House build – Page 2 – Blue Heron EcoHaus

The trials and tribulations of concrete

Posted on June 12, 2016June 12, 2016 by kent

The last of the work on the house was a concrete retaining wall and front step/pad and a side door pad. I can’t tell you how excited I was to be done with contractors (and spending 1000s of dollars). One of my friends, Dan, who had worked for a large concrete contractor in town had recently started his own company, called Old North Concreteworks. When he’d told me about this over the last winter – I said, “Dude! Why didn’t you start your company last year?!” With all of the headaches we’d had with the concrete before during the build it would have been so nice to have someone with a such an experienced and trustworthy knowledge of concrete.

Nonetheless we, being one of his first contracts, would be able to get the pads poured early as soon as the ground had dried and thawed. Retaining walls are tricky and we’d had a lot of settling over the wintertime. But around the area of the retaining wall we had watered and backfilled last year to try and expedite the settling. It seemed that we’d been successful in this regard as the land had really not dropped at all there over the winter. For the retaining wall, Dan first poured a 6” footing extending 6’ perpendicular to the house with the retaining wall form built on top. He and I then backfilled to the form with dirt and crushed rock (tamping down at each bucket load) to bring this up to the point where they would be able to join an 8’x6’ pad to the top of the retaining wall – essentially creating an upside down ‘L’.

The side door pad would be simpler – 4’x7’ and 4” thick.

A few days before the planned pour date, he sent me two different options for finishing the concrete edge:

grosse-construction-services-portfolio-149

“Hmmm… Neither,” I told him.

Do this:

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Yup, that’s what I want, no edge, just poured.” If you’ve read this blog for anytime, you may realize by now that Darcie and I like things that other people don’t normally do – at least not around here. Dan suggested a “mag finish” in which he lightly brushed the top of the concrete in a swirled, random way to get some grit to the top so it would not be slippery.

The day of the pour came and when we got home wouldn’t you know, we had a two pads and a retaining wall poured! Success.

I messaged Dan to see how the day went. “OK I love the top,” he said. Excellent, I thought, I would like to collect a royalty fee now every time you use this. “But…” he said, it was essentially the worst day of his life otherwise. The concrete truck they’d ordered broke down on the way out to our house. We are 30 minutes away from the city and it was a very hot day – that’s not a good combination for concrete. The concrete was starting to set as they poured it. Fortunately they were able to get it in place, not being a lot of concrete really – but our very sandy soil didn’t hold the retaining wall forms very well, despite being heavily reinforced, and the wall had bowed. He was not happy about this and insisted that he would fix it, suggesting that he rent a large concrete grinder to take out the bow later.

I really wasn’t surprised to hear that they’d had issues. It always seems to be that way with our place… Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

For Dan though, the day only got worse. After finishing our place they had to rush over to my neighbor’s house a ½ mile away to pour a sidewalk along his garage and house. The concrete truck broke down again! And he poured the hardest concrete of his life, he said. He had to use all of his might to smooth and level it. In the process and stress of it all, the concrete had started to stick and cure to his legs. After they’d gotten it all down and finished – he attempted to pull the concrete off of himself, but with that came a lot of his skin. Yucky.

A few days later Dan returned and ground the bowed section out, exposing the aggregate in a very interesting and dramatic fashion, which I was pleasantly surprised with. As has seemed to have been the way with our house too – right to the bitter end – many of the seeming mess-ups or frustrations end up turning out creative and interesting solutions. I would not have asked for the wall to be finished the way it was, but pleasingly, I’m happier with it then I would have been had it all worked out just as planned.

That’s a big deck!

Posted on May 23, 2016May 23, 2016 by kent

January to March had been fairly relaxing. The previous year and a half had been incredibly busy/hectic/stressful with planning and building the house and we thoroughly enjoyed our hibernation time in the new house over the winter. But now that Spring has sprung itself we were looking forward to getting outside and crossing a few things off of our to-do list.

I have to continually remind myself to: “Beware of the barrenness of a busy life.” -Socrates

Although we are going to be getting more projects done, we’re also trying to take things easy and be a little gentler on ourselves. There is really no rush or pressure to do anything at any specific time.

Still, the Spring/Summer To-Do list includes (but not limited to): backfill, grade, deck, plant grass seed, build garden fence, prep garden, plant garden, concrete patio, retaining wall, walkway, driveway, irrigation, dog run, general yard clean up, plant trees… I’m sure there’s more.

One of the first priorities was to get the deck built (it would make all of those other projects so much better by being about to recover on the deck after a hard days work). We elected to have our framing contractors come back to do it as soon as the snow and land was dry enough to start. The weekend before we had to backfill around the house as it had settled a lot over the winter. The wooden stairs we’d been using dropped at least 12″. And as the snow melted we had a mini waterfall along the side of the house.

It was gruelling and dirty work backfilling, shovelling, grading and tamping. We were fortunate enough to have our neighbour (best neighbour ever) offer to bring his payloader tractor over to help us out. We must have moved 20 yards of dirt that day.

We’d designed a BIG deck to take up most of the south side of the house with a size of 16’x40′ (about half the size of the house!).

I’d really wanted to have the deck clad in cedar, but the cost was absurd – exactly double the cost of treated lumber. I’m not a huge fan of treated lumber, but for 50% the cost, I can learn to live with it. Besides we would not be staining the cedar had we done it, so in 5-10 years treated and cedar look nearly the same – a light grayish colour.

The Monday after completing the backfilling the builders were able to come out. And by Tuesday evening, Darcie and I were having dinner on the new deck.

As we sat there on an unusually warm April evening, eating our dinner with our legs dangling off of the side of the new deck, drinking wine and looking out over the river, a bald eagle soared over our heads and into the distance. Both of us stopped and looked at each other, “Could this moment get any better?”

Musings on Passive House Standards and the Costs of New Home Construction, Part 3

Posted on April 2, 2016April 2, 2016 by kent

If you have not yet read my posts (rants) in Part 1 and Part 2, maybe check those out first.

