LEEP field trial video series
These videos show how the Local Energy Efficiency Partnerships (LEEP) initiative is helping builders drive innovation in their industry and accelerate the construction of affordable energy-efficient homes.
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LEEP Builder experience Overview / The builders’ perspective
See how master builders and energy advisors used NRCan’s LEEP collaborative, builder-driven process to determine which elements of their home they were going to innovate. Hear how the LEEP process helped them and the industry integrate innovations and technologies into their designs, enabling them to build better, energy-efficient homes.
Transcript
Einar Halbig: LEEP is a federal government program it stands for Local Energy Efficiency Partnership and basically, innovation through collaboration.
Nathan Stone: LEEP is a program that's put on by Natural Resources Canada.
Einar Halbig: It's done all over the country, different locations, builders and government and product suppliers all get together in a room and say ‘let's evaluate these different technologies.’
Bob Deeks: The LEEP process really helped us narrow our focus down to the five technologies that we felt were going to give us the biggest bang for our buck on the houses that we are currently in design with.
Brian Lowka: The cost benefit analysis is not just about saving a few dollars on your electric bill, it's about whole home comfort and about healthy living.
Jonathan Zerkee: With the LEEP program for me not only does it give me a market niche to work in. It allows me to separate myself from the average builder out there.
Brian Lowka: You don't have to build a different way. You can build just how you would normally build and then add on as much or as little products and techniques to make your house as energy efficient as you want to be.
Jonathan Zerkee: We're finding out what some of those new technologies are and we're learning about them and we're learning how to implement them.
Einar Halbig: What does it make sense to do or use for this particular climate.
Nathan Stone: We kind of focused on two or three key areas. Outside the skin of the house, the mechanical equipment, the heating and air breathing part of the house, and then as well as the energy production side.
Ryan Coleman: Practices are evolving and so the builder and architect and design community realize the business benefits of moving towards more high performance homes.
Jonathan Zerkee: I believe in the high performance home because we need to think about future generations and we need to think about energy efficiency and our carbon footprint on the earth.
Bob Deeks: LEEP is the opportunity for you to interact with your peer group and find out how you cost effectively deliver on that house of the future today and market that for your business.
LEEP New Westminster/Importance of energy modelling for R2000 micro-homes
Brian Lowka, Master Builder at Faserit Construction, explains the importance of energy modelling to predict and understand the performance of the two R-2000 micro-homes featured here.
Transcript
Brian Lowka: I started when I was 15, as a framer. Bought and sold my first house at 19. I wanted to build by better technique. My company’s Faserit construction, and I build energy efficient homes.
Einar Halbig: How does an energy adviser fit into the whole picture? We use energy modelling software tools to evaluate, predict and understand the performance of the house.
Brian Lowka: It’s almost like a report card for your home.
Einar Halbig: We do blower fan test to see how tight the building is.
Brian Lowka: The blower door test is instrumental in knowing how well your home will perform.
Einar Halbig: Probably in a house of this size, 20, 25 percent of the heat loss would be from just from air leakage.
Your house is about zero point five air changes per hour. Zero point five air changes per hour. That’s tight.
Brian Lowka: Come down to the basement.
Einar Halbig: We can use the thermal image camera tells us which part is warm, which part is hot.
Take a look at the thermal bridging around the window. Dark color indicates a cooler temperature. There’s a bit around the window framing.
Now we look at the wall you can see no thermal bridging through the insulation.
We pan down a little bit further, it’s almost exactly the same temperature difference. The wall is nice and warm, but so is the floor.
Brian Lowka: We didn’t know how well we were going to do. We knocked it out of the park.
We’re nailing up our cladding onto our inch-and-a-half XPS, which is R seven-and-a-half. This is our airtight barrier from the outside. Our air sealing from the outside wraps in which gives us our 100 percent air barrier keeping it warm and dry. We’re not framers and builders anymore, we’re scientists.
If you’re going to have an airtight home, you need to replenish your home with fresh air. This is your core, or the main component of the HRV. The fins go one way, allowing the hot air to go through, and then the fins on the opposite side wash through with cooler air.
