Positive Energy

Positive Energy is a specialty MEP engineering firm for custom residential architecture, working from Austin across roughly two dozen markets from California to Maine. It is registered with the Texas Board of Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors as firm F-17960, and three of its staff hold active Texas professional engineer licenses, all in the mechanical discipline. Alongside the engineering it runs a rationed building science consulting practice — commissioning, envelope consulting, diagnostics and forensics — which it says it takes on at its discretion rather than offering to every project.

The framing is the reason to pay attention. Their argument is that you do not live in a house so much as immersed in the air it contains, and the engineering follows from that: humidity as the governing constraint rather than temperature, ventilation sized to the ASHRAE 62.2 whole-building formula, a 40 to 60 percent relative humidity target band, and multiple points of filtration rather than one filter at the air handler. They are specific about the failure mode they see most often in a hot, humid climate — an ERV installed without a dehumidifier, which imports outdoor moisture and produces exactly the discomfort the ventilation was meant to solve.

They also take a position most of this market avoids, because the products in question sell well: avoid anything marketed on ozone, ions or ionizers of any polarity, photocatalytic oxidation, or UV. The reasoning is mechanistic — pollutants can be filtered out of air, but nothing added to air makes it healthier — and it follows the research consensus rather than the catalogue.

The project record is third-party confirmed where it counts. Texas Architect's own credit blocks list them as MEP engineer and commissioning consultant on the Theresa Passive House in Austin, which the Texas Society of Architects describes as the first project in the South to earn PHIUS Source Zero certification, and as both MEP engineer and building envelope consultant on Marfa Ranch — a dual scope the firm notes is unusual for an MEP practice. Both projects took 2022 Texas Society of Architects design awards. Two caveats belong alongside all of it. The firm publishes no aggregate performance data across its portfolio, a conspicuous absence for a practice this measurement-literate. And the one filtration figure it does publish, MERV 6 or better for ducted systems, sits well below the MERV 13 its own writing attributes to ASHRAE — low enough to be worth asking about before treating it as the house standard.