Have you heard of the Pareto Rule before? It’s more commonly known as the 80/20 Rule. It says that for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

I think that Passive House (PH) follows this rule to a T. It has certainly been our experience in building an extremely energy efficient home and following the principles of PH. I believe that 80% of the benefits of PH come from about 20% of the cost and effort (from Part 1 of these posts, I noted that our financial cost was about 8% more than a standard house construction). Whereas to get that last 20% to the hit the PH certified requirements, you’re going to have to spend 80% more… At least this was my assumption.

Still being the curious person I am and because I kept getting asked about it… I just had to know. How close does our house come to the PH standard?

The only way to find out would be to either track the house over the next year or to have someone run the house through the Passive House Planning Package software (PHPP) to predict our values.

As you may recall, we were never pursing PH certification, right from the beginning we were told the cost-effectiveness (80/20 rule) was just not there. Maybe if there was some incentive or rebate for going full-out, one could justify it. We were also told that there was no need to use the PHPP as it was too expensive. This latter statement however is simply not correct.

I decided to ask around and see who could put our house through the PHPP for us. Or at least get a price quote for it. Maybe it would be too costly and so I wouldn’t bother if it was. After a few emails, I was eventually referred to a very well-respected PH consultant out of Alberta – Stuart Fix at ReNu Building Science. I sent my email explaining that we’d already built the house and so really can’t change anything now, but due to curiosity I was wondering if he could run the house through the software. No problem he said. The price we were given was entirely reasonable and was actually less than what we had paid to run the house through the inferior HOT2000 software prior to building. Crap!

After a couple weeks we received the results, not surprisingly: we weren’t a Passive House. But the results on the various aspects of the house were very interesting and lead to some interesting points of discussion.

Based the three criteria for PH certification, recall:

Space Heat Demand: max. 15 kWh/m2a OR Heating load max. 10 W/m2
Pressurization Test Result @ 50 Pa: max. 0.6 ACH
Total Primary Energy Demand: max. 120 kWh/m2a

Our results were as follows:

Space Heat Demand: 37 kWh/m2a
Heating load: 22 kWh/m2a
Pressurization test result (assumed 0.6 ACH, prior to testing)
Total Primary Energy Demand: 116 kWh/m2a

So, you can see that the only criteria we met was the Total Primary Energy Demand. The blower door test we did later came back at 0.72 ACH (we’d run the software assuming 0.6 ACH as a target). As a result of the actual pressurization value, this would correspondingly increase the other values, but, for argument’s sake, let’s simply say that the Total Primary Energy Demand we either met, or were very close to meeting, while for the Heat Demand and Heat Load, we were WAY above the German PH maximum values.

I won’t reiterate why this makes sense given the climatic and heating requirement differences of the Canadian prairies versus Germany (see Part 2). But I had to ask the PH consultant:

“If we were still in the planning stages of the house, what would be your recommendations to try and reduce these two values (Space heating demand and heating load)? Not that we would change anything at this point, but I’d be curious as to how we would have gotten those values lower – and if it would have been at all possible with our type of house and in our climate to feasibly meet the PH requirements as stated?”

The ways to reduce the heating load & demand are as follows:

More insulation (you already have great R-values)

Lower airtightness (dropping from 0.6 to 0.3 has quite an impact, but you’re already doing tremendously well)

Add more south glazing, reduce all other glazing. (You already have a great balance of glazing)

Build a larger home (!?!?… small homes are the hardest to make meet an intensity based target, as they have the largest surface area to volume ratio. Meaning that a larger building squeezes more floor area into slightly more exterior envelope area, reducing heat loss per unit of floor area. The Germans do this to motivate one to build multi-family dwellings… but the result in North America has been a lot of larger single family homes getting certified).

Your home is a great example of why you don’t see certified Passive House buildings taking off in Canada. It’s damn near impossible to design a compliant home, without either blowing the bank or ending up with a solar oven. I’ve designed many compliant buildings, and 99% of them end up backing off on insulation and glazing to be around where your home is. You’ll note that local Net Zero Energy homes have similar envelope performance to your home; it’s most cost effective from that baseline to invest in solar PV generation than to add more insulation.

Under the section of the report on Energy Balance Heating, I asked, “I was surprised by the amount of heat loss through the walls as well as the windows – is that due to the size/number of south windows? Or does that relate to the number of windows on the east/west and north sides more so? How could we have changed that to reduce the heat loss?”

Ideally, if the insulation in all areas of the building cost the same, you’d want to balance the R-values so that the heat loss intensity rate is the same through all envelope elements. Your exterior above grade wall has the highest relative rate of heat loss, so that’d be the place to add more insulation first if you want to improve performance. If you want to optimize R-value ratios this way, it’s smartest to add in the cost/ft2 of each insulation type, then you can maximise your return on investment. For example, adding 1″ of cellulose in the attic is much cheaper than an inch of foam outside of a wall.

The glazing of course has the highest rate of heat loss, but that’s just because you max out at around R10, where your opaque assemblies are R50+.

Your North, East, and West windows are NET losers of heat, while the South windows offer a net gain. This is as expected, and is really the basis of Passive Solar design, that a South window can actually HEAT a building throughout the heating season, with the right recipe. If you wanted to optimize the glazing further, you can add more South glazing while removing glazing on the other elevations (North being the biggest drag on efficiency), which will continually reduce the annual heating demand (how much energy is consumed to heat). This is a Red Flag area though, following this path of more South glazing will eventually cause overheating throughout the year. Prediction of overheating / discomfort is an area where the PHPP is very poor, and I’ve been burned in the past on some projects where we pushed the Passive solar too far in an attempt to reach certification. I now use IES<VE> as a energy modelling tool because of its ability to accurately predict overheating.