The beauty about having an HRV, and having an airtight home, you don’t have cold spots in your home, you don’t have mold and mildew issues. It’s about whole home comfort and about healthy living.
Einar Halbig: What the builders are looking for is a recipe. How do I mix and match this material and that material that’s more cost effective for the builder to create a higher performing more energy efficient house.
Brian Lowka: I’ve purchased and developed two small homes, micro homes we would call them. We exceeded what we were planning on knowing that we have some of the tightest houses in Western Canada. I’m very proud of these buildings.
LEEP Agassiz/Energy Star with Continuous Rigid Insulation
Nathan Stone’s (Partner and Master Builder at Odessa Group) goal, is “to build 300 homes that are all better than the average code.” Through LEEP, his team added continuous rigid insulation to this ENERGY STAR home in Agassiz, B.C., which reduced air leakage and heat loss through the walls.
Transcript
Dave Douglas: Hey I’m Dave Douglas and I am a very proud owner of an energy Star plus home.
Einar Halbig: This house is Energuide 87. This is a house that’s approximately 30 to 40 percent more energy efficient than if it were built just to code minimum.
Nathan Stone: We build masterplan communities, so our goal is to build 300 homes that are all better than the average code. You know we're 20 percent more efficient, We're not quite net zero but we've done it across a whole subdivision. Through the LEEP program we looked at adding in some continuous rigid insulation and wrapping the whole home with, right over top of the plywood underneath the siding.
Einar Halbig: It’s adding about 35 percent R-value to the value of the walls.
Nathan Stone: This was equal to our best result that we've had in the subdivision. You know at one point nine air changes per hour.
Dave Douglas: Here I am now in a super insulated super sealed house. That's like being in a cocoon, right.
Einar Halbig: So this is the air source heat pump. The air source heat pump is technology we looked at in the LEEP forum in terms of using less energy to heat the inside of the house. This is one of the most energy efficient ways we can use electricity to pull heat energy out of the outside air to heat the house.
Let's take a look at the mechanical room of the house. The mechanical room is the heart and lungs of the house. You've got the indoor coil connected to the outdoor heat pump. This is bringing the heat energy into and distributing it to the forced air ductwork. Over here you've got the heat recovery ventilator.
Dave Douglas: The HRV system it is constantly refreshing the air as it's capturing the heat from the exhaust air.
Einar Halbig: You got the ventilation system over here, the lungs of the house. And you've got the space heating system over here.
Dave Douglas: You don't have to worry about fresh air here.
Nathan Stone: With this home we put on photovoltaic solar panels.
Dave Douglas: Six o'clock in the morning the first rays of sun hits those panels, you can see the little blue line on the power graph going up. My hydro bills, you know what, I win every time the sun comes up in the morning.
Nathan Stone: Dave our homeowner uses his iPad app for his solar panels. He gets to see real-time what his solar panels are doing. Hey how much did we generate this year versus last year. A peak day yesterday you can boil it down so you know what this was actually running probably almost the whole house and we may have been selling power back to BC Hydro.
Dave Douglas: Exactly. Anytime you want you can go check the power meter and see how much you've exported.
Nathan Stone: When you're generating power to hydro, you know our overall energy usage is going to be reduced drastically.
Dave Douglas: Twenty-five-dollar bill can't beat that.
Nathan Stone: You know that money you've invested in something like solar panels to see it starting to pay back you know day after day by the power they are generating really kind of a cool experience.
Einar Halbig: 2032 they're expecting their code will require net zero energy houses.
Nathan Stone: Net zero homes being that they produce as much clean energy throughout a period of a year as they consume.
Einar Halbig: If you could have a subdivision of net zero energy houses, it does make a big difference.
Dave Douglas: Glad to see that somehow, I may have influenced the direction of energy efficiency in this subdivision
LEEP Chilliwack/R2000 home with focus on ventilation
Jonathan Zerkee, Master Builder and President of Sonbuilt Homes, builds high-performance homes because he “cares about our environment and the living environment of the individual person.” This video focuses on clean air (the lungs of the house) at an R2000 certified Chilliwack, B.C. home.
