High-performance homes   (Page 3 of 3)

Why isn’t Canada spearheading the movement to build more sustainable homes?

By Monte Paulsen with photography by Grant Harder

Photo: Grant Harder

“You can’t make the inside tight enough,” says Durfeld. Indeed, the Rainbow Passive House duplex scored 0.4 ACH@50Pa on a preliminary blower-door test that I performed while the house was being finished in February. All its cracks add up to about 47 square centimetres — a hole the size of a business card.

The remaining components follow the Passive House model: triple-glazed windows; doors that latch snug against airtight seals; a 95 percent efficient heat-recovery ventilator that provides a complete air change every 90 minutes; and a ductless air-source heat pump to warm the house at nearly three times the efficiency of conventional electric baseboard heaters.

Durfeld says this duplex cost him about 15 percent more to build than a conventional house of similar size. In pricey Whistler, that will add about $40,000 to the construction cost of each 140-square-metre home. To help offset the cost, Durfeld installed simple bamboo floors and old-school Formica countertops. “You can always change the flooring or the countertops — you can upgrade those things later,” he says. “But you can’t easily change your windows. You can’t change your insulation.”

Ponder this: if a 15 percent bump in construction cost can lead to a 90 percent drop in home heating cost, what would it take to eliminate 100 percent of home energy consumption?

That’s the question Harmony House aims to answer. Harmony House is a net-zero home, meaning it’s designed to produce as much energy over the course of a year as it uses. The home in Burnaby, B.C., is one of 13 net-zero houses being built nationwide as part of the EQuilibrium Sustainable Housing Demonstration Initiative, sponsored by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.

Harmony House was designed by Chris Mattock, who has been creating high-performance houses since 1972. As he walks me through the light-filled home’s high-ceilinged living room, he makes it clear that the scientific foundation on which this home was built never left Canada. “Often, we look to Europe, but we actually did a lot of this stuff before they did,” says Mattock, who refers to the Passive House standard as “Canadian technologies that the Germans have repackaged and are now selling back to us.”

This is Mattock’s fifth net-zero project. It features R-40 walls, less than 1 ACH@50Pa, triple-glazed windows, a heat-recovery ventilator, a solar water heater and an efficient heat pump. There are also daylight sensors that turn lights off as the sun rises, a “green switch” that can power down all non-essential systems from a single control, a cooling tower to help moderate summer heat gain and 111 square metres of photovoltaic solar panels on the south face of the roof. During daylight hours, the photovoltaic panels generate more electricity than the house requires. The provincial power company functions like a battery: it buys excess power during the day and sells it back to the house overnight. If the system performs as expected, the house will generate enough additional electricity to provide owners Les and Linda Moncrieff with 5,000 kilometres a year worth of free driving in their small electric car.

The Moncrieffs, who moved in earlier this year, are now living as close to a zero-carbon lifestyle as possible in a Canadian city. And that’s the appeal of the fast-growing net-zero movement, which is projected to become a $1.3 trillion a year global market by 2035. Canada is already home to more than a dozen net-zero houses, including what may be the world’s first net-zero laneway home in nearby Vancouver. One step up from net zero is the Living Building Challenge, which certifies buildings that are not only net-zero energy but also netzero water and completely free of toxic materials. One of the first Living Buildings is an innovative child-care centre at Simon Fraser University, just across town from Harmony House.

Mattock tabulates the cost of net zero in two stages. First, he adds the cost of what he calls “net-zero ready,” which means everything but the photovoltaic system. The net-zero ready list bears a striking resemblance to Passive House practice: superinsulation, an airtight building envelope, triple-glazed windows, heat-recovery ventilation and a highefficiency heat pump. Mattock estimates that the net-zero ready list adds an 8 to 9 percent premium above standard construction cost, with the photovoltaic system adding another 10 percent.

“Energy efficiency is definitely where you start,” he says. “You’ve got to get the energy consumption down as much as possible before you start considering adding photovoltaic cells and stuff like that.”

Mattock, who co-authored manuals for the R-2000 standard, has witnessed first-hand Canada’s on-again, offagain interest in high-performance homes. “We are kind of making progress,” he says. “It’s maybe two steps forward, one step backward.” Oil prices drove public interest in the 1970s, but “now we’ve got another big driver: climate change. If we don’t deal with climate change, this could be the end of our species.”

All of which brings us back to the curious conundrum of Canadian home building: we invented high-performance homes, so why don’t we build them?

Home builders tend to blame home buyers (and their real estate brokers). Almost any builder can regale you with some tale of a customer who insisted on a $20,000 granite countertop, then balked at spending $2,000 for a more efficient furnace. At the same time, buyers blame builders for not putting more high-performance homes on the market. Buyers repeatedly tell pollsters they want green homes. Half of the 1,545 respondents to a survey conducted last year on behalf of Yahoo! Real Estate ranked energy efficiency ahead of perennial favourites such as “water views” and “mountain views” when describing their desired homes. Energy efficiency, as one developer is quoted saying on The Atlantic Cities website, has become “the new granite countertop.”

“People want a comfortable, healthy home that uses a minimum of energy,” affirms American green-building consultant and author Jerry Yudelson, who has been dubbed the “Godfather of Green” by Wired magazine. Put another way: people want homes without holes.

Yudelson says both builders and buyers would benefit from energy-efficiency labels on houses, building codes that require energy efficiency and a consistent federal government commitment to energy-efficiency programs (see sidebar). “We know how to do this,” says Yudelson. “We know how to do it cost-effectively. And we know that the public wants it.

“Somebody has to take a leadership role to sort this out,” continues Yudelson, who suggests that provincial governments are in the best position to do so. “I think it’s time for tough love. It’s time to take off the gloves and say, ‘You cannot build unless you meet these standards.’”

Monte Paulsen is a writer and certified energy adviser based in Vancouver. His last feature for Canadian Geographic, on the rail industry, was published in July/August 2011. Photographer Grant Harder also lives in Vancouver.