“Did you have any thoughts or considerations you would have given us had we run these numbers off the bat with the house planning? “

I’d honestly say you’ve done a great job on your home. It’s pretty much impossible to meet the PHI Passive House criteria for a small single family home in Saskatchewan, without significant and typically unjustifiably cost. The PHIUS criteria is based on a more climate-specific analysis, which attempts to stop investment in conservation at the point a little bit beyond where renewable generation is more feasible. Meaning it’s more realistic to meet the PHIUS+ targets, though we’re not seeing much uptake in the Prairies.

All of this was very interesting and at the same time reassuring to me. Like many others, I had put a lot of credence on the PH standards as the be all and end all (even still despite reading and appreciating the issues I’ve previously discussed). It was good to hear that the assumptions we’d made were in the end in line with the reality of trying to build a PH in Saskatchewan.

Even still there was one last thing that I just had to know… it kept coming up again and again. It was one of those pesky assumptions we kept getting asked about. And one of my recently reposted blogs on Green Building Advisor brought it back to my mind again… German windows.

It is regarded that the German (or Polish and Lithuanian) Passive House certified windows are the creme de la creme of windows. They are attractive, heavy, thick (6″ wide!), and expensive. But if you want to reach Passive House standards, you gotta have ’em! (Or at least that’s what they say).

I felt a little bit guilty asking for quotes on windows that we were never going to buy, but my curiosity just couldn’t be helped. I wanted to know how expensive PH-certified windows would have been for our place. We’d heard outrageous prices of up to $80,000 for some homes.

We tendered a couple of quotes and received a reply from Optiwin of Lithuania. The salesperson was exceptionally thorough and I was really impressed with his communication (which made me feel more guilty). After a couple of weeks I received the pricing back. I was actually surprised that the cost of the PH windows was only $17,000 CDN more than the windows we purchased from Duxton Windows. Although they would have been certainly way outside our budget anyway – they weren’t 400% more than the price we paid by any means (just a measly 75% more). Nonetheless, I really had to pause again and wonder, why? What would make these windows $17,000 better than the fibreglass, triple pane windows we got? The U-factors and solar heat gain coefficients were not that big a difference. Maybe the the locking mechanisms of the windows could get you a bit lower on your airtightness – but $17,000? How long would it take you to save on heating bills to justify that “investment”?

All this being said, I’m happy to have answered my lingering questions and to confirm some of my assumptions. The bottomline, of course, though is that you want to be able to sit back and be happy with what is around you. To know that you did the best you could in building a sustainable home for the future.

I can’t complain.

Musings on Passive House Standards and the Costs of New Home Construction, Part 2

Posted on March 17, 2016 by kent

If you have not read Part 1 yet, please go back and read it first.

In mid-November of 2015, just prior to us moving into the house, we were asked to be apart of the Passive House Days tour (a world-wide weekend of awareness of Passive House and energy efficient building). Well, not “officially” – we were asked to be apart of the tour by the event organizer in Saskatchewan who is the Passive House (PH) consultant on what should become the first certified PH in the Saskatchewan. Even though we did not build a PH, we did follow their standards as closely as I could justify, but from the beginning we were not pursuing certification.

Although all of the visitors on the PH Days Tour were very interested in our house, our process, and why we did the things we did, one question we got a lot was, “If you were following the PH standards why not go all the way for certification?”

First, let’s back-up a little bit. Indeed the principles of a PH are second to none. From Passipedia: “Passivhaus is a building standard that is truly energy efficient, comfortable and affordable at the same time.” So simple. Brilliant even. I wanted to build a PH. Who wouldn’t?

Strangely, if you visit Canadian Passive House Institute (CanPHI) website there are total of 5 projects that have received Canadian PH certification. If you look up the PH Project Database there are a grand total of 23 houses in all of Canada that have received certification.

Why the discrepancy you may ask? Why so few certified projects?

This is a bit complicated and took me awhile to figure out. But here are the basics as I understand it: the Passivhaus standards were developed in Germany for German buildings in the German climate (obviously). However, when other builders in other countries tried to build a “Passivhaus” in say the USA, England, or Canada, they realized something profound: Hey… wait a second… I don’t live in Germany!

Maybe trying to build to German PH certified standards in Minnesota or Saskatchewan is going to be really difficult? Maybe impossible? Or maybe possible but really expensive? Or maybe possible but a really uncomfortable building to actually live in?

Still PH institute satellites started to spring up in most countries around the world. Slowly, Passive Houses, built to the German requirements, started to be built in other countries with the first certified Canadian building being built in 2009. The uptake, however, was certainly not rapid nor widespread. Why? Was it not as the PH Institute of Germany said that these buildings are “truly energy efficient, comfortable and affordable”? Or is it just that we are too cheap and/or lazy and/or complacent to meet those strict German requirements elsewhere?

It seems like this is something that these PH satellites were struggling with as discussed here, here and here.

A few years ago though, some people started to say, this is silly – why are we following German standards and requirements for our buildings when we don’t actually live in Germany?

The German PH standards are as follows:

Space Heat Demand: max. 15 kWh/m2a OR Heating load max. 10 W/m2
Pressurization Test Result @ 50 Pa: max. 0.6 ACH
Total Primary Energy Demand: max. 120 kWh/m2a

Simple enough right? Hit these numbers using the PH planning software and your building can be certified as a PH. Where’s the problem?

The Pressurization Test for 0.6 ACH is strict, but not impossible. There had been many houses built to this level of airtightness before PH came around. Rob Dumont’s own home in Saskatoon in 1992 tested at an awe-inspiring 0.47 ACH.

Jumping to the third requirement, the Total Primary Energy Demand of 120 kWh/m2a ensures essentially that you are not wasting energy or are at least using it wisely. It forces you to use energy efficient lighting, appliances and mechanical systems. I don’t think anyone can argue with that as being important to green building.

The real problem though, in my opinion, is the Space Heating Demand of 15 kWh/m2a or heat load of 10 W/m2. These numbers dictate the maximum space heating allowed for each square meter of a building. Remember – this is based on a German climate.