Transcript
Will Barrow: I’m Will Barrow. My family and I, we built a high performance home.
Jonathan Zerkee: I built high performance homes because I care about our environment and I care about the living environment of the individual person.
Will Barrow: I have allergies and my kids will probably have allergies too; so we wanted to have clean air.
Jonathan Zerkee: So when we build a home that’s really airtight, we need to make sure that we’re changing that air out to keep it fresh.
This is the lungs of the house. It’s the fresh air management system. The way this system works is it takes that warm stale air that’s inside your home and it uses the energy that you paid for to heat the cool fresh air that is coming in. As it does that process, it’s recovering the energy.
Will Barrow: In our old house, we were paying about 200 dollars a month. Now we’re about 60 dollars a month.
Jonathan Zerkee: What makes this home energy efficient is the very airtight building envelope.
Will Barrow: This winter, power went out. It was like minus two. It was snowing. I had ice hockey out on my pond there. We set our home to about 18 degrees Celsius. After four days of no power, it was 17 degrees. The house is retaining its energy.
Jonathan Zerkee: This is at 30,000 BTU gas furnace in a 4,100 square foot home. This piece of equipment is right-size for this home.
Will Barrow: We went low cost on electricity, dual with gas and electricity. We’re saving a lot of money.
Jonathan Zerkee: The homeowner wanted to have floor to ceiling windows in their two story great room.
Will Barrow: But from an energy efficiency standpoint you’re not going to have that.
Jonathan Zerkee: By creating the roofline you see in between the two stories there, we actually offered a little bit of shading that would happen in the summer. In the fall and winter months, when the sun is lower, we’re going to take in some of that solar heat gain which is going to be important to help heat the home.
Here we have the thermostat which controls the home comfort system. It allows you to make very simple changes to temperature relative humidity and the fresh air management system which is the HRV.
Our standard home is based around the Natural Resources Canada R2000 program.
Will Barrow: We wanted to build our dream home and we wanted to build high performance energy efficient home.
Jonathan Zerkee: Now the budget they initially started with was a little bit low. We start with the building envelope.
Will Barrow: And then you’re like okay we could add on, and make it even more efficient afterwards.
Jonathan Zerkee: We found a way to balance the energy efficiency side with the family’s budget.
Will Barrow: The house is awesome Jonathan. We love it. The LED lights, the tankless water system; it’s been wonderful. We’ve been able to maintain the temperature that we want, we can have the fireplace on and no overheating. The air is wonderful.
Jonathan Zerkee: Good, I’m glad to hear that. It certainly is a beautiful view out the windows here into the field.
LEEP Squamish/Right-sized mechanicals
Bob Deeks, Owner and Master Builder of RDC Fine Homes, shares the importance of right-sized mechanical systems. His team built two energy-efficient homes with the help of an energy advisor and HVAC designer.
Transcript
Garth Campbell: This is my home, this is my parents’ home; and they’re both high efficiency houses.
Bob Deeks: We built two houses side by side, one for the kids who are 50 and one for their parents that we’re in right now.
This home is different because it’s an Energuide 85 home. It would be one of the most sustainably built energy efficient houses built in Canada today.
Garth Campbell: For the high efficiency home, the envelope is critical. The heating system, the air exchange system. Door seals triple glazed windows all combined to make it such an incredibly comfortable perfect house to be in.
Bob Deeks: As we design the house, one of the most important members of the team is your energy adviser.
Ryan Coleman: A home is the biggest asset that you’re most likely going to own in your entire life, so you want to make sure that that asset is performing to the best that it is capable of. So achieving a well operating system starts with doing room by room load calculations.
Bob Deeks: Measuring every room, measuring the volumes, measuring the insulation the windows. If we bring in energy adviser and it’s like measuring something twice and cutting it once.
The vast majority of houses today, when the mechanical contractor looks to come in to size the mechanical system, tells you… like that … uh, you know, 30,000, 70,000, 100,000 BTUs.
