual interview with Integral, a mechanical engineering firm based in Victoria, BC.
“We had the interview in the Tate Modern,” says Ruan with a laugh. A principal with Integral was getting a tour of the London gallery as research for a design contract with the Vancouver Art Gallery. They did the interview walking around the museum, and at the end, he offered Ruan the job of project manager and mechanical engineer.
So she moved her life to the West Coast of Canada — and began working on a Passive House project even more ambitious than her award-winning work in the UK. That project? The University of Victoria’s new student residences, which included a large commercial kitchen.
The University of Victoria’s Cheko’nien House.
“We had to basically invent sophisticated mechanical systems to achieve high performance, especially for that kitchen,” says Ruan.
Heat recovery was one challenge. Ruan wanted to use the exhaust air from the kitchen to heat the buildings, but kitchen air is especially greasy.
“We had to talk to a lot of suppliers to find a bespoke multiple filtration system that could get that grease out and also complied with building inspector requirements,” says Ruan.
She also discovered that heat pump technology was not as advanced in North America as in Europe, and though they eventually found a supplier in Seattle, the product was so new that it took a fair amount of trial and error and bespoke design to make the system work for the scale of the residence.
“It was a lot of late nights,” says Ruan. But it wasn’t without its rewards. When the 2024 Passive House Canada Conference was held in Victoria, all the attendees actually stayed in the very residence that Ruan had engineered.
“That was very cool,” admits Ruan with a smile.
Looking forward, Ruan wants to bring together her various skill sets to generate more accurate modelling tools.
“I would really like to close the gap between mechanical engineering and energy modelling,” says Ruan.
The problem? “The energy modelling that is widely used at the moment does not reflect real world mechanical engineering,” says Ruan.
“My dream is to replicate a building’s performance exactly, and in real time, so that the model and the building can talk to each other,” says Ruan. “The idea is to create a digital twin.”
She says that while many developers aren’t necessarily interested in investing the kind of money in the data collection and sensors a digital twin project would require, she has found that BC Housing has been more receptive to the idea. As an NGO with an ambitious mandate, Ruan says they have been a solid partner.
“It is possible to accurately replicate a building’s performance in real time,” says Ruan. “We will get there.”
Today, Ruan is a Project Manager & Building Performance Analyst at reLoad Sustainable Design Inc. in Vancouver, and also works as an instructor for Passive House Canada. In both roles, she continues to marry her varied skills in pursuit of a more perfect model of performance prediction.