In Germany the number of heating degree days (HDD) is around 3100 compared to over 10,000 HDD in Saskatoon. So that means there is over three times as much heating requirement in Saskatoon as compared to Germany. Besides that, who really cares what your heating demand is? With the maximum energy demand of 120 kWh/m2a already stated, what difference does it make whether you use 50% of that to heat your house or 10% in terms of your overall efficiency? This is my real beef with PH and the one that most others working towards PH in countries that have climates other than a German one tend to struggle with too.

Recently the PH Institute in the USA (PHIUS) split off (or was banished – depending on what you read) from it’s affiliation with the German PHI. This allowed them to develop their own standards and specific requirements for climate zones in the USA (Minneapolis also has different heating needs compared to Miami) and also to use North American calculation values instead of European. As a result it is now ~~easier~~ – ok, let’s say, attainable – to hit the PH targets for your Minneapolis house using a Minneapolis climate to calculate your requirements. Now that makes sense to me.

Sadly, the Canadian PH Institute has been resistant to following their American counterparts and has continued to align itself with the German requirements. Thus making it darn near practically impossible to meet the PH standard and become certified by the Canadian PH Institute.

There is a small loop-hole of sorts though, a Canadian house can pursue certification via the PHIUS, which is somewhat closer to our climate in the northern States. Although the conversion is not exact, the Space Heating Demand requirement for the northern USA is about 30 kWh/m2a (or double that of the German standard maximum). That’s better, but still the maximum heating degree days in Saskatoon are more than any other place in continental USA. Nonetheless, there have been a few of PHs in Canada that have used the US system to become certified (ok, like maybe 10 or 12).

I told you this was complicated…

Anyway, let’s try to bring this full circle, back to my original question of why don’t we just build all new houses in Canada to the PH standard?

I hope that I have presented the argument that it may not be realistic to build a certified PH in Canada and follow the original edicts of the German Passivhaus Institute of “energy efficient, comfortable and affordable.”

From Part 1 of this post, you may be able to see that there is a HUGE chasm between how most new homes in Canada are currently built as a result of our pathetic building code allowing inefficient homes to perpetuate, and the extremely difficult PH standards currently set in Canada.

Unfortunately, I think the CanPHI has done itself a disservice in not distancing itself from the German PH Institute. By not developing it’s own Canadian climate specific standards for the unique climate zones of our country, which maybe (just maybe) one day could be adopted on a large nation-wide scale.

Until such a time that the CanPHI recognizes this and modifies their requirements appropriately and regionally, I doubt that PH will ever gain much more than a very small handful of faithful followers willing to spend, at all costs, to meet an arbitrary set of values developed on the other side of the world.

That being said, I do KNOW that you CAN in fact build a house in Canada that IS energy efficient, comfortable and affordable.

But it isn’t a Passive House.

Because that’s what we’ve done.

house-snow

Musings on Passive House Standards and the Costs of New Home Construction, Part 1

Posted on February 24, 2016March 5, 2016 by kent

A friend of mine sent me this article for Tree Hugger yesterday about an Irish county that made the Passive House standard for all new home construction. This is a pretty big deal. The question then came up – why doesn’t Canada (or the USA) adopt such strict and stringent standards to their new home construction? Certainly the Paris Climate Conference of 2015 has finally made it official what everyone and their dog already knew: the world is overheating and we need to do something about it before we all die. Building better homes could make a massive difference in our world’s energy use. It is well-known that a certified Passive House uses 80-90% less energy than a standard house.

The problem, as usual though, in making such rigorous standards mandatory is a combination of bureaucracy, status quo, and resistance to change. In this post and my next, I will make the argument that I believe there is a skewed perspective on both sides of this battle in Canada.

Did you know that the minimum standard for wall construction in Saskatchewan (a province that has frigid winters of -40° temperatures for long stretches and over 10,000 heating degree days per year) is a 2×6 wall with batt insulation? The effective R-value of this wall is only R17.5 due to thermal bridging (as the wood studs bridge between the inside and outside of the wall). This standard must be out of date, you say? In fact, this was recently upgraded to this absurdly pathetic level in 2012 (it was only a 2×4 wall before that). Shameful.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, most homes in Saskatchewan feature R12 in basement walls and only R40 in the attic. There is no requirement for insulation under the slab of the house. Also, the building code requires only double-pane windows – such insufficient windows account for a massive amount of heat loss of up to 50% (these are usually vinyl framed windows, though sometimes wood or aluminum). And placement of these crappy windows can lead to further issues with heat loss due to inadequate southern exposure and large windows on the north side of house. Furthermore, air leakage rates in most new homes is about 2.0 ACH@50pascals (which is actually one of the lowest values tested in Canada). (Source: Energy Standards by Ken Cooper)

I assume that you can get the picture that our homes are generally very inefficient (don’t think that this is specific to Saskatchewan – this is relatively consistent across North America).

Although we did not build a Passive House, we followed the principles of this as closely as we could financially justify (which is the rub, more on this in my next post). For a quick comparison, our house has R56 walls, R80 attic, R32 basement walls and under-slab. Our latest air tightness test was 0.72 ACH@50pascals (and with some extra tightening we’re hoping to get this to 0.65 or less at the next test). We used triple-pane fibreglass windows. The design of the house maximized heat gain through the south windows and minimized heat loss through the windows on the east, west and north sides. Passive shading with our roof overhangs prevents overheating in the summer. The positioning of the house is directly south (a luxury we have living on an acreage). We also installed PV panels to offset our meagre energy use, which are becoming more and more affordable.

Now, a lot of people wonder and ask (I know I did prior to building), that it must cost substantially more money to build a house to this level of efficiency?

The simple truth is that it does not have to.

The general consensus is that a new custom home in Canada, excluding the cost of purchasing land, is between $200 and $300 per square foot to build (a contractor spec “cookie cutter” home built to the minimum standard with minimal features and cheap finishing can be $175/sq.ft or less). Indeed this is large range – for a 1500sq.ft home you could either spend $300,000 or $450,000. But for argument’s sake, let’s say $250/sq.ft is a realistic cost of a new custom home (we will also assume that most people would not build to the bare minimum construction standard of a spec house and see the benefit of adding triple pane windows and a 2″ layer of EPS foam on the outside of their 2×6 wall).