Ryan Coleman: It’s not rule of thumb. It’s not, “Hey I’ve got a certain size house so it needs a certain size system”. You need to be more sophisticated than that.
Bob Deeks: Here we’ve got the heart of this system isn’t this an amazing furnace. You know it’s so small and compact. When we first engaged with our HVAC contractor they wanted to put a 70,000 BTU furnace in here. Once we did the mechanical design with you guys, and we understood exactly what our heat loss was, we’ve ended up with a 30,000 BTU unit.
Ryan Coleman: And then I guess, when you look at the actual system itself, we’ve got a very high performance efficiency rating at 95. It’s obviously Energy Star certified. Fits really well into this mechanical Room.
Bob Deeks: And you know that’s one of the biggest challenges we’ve had with our architects is they always want to shrink our mechanical room. We finally have a furnace here that fits in to a nice compact space.
Ryan Coleman: So a properly sized system delivering its operating intent sounds like a good idea to me.
Bob Deeks: And an Energy Star certification to meet our performance goals.
Ryan Coleman: Things like HOT2000 and the EnerGuide rating system, it’s really a foundational element to all high performance homes in Canada.
Bob Deeks: One of the amazing things about this home is the way it’s designed is that the floors feel warm. Most people walking into the house would actually think that we had heated floors.
Ryan Coleman: People don’t really think about that when they when they think about forced air. They think about hydronic. I loved when the homeowner was talking about that actual level of level of comfort was achieved in the house. It’s fantastic.
Bob Deeks: You know, the concept was that it would blow the air across the room and create that even thermal comfort.
So everybody wants to know what’s the payback on my energy efficiency house. What you get for that extra investment is you get a healthy environment for your family; a place that’s comfortable warm in winter, cool in summer.
Garth Campbell: Being satisfied and happy where you are, it’s the best value for the dollar. It’s all about quality of life.
Bob Deeks: It’s an amazing view isn’t it. It’s unbelievable. You know, these two lots side by side, view of the wilderness in this urban setting here.
Garth Campbell: Couldn’t have workedout better.
LEEP Thompson Cariboo Region/Advanced Mechanical Technologies with Focus on the Envelope
This video highlights the Alkali Lake Health & Wellness Centre, which received a Net Zero Energy Ready label from the Canadian Home Builders’ Association (CHBA). This is the first such project in a First Nations community and in a northern climate to achieve this recognition. The Esk’etemc First Nation, in partnership with health authorities, opened this five-bed facility to provide indigenous residents of the Thompson Cariboo region with culturally appropriate recovery services. LEEP introduced Sam Zirnhelt, owner of Zirnhelt Timber Frames, to technologies and experts he chose to work with on this project.
Transcript
Charlene Belleau: Cutting the ribbon it’s like okay we’re here, it’s happened. It’s real. You know we’re standing in the facility. A lot of the timbers that are a part of this building come from our land. Come from within the Esk’etemc Nation.
Sam Zirnhelt: Today was really a special day. It was great to see the different generations and also just how many people came from different communities, the pride felt there from the community members and some of the friendships we’re starting to develop there seem to really come together today. It was very enjoyable.
Eric DenOuden: What intrigues me is the way it was constructed to be a very energy efficient structure and to be net zero ready.
Sam Zirnhelt: Once we started down the design path and realized hey, this is going to be a really cool building that’s going to be here for a couple of hundred years the way we’ve built it. What else can we do to make it better?
That’s where we got some interest from Natural Resources Canada and their LEEP program as well as BC Hydro and BC Housing.
Joe Hart: To have something like this that’s finished and monitored and something that we can look at and learn from is just a huge step.
Sam Zirnhelt: The way the building is designed unlike traditional timber frame there are no protrusions through the envelope so the building is extremely airtight. It’s just under 0.5 air chambers per hours. The primary focus for achieving net zero is to upgrade the envelope. We wanted to take it significantly further. We needed an overall minimum of 60% reduction in energy usage.
