JANUARY CSC H-N Chapter Dinner Meeting
CSC H-N Chapter Dinner Meeting by Peter Adams, P.Eng.
January 13, 2026 | By Elsa Cordero Boyden, Vice-Chair
Date: January 28th, 2026
Time: 5:30pm to 8:30pm January 28, 2026
Burlington Golf & Country Club, 422
North Shore Boulevard East, Burlington, ON L7T 1W9
REGISTER:
Peter Adams, P.Eng., is a Senior Building Science
Engineer at Stantec with over 30 years experience. As a mechanical engineering graduate, Peter has conducted work on hundreds of buildings with challenging occupancies, including forensic studies of building performance problems,
building envelope failures, and indoor environmental studies. Peter has taught
building science and related topics at the university level and remains active
on several industry technical committees.
Title: CSC H-N Chapter Dinner Meeting
Many heat-loss calculations and whole-building simulations still overlook thermal bridging or use simplified building-envelope details when calculating building heat transfer. This often neglects
significant contributions to heat loss, particularly at corners or envelope
connections. As wall systems, thankfully, become better insulated overall under
more stringent energy codes, the impact of thermal bridges represents a much larger share of the building's overall energy loss than it used to. Ignoring
them will result in overestimating thermal performance and designers will miss
the opportunity to mitigate problem details before it becomes impractical to do
so. In these situations, predicted energy performance often falls short of
reality with few options for real improvements once construction is done. The
ASHRAE 1365 research on thermal bridging was completed 15 years ago and
provided a simple means for the industry to make more accurate thermal
transmittance calculations for incorporation into whole building energy
simulations. This presentation will look at where we have come from in
addressing thermal bridges in building envelopes, how far we have made it along
the path to thermal truth, and where we need to go as a building industry. It
will also include an example of how the powerful online version of the Thermal
Bridging Guide can be used to get a far better prediction of building energy
loss.