OK so where are the extra costs?

I would say that the design planning and orientation of the house will be the single biggest factor in determining your initial and long-term costs in a high performance, energy efficient house. It does not cost anymore to build a house with your windows facing north instead of facing south. Positioning the long side of your house to east does not cost anymore than facing it south. Designing correct overhangs for shading does not cost anymore than designing insufficient overhangs. Designing outcroppings, bay windows, and cantilevers does not cost anymore to design than a rectangle or a square-shaped building. Placing operable windows appropriately for cross-ventilation does not cost anything extra either. But all of these decisions and factors can have huge ramifications on the cost of construction and/or long-term costs of operation. We had several team meetings during our design process (including a Passive House certified designer, contractor, and LEED engineers) to decide on which systems would be best suited to be optimally energy efficient, be comfortable to live in, and also to make sure everyone, including sub-contractors were on the same page. This extra consulting time accounted for 2.5% of our overall cost.

In terms of actual construction costs, we built a double 2×4 stud wall that is 16″ wide. The cost of materials for this wall system versus the cost of 2x6s and the 2″ of EPS foam is almost negligible. Framing labour costs were slightly more though as each exterior wall was built twice (accounting for an additional 2% of the overall budget). Remember though our design is simple, a rectangle, meaning four walls – no bays or outcroppings. We also invested 20% more in purchasing fibreglass framed triple-pane windows versus the usual vinyl or wood triple-pane windows (accounting for an additional 1.75% of the overall budget). Insulation costs slightly more but pays for itself in short order when compared to long-term operation costs (the upfront cost is an additional 2% of the overall budget). Airtightness of the house did not cost us anymore than the standard vapour barrier (although it does require some attention to detail by the tradespeople) with the exception that we needed to install a heat-recovery ventilator which cost $1200 (0.3% of the budget).

But there are also some possible cost savings to consider. One can get away with a smaller mechanical heating system due to the lower heat load required in a super-insulated and airtight house. For us, our mechanical system cost about the same as a standard house due to us deciding to install in-floor heating and a wood burning stove. Although you certainly could get away with baseboard heaters or a very small forced air furnace combined with a heat coil on your HRV if you so chose (for us we wanted the in-floor heat and a wood stove – you can read about our reasons for this here and here). Most new houses also have air conditioners installed. We do not (cross-ventilation, insulation and proper shading is all that is needed).

The bottom line is that it cost us about 8% more to build a house that is in the range of 75-80% more efficient then a standard new custom home.

After these extra costs are accounted for the rest of construction costs are basically the same as any other house – how much do you want to spend to finish the house is based on your taste and how much you want to invest in your bathroom fixtures, lighting, hardwood flooring, custom cabinets (vs. Ikea), appliances and so on. Also, how much sweat equity do you want to do yourself? All of this will have a big impact on your end costs (consider, painting our house took 5 full days, but saved us about $6,000+. Installing the tile in the bathrooms and kitchen ourselves took 10+ full days, but saved us another $8,000).

Ok, so you’re probably thinking, how much did this damn house actually cost you? Tell me already! Although I haven’t done our final-final tally yet, it is in the range of $280/sq.ft. But this also includes the cost of our 6.2 kW solar PV system, our septic system, and the cost of trades to travel the 30 minutes to our house each day. Removing these factors, to build the same house in an urban area, you could easily do it for $250/sq.ft.

Say… that’s pretty much the same as what we said a typical new house would cost, right?

So why the heck isn’t everyone doing this??

Well, it goes back to the fact that there is an unfounded assumption that building an energy efficient house costs a lot more (I think we’ve shown that it simply does not have to). It also does not help that energy costs from non-renewables such as coal-fired electricity and natural gas are very cheap still (even so, those extra 8% in building costs for us should be paid back in less than 12 years in monthly energy bill savings). And the public outcry for action is not yet greater than the apathy of maintaining the status quo on the part of our government, the building industry, and those contractors who have been making a tidy profit on their suburban sprawl spec houses.

Part two to come…

Observations, expectations, and regrets

Posted on February 20, 2016February 20, 2016 by kent

As I’ve written about building our house over the past 18 months or so, I’ve commented several times that the decisions we were making in energy performance and efficiency of the house were all theoretical. Certainly, we based our decisions and assumptions on solid foundations of research, well-established protocols, software design and modelling, and the recommendations of others who have built high performance buildings or through websites and blogs of others. But STILL. I couldn’t be sure how the house would actually function. How efficient would it be? Would we overheat? How much solar power would be generate? What are our power bills going to be? How comfortable will we be? Oh and of course, do we have any regrets? These were all questions on move-in day that we had yet to answer.

Here are some observations from the first three months of living in the house.

We have had an unseasonably mild winter this year including several days of above freezing temperatures in January and February, which generally are our coldest months of the years. In fact, the past 5 days have been between +1°C (34°F) and +6°C (43°F). Normally the ice from the river is not breaking up until mid- to late March, but just yesterday it’s already opened up (#globalwarming).

But even so, we have had a few of our more typical extremely cold days too (we couldn’t get off this easy of course). In December we had a couple days of -40°C (-40°F) or colder. One of these days was a bright and sunny Saturday, the news here reported that it was the highest day of power usage across the province for the year. Our dogs were lying in the sun panting and the temperature on the thermostat read 24°C (76°F) – without the boiler running – purely from passive solar heating. I had to laugh. We even had to crack a window for awhile so we didn’t overheat.

warmday

Even though that day was great to see how well things performed under extreme conditions (very cold day + lots of sun = no active heating required. Awesome) I was a bit worried that we might overheat on milder winter days with lots of sun. But, for whatever reason, this really hasn’t been the case. Within a few days of that extreme cold snap, we were back above freezing temperatures with lots of sunlight. I think a couple days it did creep up to +26°C (+78°F) on the thermostat due to passive heating, but with our well-planned operable window placements, we could simply open a window or two and cool things down if needed. It seems bizarre to me that I’d need to open a window in the middle of winter, but it really does not bother me to do it. But it also makes me very happy (and relieved) that we really thought out well how to get good cross-breeze ventilation throughout the house (although we thought this would be for summer passive cooling not the winter too!). If we didn’t have this I might be cursing myself due to overheating issues.