Eric DenOuden: We’re celebrating something. It’s the first building like this in northern BC and also it’s a first net zero building for the First Nations people. So it’s a first in a couple of ways and I think we’re here to show it off and to brag about it throughout Canada.
Sam Zirnhelt: During the design process where the modeling, like using HOT2000 for example comes in. It starts to tell you once you’ve improved the envelope you can really start to refine where your money is best spent.
Some of the other elements that were important were triple glazed windows as well as a super insulated foundation and under slab insulation.
Then once you get into the mechanical system it’s what level of efficiency you require in the HRV, what do we gain from installing heat pumps.
We’ve heavily emphasized in the last ten years on prefabrication. I think it’s the way to go. It allows us to keep people working in the shop in a controlled environment, reduce waste and really perfect the product itself more than we are able to with site building. It’s a meaningful project. It’s worth getting excited about. It’s worth putting extra effort into.
Charlene Belleau: It’s just a beautiful building. I can’t say enough about what we can do in a space like this.
Eric DenOuden: It’s the way of the future. We’ve come a long way in new homes. This is the leading technology that we’re using, a very energy efficient home, easy on our environment.
LEEP Integrated Design
Darren Witt, Owner, Bercum Builders, energy advisors, consultants, and others from across British Columbia discuss the importance of an integrated design process, collaboration and consulting industry professionals early in the planning process to build high performance homes.
Transcript
Darren Witt: Getting your team together early from the start is critical. There is just no other way to do it.
Rob Pope: There’s a whole discovery process. We ask a lot of questions. We want to know no just what’s on the plans, but what’s intended in the minds of the clients.
Shay Bulmer: Early planning, the sooner you can be focused on the exact target, the better.
Beau Jackson: Details from the beginning really matter. If you don’t do it early enough, you’re really shooting yourself in the foot. You need to really work with the professionals like an energy advisor, a proper mechanical engineer or designer.
Alison Conroy: Energy advisors use computer modelling software developed by Natural Resources Canada, and it allows them to look at all the components that go into a house that have to do with energy efficiency.
Rob Croome: The role of the energy advisor would be like that of a copilot. Inform the builder if we’re on the targets, or are we going to meet the targets, where best for the builder to put the money to save those extra gigajoules.
Gilles Lesage: Well with the LEEP initiative we were tasked to work with the builders with their house plans, and to basically see what kind of targets we were looking to achieve and to help get to those targets. We can make changes at the design stage, basically working with the designers, builders, developers. We can anticipate, in a way, he expected performance of the house even before it gets approved for a building permit. We basically are able to gauge the construction process all the way through and actually quantify the decisions that were made with insulation, mechanical systems.
Shay Bulmer: An energy advisor is going to help you hit the mark and it’s going to be more efficient in the long run if you don’t have to go backwards to address something that could have been more well thought out or better planned in the beginning, you are going to save money.
Rob Pope: The idea that integrated design that includes mechanical is an extra line item in the budget is a misconception. If you really think about it, that cost is somewhere in the project. You bring it upfront, you own it, you control it. The truth is, down the road, during the construction to completion, you’re going to save money.
Darren Witt: It’s all in the details and then, trying to pass some of those details on from crew to crew to crew so that everybody buys into the entire program.
Nicholas Hill: It does make a considerable amount of education to get the professionals and the trades to understand a different way to build. There is different sequencing, different technologies, it’s kind of outside the box thinking and it’s important to take the time to find the right team of professionals and trades and make sure they understand what you’re trying to achieve. Get them on early and get them involved in the process, so they take ownership in the project.
Jody Tindill: Our trades, our energy advisor, everybody is a partner in this, they all understand what we’re trying to achieve. We educate them along the way. We show them why we have asked them to do something a certain way. Once they do it, and they’re consistent, the next homes are easier and easier and it gets more efficient, and they’ll use that as best practice going forward.
Darren Witt: Get it all done at the start. Allow yourself enough time with your drawings and your design teams, and just to be able to plan through that entire process before you even put a shovel in the ground.
LEEP Penticton
Industry professionals share their insights on the importance of an integrated design process to create high-performance buildings. This daycare in Penticton, has achieved BC Energy Step Code Part 9 Step 5 and is Passive House certified. Hear from Nicholas Hill, President, Ritchie Contracting & Design Ltd, Chris Allen, Project Architect, Landform Architecture Ltd and Rob Pope, Senior Consultant, Ecolighten Energy Solutions.
Transcript
Chris Allen: So it’s a very simple concept. We turned the building to the south, put most of our windows on the south side. The building is super insulated.
Nicholas Hill: So we achieved, you know, a very unique wall system, very air tight construction in a short amount of time through collaborating with different professionals. We relied heavily on the architectural firm, my own knowledge, the trades, and especially the passive house consultants, both the designer and the certifier. The exterior walls are a double framed two by four wall with dense packed cellulose inside. We did air controlling barriers on both the exterior and the interior for redundancy. And then it’s a wood truss roof, and that’s again, a dense packed cellulose for insulation. So you know, we’re upwards of anywhere between R60 to R80 in the different wall assemblies.
Chris Allen: It was the most airtight building that’s been measure in the Okanagan. We were very careful in taping up the assembly and making sure that there was no air leakage against the windows or in any locations.
Nicholas Hill: You can see here the windows are placed in the middle. The most efficient place to put the window is in the middle of the wall assembly. The windows themselves are a triple glazed window, and we specifically change the solar heat gain coefficients and U values depending on the orientation. There is what’s called a lantern which is a natural passive ventilation, so it’s facing north, and all the windows are on electronic openers. So what the people operating the building do in the summer months, when it’s really hot, at night they’ll open up all the lower windows around the perimeter, and they’ll open up these and get natural passive ventilation which will cool the building overnight.
Sherry O’Connor: We certainly like to optimize that feature where we can open the windows, bring in the fresh air, especially in the spring and the fall when the temperature can be so different from morning to afternoon.
Rob Pope: The tighter you build your house the more high performance that house is, the more dependent that home becomes on a mechanical system. It doesn’t matter if it’s a simple little box that’s being built on a budget or a very high performance home. Either way it benefits from an integrated design process.
Nicholas Hill: Well, for one, you’re not going to get significant temperature fluctuations. It’s going to have a stable, level, comfortable temperature. The acoustics are phenomenal. For the owners the utility bills will be low.
Chris Allen:Essentially it establishes a very low threshold for how much energy a building can use. It’s about a quarter of what a typical building would use. You know in order to do a building like this you need to have a committed client and in this case Okanagan College is very committed to showcasing sustainability.
Rob St. Onge: We want to build green buildings because we have a number of students coming through here in a number of different trades programs, business programs and we need them to be exposed to the latest and greatest engineering and construction technologies because they’re going to be out there in the workforce, and we want to prepare them for that.
Nicholas Hill: The building preforms phenomenally well, and you know, it’s a very comfortable home, uses a little amount of energy. One of the most important things you learn in the LEEP field trials is don’t underestimate the time it takes to properly and thoroughly plan your strategy. You know, what technology you’re going to use, whether it’s certain mechanical systems, wall systems. Research them thoroughly, understand the risk, the pros, the cons, and really truly understanding that you have the resource network to execute it.
LEEP Regional Considerations in high performance housing
Energy advisors, builders, and other industry professionals share insights on how to address regional climate and market considerations. From air-tightness to insulation, hear about the benefits of working with energy advisors and other experts to build high performance homes, no matter where you live.
Transcript
Gilles Lesage: With NetZero, we are looking at advanced technologies for one, for ventilation, heating, cooling, and hot water. We’re also looking for more well though out walls and ceilings and foundations. Not to mention, taking advantage of certain things like sun exposure and shading, all those things.
Darren Witt: The higher end homes are a little bit more difficult to hit those targets because everybody wants more glass, and the more glass you have, the harder it is to hit your goals. Especially here in the Okanagan where we get that vast range of temperatures from, you know, minus twenty five degrees C to plus thirty eight degrees C. There is not a lot of climates that do that.