All this being said, of course, on cold and cloudy days, the boiler and in-floor heat runs. We have it set to keep the indoor temperature at 20°C (70°F). We played around a bit with what setting to keep it at – going as high as 72°F (comfortable all the time, but easier to overheat with passive heating, also running the wood stove would make it too warm) and as low as 68°F (too cold in the morning, even with a sweater on, and needed to be running the wood stove morning and evening). We both wear a sweater in the house in the morning – cheaper to put a sweater on then to pay for more power. If it is really cold out then I light a fire in the wood burning stove, which is a nice luxury to have. When we tried setting a lower temperature in the house, I was needing to light a fire every morning, which was a hassle and not something I was overly motivated to do every day.

I’ve started tracking our solar generation through our 6.2 KW ground mount PV system with the plan to monitor this for the year. This time of year makes for the least amount of solar generation due to the short days, more cloud cover, lower height of the sun in the sky, and SNOW. I’d not really considered it before but snow and ice covering the PV panels is crazy frustrating. I guess I assumed the snow would just fall of it. Not so. The first couple of times this happened I shouted out in horror – we had a bright sunny day, but due to a snowfall in the nighttime our panels were 100% covered! I grabbed a ladder climbing up to clean the panels with a broom – an arduous task with the wind blowing and -20°C (-4°F) temperatures. There must be a solution to this I thought, but after reading several websites, it seems like the only solution is a long broom handle or to wait for the sun to melt it off. This was so aggravating – seeing our energy generation oppurtunities being squandered. Aside from a 16′ long broom handle, I’ve not yet found a good solution to this problem (and perhaps there is no solution).

I’ve also started tracking our energy use, but this has been more difficult as we have an outdoor chicken coop with a heat lamp and a water heater that is on 24/7. These suck energy like crazy. I’m sure these three chickens are costing us a fortune right now (they better start laying golden eggs) – in fact, I think heating their little 24sq.ft coop is more expensive then heating our 1240sq.ft. house. So for this year we will see what the total energy use. But for next year, we have a second transformer located next at our shop (and not connected to the PV panels), so I will try to run the chicken coop power from there, which will give us a more accurate reading of the house’s energy use for 2017. (I also need to build a passive house chicken coop now).

I guess the last thing that everyone seems to ask – which is interesting as it is one of the first things they ask after, “So you’re all settled into the house?” … “Any regrets?” or “Anything you would change?” To be perfectly honest, my answer is, “No. Nothing.”

We really love the house. We love the design. We love the style. We love it’s performance. We love the comfort.

We spent a lot of time planning, designing, and researching the house. We did not compromise and we followed the adage to: “Do it right the first time.”

I have no regrets.

Airtightness: Blower Door Testing

Posted on January 23, 2016August 15, 2018 by kent

Excellent levels of airtightness are equally, if not more, important to the level of insulation you decide to put into your house. These really are (insulation and airtightness) the two pillars of an passive house and pretty well any other Eco-house building.

For our house, we’d gone with high levels of insulation in the range of 3x the typical amount for standard construction: R32 under-slab and basement walls, R56 walls, and R80 attic. However in deciding our insulation levels and our targeting goals for airtightness, we did try to strike a balance between cost-benefit and recognize the point of diminishing returns.

I have written about our insulation choices previously here and here, so I will not go into that as much, but in terms of airtightness there are some basics that are worth discussing. The fact is: air leaking into and out of a building is not efficient no matter how much insulation you have in the walls. Although insulation decisions, thermal bridging reduction, and solar gain can be designed into the house, airtightness can really only be ensured while actually constructing the building. Airtightness is tested with a blower door test and is rated based on “air changes per hour a 50 pascals of pressure.” Typical construction in Canada reaches about 3 ACH. The Canadian R2000, our high-efficient energy standard, is 1.5 ACH. While the Passive House standard is a whopping 0.6 ACH.

Although I was hoping we could target the extremely difficult goal of 0.6 ACH as per Passive House standard, the question was – how far ($$$) are you willing to go to reach this? As with insulation levels, there is a point of diminishing returns. Will 0.8 ACH versus 0.6 ACH be anymore noticeable in terms of user comfort? And over the lifespan of the building would you ever balance out these costs?

We decided to set an ambitious, but realistic goal, of 0.8 ACH.

The reason for this was four-fold:

1. Our house is not big. It is a rectangular bungalow at 1240 sq.ft. The blower door test is an test of absolute air leakage from the building – not a relative test. By that I mean, that a large house can more easily meet a lower ACH level then a smaller house due to the greater volume of the house overall.
2. We were not prepared to spend the greater amount of money on air sealing tapes, interior sheathing, and the labour to do this. A standard house is sealed with a 6 mil vapour barrier (cost is $50 per 8’x500′ roll) and Tuck Tape ($6 per roll). A Passive House is often sheathed with 5/8″ OSB ($25 per 4’x8′ sheet) on the interior to serve as it’s vapour barrier or high-end Intello Plus vapour barrier ($320 per 64″x164′ roll) with the seams sealed with Tescon Profil/Vana tape ($45 per roll). It does not take much in the way of math skills to see that the latter option can get extremely expensive. But if you really want to ensure you hit that Passive House 0.6 ACH target, that’s probably what you need to do (the Tescon Profil tape is often used on the outside walls as well to seal the air barrier and windows/doors).
3. We were not pursuing Passive House certification, so really there was no point in ensuring we hit 0.6 ACH. If you’re spending the money to have a Passive House consultant work with you at the initial design stage and you’re spending the money on the high-end Passive House certified windows, the special tapes and the extra insulation, you better make sure you hit 0.6 ACH or all of that expense will be for nothing. For us, if we made 0.6 ACH, great, if we didn’t, oh well.
4. We were installing a wood burning stove and chimney. Although the stove itself is very high quality from Morso in Denmark, I figured this extra hole in the wall would likely negatively impact our airtightness. But we were not budging on not having a wood stove. We also had another extra hole in the wall for the water cistern in the basement, but again this could not be avoided.