Chris Allen: What’s really great about the south Okanagan is we have long shoulder seasons on either side where the weather is quite pleasant, and so for a building like this, we have a passive mode where the building essentially requires no heating or cooling systems.
Joe Hart: We have a market in Quesnel that is the good part of it is that housing is inexpensive here compared to the rest of the province, but from a builder standpoint, it also means we have to produce homes that are not as expensive. And so, I was trying to see how far I could go and still keep it within the limits of what people would do here.
Nicholas Hill: And therefore develop the most cost-effective strategy possible for the highest level of performance, and that requires time.
Beau Jackson:Well, the weather is a factor up here in the North. It is tough to build to a Net zero energy ready. You really have to think about what’s important.
Shay Bulmer: Every little hole in the house matters.
Rod Croome:So, the mid-construction blower door gives us an opportunity to address any areas of leakage before the house is finished, where it is more difficult to do so.
Beau Jackson: An energy advisor that certainly lives in this region and knows the region and knows the builders that are trying to do these things can certainly give you a bit of his opinion on that is the best way to go about things.
Joe Hart: We’re really limited by what companies are making available to us.
Rob Pope: The challenge in very cold climates is lining up the kinds of equipment that can best do the job with the availability of the equipment for those regions. So you have to balance between locally available product and local expertise. Anything you can design, design it ahead of time. Don’t wait for construction to figure it out then. It just makes sense right?
Shay Bulmer: So this building is Net Zero Ready Certified. It is performing really well, especially in our colder weather in the winter. It’s just comfortable in here.
Joe Hart: We’ve been in the house now for one year, and this summer at our hottest temperature, which was in the low thirties, our house went up in temperature about two degrees. And in the winter time it was minus twenty seven outside and our house hadn’t gotten cool enough yet for the furnace to come on, so I’d say it works quite well.
Shay Bulmer: When we hit the mark, and they’re happy with their home, at the end of it, it’s a good feeling.
LEEP Quesnel
Joe Hart, President, Icon Homes Ltd. shares his lessons learned on building an affordable high-performance home while incorporating the desired features to create maximum comfort. Joe’s bungalow is built to BC Energy Step Code for Part 9 Step 4 with an energy rating of 83 GJ/year.
Transcript
Joe Hart:I enjoy building. As we go further down the path with new building science and technologies, I find it more and more interesting. My wife and I had decided to build this home a couple of years ago, and I had an opportunity to join the LEEP program, where I found out the potential of where we could go with a house. It’s twofold. They work with you to try and help you decide what you want to do, and then they provide as much guidance as possible to help you through the process.
Alison Conroy: Energy advisors work with builders on high performance homes and in programs like LEEP to improve the energy efficiency of the buildings through the use of a computer modelling program and on-site verification and testing. An energy advisor actually looks at all the components of a home that either contribute to the heat loss or heat gain and energy consumption and production of a home. So it’ll be things like the building envelope insulation that you might have in your walls, your ceilings, your floors, or foundation, the windows and doors, your heating and mechanical systems, so it has a greater long term impact on efficiency of the building.
Jody Tindill: So taking the next step through LEEP, we want to make sure that we are building the best possible standard without going overboard.
Joe Hart:This is a mock-up of the wall that we have in our house. It’s got the double 2x4 wall with an airspace insulation on the outside is EPS and our windows are mounted on that and then sealed to the EPS. And then on the inside we have ridged insulation that’s continuous right through, including on the ceiling.
Rod Croome: There seems to be an acceptance of added insulation up here because, you know, we are so cold. Tests like the blower door test, like here today we’re doing a mid-construction blower door. So, what that does is help to see if we’re on track. So the mid-construction blower door gives us an opportunity to address any areas of leakage before the house is finished where it is more difficult to do so.
Joe Hart:One of the nice features of this house is the wide windowsills. My wife wanted a window seat. It took some time to figure out how best to do that without interrupting the envelope that we had produced on the rest of the house. So this is the master bedroom and this is the window seat. We were able to ring it to the inside of the house instead of bumping it out like most window seats are. With a nice big window, it still is a lovely place to sit. This building performs really well in my opinion. We’ve been in the house now for one year, and this summer at our hottest temperature, which was in the low thirties, our house went up about two degrees. You’re just not uncomfortable at any time. It never overheats, you don’t get cold spots anywhere. It’s just a constant, comfortable temperature all the time. We were really interested to see just how far we could take this. I had heard about net zero houses, but I didn’t really fully understand even what that meant, and so I was just intrigued to see what we could do. I thought it would be an invaluable tool to say here’s what we can do, and here’s what it’ll be like.
And now that we have gone further down this path and learn from this experience, we are actually in the process of starting our first net zero home for a customer.
LEEP Fort St. James
Shay Bulmer and Beau Jackson owners of Northern Homecraft Ltd. discuss the importance of working with an energy advisor and using a good mechanical design to build high performance homes. The home featured in Fort St. James is a CHBA Qualified Net Zero Ready Home and has achieved BC Energy Step Code for Part 9 Step 4.
Transcript
Shay Bulmer:We realised that we would actually exceed the Energy Star level, and then it just became this thing we couldn’t stop thinking about, like this challenge. What would we have to do, or could we do, to hit that Net Zero value.
Nancy Schlamp: When we talked about building a home, we were only going to build once, and we just wanted it to be our home. Something that would really be impressive yet cost-effective.
Shay Bulmer: As a custom home builder, we’re not a spec builder, we’re not a development company, so what we build is very reliant on the client that we get. These folks were interested in energy efficiency already. So when the LEEP opportunity came along, we were happy to take part in that. We feel like we were very fortunate to get to. Everything kind of came together.
Beau Jackson:We learned that you have to really push on every little detail, and you really have to strive to hit it exactly on the head. You need to work with the professionals like an energy advisor and proper mechanical engineer or designer.
Shay Bulmer: Insulation on the exterior, and then also a rain screen, and then your siding, and then your trims. You want to make sure your team is on top of it. So, looking at all those details throughout construction was certainly another key point to success for us. We learned a lot about mechanical design throughout the LEEP process. The original mechanical system that we had sized by the supplier was about three times as big as it needed to be.
Rob Pope:They managed to build a house with extremely low air changes so it doesn’t leak, with really good insulation. Consequently, we needed a very small mechanical system. What they wanted was in-floor radiant heat.
Shay Bulmer:This is our mechanical closet. This houses our high efficiency gas boiler here. It’s an in-floor radiant heat system. This is our ERV here, you can hear it going right now, it’s breathing for the home. All the loops begin and end here, and as a result, this space could be a little warmer. So this actually takes the ambient temperature and compresses it and uses that process to heat your hot water. So it’s very efficient. It produces a little bit of cool air. Those two things together actually complement each other really well.
Rob Pope:That’s our mechanical system. It’s basically keeping the comfort level where it needs to be. Otherwise, it would be too cold, too hot, too stale, too unhealthy. A mechanical system is vital. It’s very important. It’s not an add-on.
Shay Bulmer:So this building is Net Zero Ready Certified.
Nancy Schlamp:We came from a mobile home. The cost of heating that is ten times what I’m paying now. You can’t beat having an energy efficient home when it comes to dollars and your savings in the long run.
Shay Bulmer:It is performing really well, especially in our colder weather in the winter. It’s just comfortable in here. The air feels nice to breath. It’s fresh.
Rob Pope:It’s got a really good system partly because they were able to accommodate it with the structure.
Shay Bulmer:They’re benefiting both on the health aspect of living in a home like this as well as the reduce cost of operation, which always feels good. When we hit the mark, and they’re happy with their home, at the end of it, it’s a good feeling. This is the way a house should be built. These are the types of houses we want to build, and we’re just going to aggressively pursue that now.
More about the LEEP field trial video series
BC Housing led the development of this video series. The videos linked above are available on their website via the following links:
BC Housing has also developed additional, related videos, which are available on BC Housing’s website.
Find out more about LEEP
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