All that being said, we did make every effort to design the house to be as airtight as we could. The dense-packed cellulose in the walls itself provides a high degree of air sealing on it’s own. We limited the penetrations into and out of the house by selecting a condensing dryer from Bosch and having an electric boiler (the only penetrations are the chimney stack, the water cistern pipe, and the HRV). We used a standard 6 mil poly for the vapour barrier with acoustic sealant at every seam. Each seam was also taped with standard Tuck Tape to ensure another layer of added protection. Around the windows and exterior doors we purchased and used the Teson Profil air sealing tapes to attach the vapour barrier to the frames. Although this tape is very pricy, it made sense to me to use it here as the greatest area of air leakage is often at the window frames and doors.

Now it was time to test the house.

The testing is done through a Blower Door test. “A blower door is a powerful fan that mounts into the frame of an exterior door. The fan pulls air out of the house, lowering the air pressure inside. The higher outside air pressure then flows in through all unsealed cracks and openings.” The test is repeated in the same way by drawing air into the house. “The auditors may use a smoke pencil to detect air leaks. These tests determine the air infiltration rate of a building. Blower doors consist of a frame and flexible panel that fit in a doorway, a variable-speed fan, a pressure gauge to measure the pressure differences inside and outside the home, and an airflow manometer and hoses for measuring airflow.”

Essentially it simulates wind blowing against the house in all directions at the same time. The test takes about an hour to administer with the tester taking multiple readings at different fan speeds both while depressurizing and repressurizing the building.

While the test was running we also used an infrared meter to look at any hot/cold spots.

A couple days later he sent us the results: 0.8 ACH at 50 pascals.

Right bang on our goal. Not bad. The guy who tested it said it was the tightest building he’d ever tested before.

I was happy enough with it, but a couple days later I happened to be standing beside the chimney on a windy day and I could ever so slightly hear a whistle through the pipe. I looked closely at the seams and saw they were not fully sealed. Damn!

We’d also had some crappy construction locks on the doors and I put my hand against them. I could feel wind there too! Double damn!

After sealing these leaks and a few other tiny ones we found, we did another retest a couple weeks ago. This time, the results were 0.72 ACH at 50 pascals. Not too shabby.

After talking to the tester, though, he thought that given the higher than expected discrepancy between the depressurized and repressurized values that maybe the vents of the HRV had opened slightly causing a skew to occur. He’d like to do one more retest in a couple weeks, thinking this would take it down to 0.65 ACH or lower. At this point, he’s doing it at no charge as he’s simply interested to see what the truest level of airtightness is.

For me, I’m happy to know that we reached almost Passive House airtightness values while still being as economical as possible.

*** Please see the UPDATED BLOWER DOOR TEST POST for the redo test final results! ***

Turning a house into a home

Posted on January 2, 2016 by kent

House: (noun) def. 1. a building for human habitation.

Home: (noun) def. 1. the place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household. The family or social unit occupying a home. A place where something flourishes, is most typically found, or from which it originates.

We’d spent nearly all of the past year, a stress-filled 2015, planning, designing and constructing the house. I certainly have never had so much stress and anxiety in my life (in fact, if you combined all of the stress in my previous 32 years of life, I think this past year alone would have surpassed momentously). But now, over the past four weeks we have actually gotten to live in this place – and experience what exactly we’d been working toward. But during the initial couple of weeks of December, I continued to call it the house. As in, “we are at the house now,” instead of “we are home now.”

I realized that the house had been associated so much with work and stress and was not “a place where something flourishes” for me – yet. I suspected that this would gradually change once we moved our furniture in and started hanging things on the walls. But really, this still didn’t change my terminology. Forcing myself to call it “home” just seemed weird to me. Even though we were living in the house, it wasn’t home yet.

I suspected this would gradually change – at least I hoped it would. I’d heard that building a house is like child birth (being a dude, I doubt I will have the experience to draw on direct correlation here) but from what I’ve been told, a woman goes through some of the worst pain imaginable in labour and delivery but at the end has a baby that she loves dearly. And suddenly, by some evolutionary trick of the mind, she essentially forgets or does not care how painful the process was. Often she will go through this same pain again more than once, knowing full well that the pain to get there was so terrible – but the reward so great.

For me, in the initial three weeks of being in the house, although it is beautiful and exactly what we had been hoping for, I still wasn’t at the forgetting the pain part yet.

But as it was in the last week, just before our Christmas break, I said to my friend, “We will be at home tonight.” And just like that, without any intention or forethought about it, I stopped referring to it as the house and started to call it home.

On New Year’s Eve, my wife and I decided to reminisce and read back through the blog posts I’d made here in the past year (yes I know – we are crazy crazy party animals). And wouldn’t you know, it was amazing how many things we’d forgotten already! We kept saying “I can’t believe that happened!” or “Oh man, I forgot about that – that sucked!” or “how did we get through that?” Truthfully we did not read through all of the posts… I think we made it to September 2015, at which point my wife said she couldn’t handle reading anymore as it was giving her anxiety!

A friend of ours, who has also built a custom house, recently said to us, “I’m so glad you are at the living in and loving it stage.” Indeed we are.

I can now look around the house and instead of thinking of my to-do list, I just think, “this is my home.”

Alchemy of a Concrete countertop

Posted on January 1, 2016January 1, 2016 by kent

As if we didn’t have enough concrete and thermal mass in the house already, we decided to install a white concrete countertop in the kitchen. We’d priced out quartz as an option as well – a machine-made product that has the benefits of durability, scratch-resistance, stain-resistance, heat-resistance, and being made from some recycled products. But the reality is, because of all of these benefits, it also is very expensive, shockingly so, in fact. We needed 14’x24″ for the long counter. I don’t know what I expected the price to be, but it certainly wasn’t the $8000 price tag they quoted. Ouch.

As an alternative, our kitchen cabinet maker, Ryan Unger with Rhine Artisans, suggested a concrete counter. He was building our butcher block counter for the island in rift sawn white oak and he’d also done a few concrete counters himself before as well. Perfect!

He’d never made a white concrete counter before but he was game to try it. It probably helped that he and I have been good friends for a number of years and he’s been willing to try a few “different” woodworking jobs for us on this project..

Although I’d had in my head that I wanted a crisp white counter for whatever, I was excited for the “handmade” benefits of the concrete counter. True, concrete can stain and scratch, but being hand-made, we’d get something completely unique and special.

On a balmy October Saturday the guys came out to build the concrete form and pour the counter. It took them nearly 6 hours alone to make the form, which they would pour in three sections, due to the size, weight, and need to form around the under-mount farmhouse sink. It had to be perfectly level, square and flush. They used white MDF for the form to make it as smooth as possible. For structural support, they used wire mesh, which they smartly spray painted white in the event that it would “shadow” through when poured.

For the concrete itself, they were able to source white portland cement, white aggregate and white sand for the mixture.

We covered the counter with a tarp and placed two heaters in there for the next 3 weeks. The temperature was dropping and these would need to be sitting in our shop for the next three weeks.

It was mid-November and above freezing still, which is bizarre for our area. It was terribly fortunate as had it been below freezing we would have had to haul the counters to the basement of the house for them to polish there. That would have sucked.

As it was they were able to polish the counters outside – only slightly as too much polishing would bring out the aggregate. We still wanted these to be as white as possible.

Once the sun went down though, it was freezing and what we had was what we were going to have. The three of us then needed to carry these in through the front door.

It was SHOCKING how insanely heavy each piece was. I don’t think I’ve ever tried to carry something so heavy before. We nearly died, but miraculously we were able to get them up the steps to the door and placed on the cabinets without any serious injury or damage.

IMG_3287A

The counters were not a crisp white, which I had originally wanted, but instead are a creamy white, which actually looked amazing against the creamy white oak cabinets. Plus the organic, handmade, imperfections of the counter really added a nice feel to the whole space. Very wabi-sabi.

After another couple weeks, we sealed them with an acrylic sealer (we tried a food safe, water-based sealer but this did nothing, as we found when a single drop of red wine left our first stain – Grrr [vinegar and elbow grease made it less noticeable]). We then added a topcoat of beeswax to finish it.

But before we would seal this, I’d need to finish my tiling work on the backsplash.

Moving Day

Posted on December 26, 2015December 26, 2015 by kent

On a surprising beautiful late November Saturday we moved into the new house. We had said that once the kitchen and master bathroom were complete we’d move in… well, neither the kitchen nor the bathroom were finished.

We’d been waiting for the countertop to be installed in the master bath for the past few weeks. I’d been told that the countertop would take about 2-3 weeks to arrive when I’d ordered it – a white basic edge Corian counter for the double-sink. Simple, right? Well, it was now week 7 and the counter was still not here. I could not finish the tiling and the sinks and faucets could not be installed until that was done. The plumber did not want to make the trip out to our place until he could hook that stuff up which meant we had no sinks and no showers operational.

I’d received a phone call a couple of days before from the counter installer saying that he could bring the counter out on Thursday – two days before we’d planned to move in. Great – just in time. I organized for the plumber to come the next day, Friday, to finish his work. Therefore our Saturday move-in should be perfect. Maybe things would just fall neatly into place.

How naive I am. Still.

Thursday came and went and no counter was installed. The plumber said he would still come out because he knew we’d planned to move in the next day – at least he could hook up the other sinks and showers (nice of him). However on Friday, I received a text message saying he was sick. Sorry. He would try to be there Monday.

We had everything planned to move the next day! Do we move anyway?

I then received a call from the counter guy saying he would come out the same day, the Saturday, to install the counter. Monday then the plumber could come (hopefully). We could rough it for a couple days. We had the bathtubs hooked up at least – so we could wash our hands there for a day or two. Who needs to shower everyday?

Screw it. Let’s move.

The night before the move I waxed the concrete floors with my neighbour (best neighbours in the world) and they turned out great. It was one of the few jobs with the house that actually went better than I expected it would.

The next morning we began the move. I don’t think many people enjoy moving, but I really really hate it. I hate packing only slightly more than I hate moving. Fortunately this was not going to be our most major move (that was last year). We were moving from a tiny cabin we’d been renting only 2 miles away from the house. We had our parents and a couple friends come help us for the day. Things went smoothly and aside from the near-death of our prized 30-year old split-leaf Philodendron (it is coming back slowly) – nothing was damaged in the move. I don’t know about you, but this tends to be a rarity.

Later in the day, the counter guy in fact showed up. He brought in the counter and… lo and behold – it totally was wrong! They’d somehow and for some reason changed the edge profile of the counter from a straight edge to a 2″ overhung edge! How does this happen? Honestly. The counter guy initially tried to convince us it was not a big deal. He wanted to install it as is. Except that we couldn’t open the top drawer or the cabinets. Plus it looked ridiculous. He suggested he build up the counter to make it not block the pulls, but that meant it would be absurdly close to our wall-mounted faucets. Besides, that – it wasn’t what we ordered! Gosh, some of these people. He then indicated that if we were to not install it then it would be 6 weeks more to get the right one in! Wait wait wait. Can’t you just trim off that ugly edge, my wife asked. We just wanted the straight finish anyway. “I guess I could do that,” he replied. (It would be two weeks more before the counter would finally be installed.)

Maybe we didn’t have any operational sinks or showers. Who cares that we didn’t have the master bathroom complete? What difference does it make that the kitchen was not finished either. We were in the house now.

And man oh man, it felt so good.