Imber Akse House – Burlington’s LEED home

Leslie and I have been long time supporters of local — local organic food production, local manufacturing, local labour, local products – we live and work local. It isn’t always easy but typically, when you really look philisophically at the reason for any difficulty, it’s related to the desire for choice, perceived quality and price. I’m not about to yank the lid off this can of worms but local makes a lot of sense when you consider the cost of distance of goods travelled on the ecology, the erroding strength and depth of our economy, and our own health with regard to food. Regardless of good intent, many industries have found themselves reliant on distance for materials and manufacturing and this is an uncomfortable reality for them.

In any event, one industry that has thus far maintained a high level of local in its diet is home building. As a matter of cost, labour practicality and standards, the majority of a home is or can easily be quite local.

But, just how local does local have to be? For us consciously, we want to support our community first; hiring a Burlington builder with families in this town that use an extended team of local contractors was important. Materials are also often local too, at least in highlight, such as drywall from CGC Inc. of Oakville, lighting from Contrast, metal products from Bailey and KN Crowder, wood products from Goodfellow or Turkstra with local mills, concrete from local manufacturing and the list goes on. But as holes develop we begin expanding out from there so taking care of Canada makes sense to us. Canadian white cedar and other woods from Quebec, stone from local and northern Ontario quarries and so and so forth outward.

The issue is that to be sustainable, we need to encourage or support a local economy, design to consume conservatively and use restraint over the urge to pursue choice before common sense. Strangely though, to qualify for a category of LEEDs, the pinnacle of sustainable best practices, much of the materials we choose have to be sourced within a few hundred miles so as not to negatively effect the environment via a high carbon cost. The balance is tricky. It may be closer to source from a US firm in NY State than from a company in Ontario, and in fact, it is reported that sometimes less fuel is consumed in the transport of some foreign goods to our market by ship than via truck a province away. This adds complication to the decision for sure as it pulls us away from the Canadian community.

In the end though, with a little homework, a protractor and your concious you can make a good decision on what products and materials will best suit your sustainability philosophy – to be pramatic or dogmatic is up to you as long as the winner is a sustainable outcome that benefits the ecology and future generations.

Small irony in all this. We recently bid on a large interactive project for a leading Niagara home builder. In the end, we lost the job on cost, with the labour going to India. Apparently, much of the costing decisions home builders have to make these days is no different than other categories — downward cost pressure from consumers and their lack of awareness of the inherant benefit of supporting community is chasing even this last vestage of local, off shore.

What a difference clothing makes. The house now has it’s skin – the siding, soffit and fascia are now complete. The place looks hot. Now I better get off my butt and restore the vintage factory safety lights I recovered from an old barn a few years ago. These are going to be installed around the exterior.

If anyone can recommend a source for contemporary mailboxes, it would be much appreciated. A great source for new and recovered house items such as lighting and mailboxes, doors and hardware:

The Door Store on Castelfield Toronto
thedoorstore.ca

Remodelista Blog
remodelista.com

I’ve been asked a lot to explain how our Ground Source Heating and Cooling System will work. My feeling is that the lack of understanding of this technology, coupled with the inability of the manufacturers to clearly explain it without making your eyes water, keeps the success of this efficient heating solution limited.

First, using the ground to heat and cool your house is called Ground Source. The device which cycles the liquid through tubes down into the ground to capture heat and up into the house to exhaust this heat is called a heat pump. Geothermal is a wrongly  used term to describe the above when in fact it more accurately describes the process of capturing heat from thermal heat sources in the earth like volcanic heated water and steam.

The simple explanation of Ground Source is to look at the refrigerator in your home. The GSHP works the same way. Imagine that the interior of the fridge is the ground – cool at approx. 4ºC to 15ºC depending on the time of year. Then imagine that the rear of your fridge is the interior of your home. Please, anyone, correct me if I’m wrong, or provide a less clunky explanation.

The coil on the rear of the fridge (your heat pump coil) runs loops around and through a compressor (your heat pump) and then travels into the interior of your fridge (into an insulated space in the GSHP that is coupled around the ground loop) and back out to the rear to complete the loop.

The interior of the fridge is warmed when you open the door and exchange the mass of cool air with warm air, as well as when you place warm masses or items of food in there (essentially the equivalent of your ground loop that travels through the ground storing warm energy in tons of liquid – any temperature above 0 Kelvin has energy so the 10 to 15ºC in the ground is balmy).

What happens is the compressor outside the fridge condenses the liquid in the coil to a gas which exhausts any heat before it is pumped into the fridge space. The now cooled gas volume absorbs the warm air trapped in the fridge (ground) as it travels through its long loop. Energy in the form of heat always travels toward the cold, and in this case the energy drains into the coil (warmth in the ground stores in the ground loop).

As the gas in the coil warms, it does what it can to convert back to a liquid and begins to expand, increasing pressure. The warmed compressed gas is pumped to the outside rear of the fridge (into your home) and hits a warmer zone (your home’s GSHP) where it absorbs more warmth, converting back to a liquid. At this point, as it turns to a liquid and passes through the compressor, it can no longer hold the energy it has stored and intensely evacuates the excess heat at near boiling.

On your fridge, a fan blows through this coil (Forced Air Handler) to expel the heat from the liquid before it is condensed once again and the cycle repeated. In the case of a Radiant in floor heating water to water system such as ours, the floor loops of liquid travel into the warm area of the heat pump and wrap around the condensing coil to exchange heat before being pumped through the floor of the house again. And voila.

Eyes watering yet? See our Geo supplier’s website for meaningless colourful illustrations, or better yet, give them a call as they are much better at explaining how it works and best of all, how it will work for you – 4 Seasons Geothermal.

4 Seasons Geothermal is now well under way with the radiant heating system install. What likely adds up to a kilometer of IPEX Heatrite hot water tubes are stapled onto the freshly prepped floor. Prior to the install the Advantech floor deck was screwed down once more to ensure no future movement. Next, SDS, the concrete floor company, ground the floor before cleaning it and applying a thin set cement on all the seams for stability and sealing for leaks when the self leveling concrete is poured.

4 Seasons and their overqualified assistant Al Davies of Eco-Options, painstakingly follow a radiant plan prepared in advance by IPEX’s engineers and radiant system planners. The house will be split into logical zones based on a number of practical and climatic factors; in our case floor layout, situation of elevation changes and our expected use – all playing a factor in how we may wish to control the heat output for various areas of the house.

Within each zone, the system uses a manifold or controller to regulate the flow of hot water in the pipes. This control gives somewhat of a sub control – though manual – to each loop of tube that connects through the box. So, if in the case that a room receives more solar gain than expected compared to a cooler northern exposed area, we can tune the manifold to lower output to the loop.

A number of floor sensors and thermostats are also installed to be the eyes of the system and to accommodate future adaptive technologies we will install to run the interconnected mechanicals of the home.

Once the tubes are secured and sensors in their permanent locations, SDS will return to pour their first layer of cement – a mixture of gravel and Ardex – a synthetic gypsum and portland that is designed to withstand the rigors of sub-flooring while distributing heat evenly. Once this subsurface has cured – approximately a day or so, SDS will return to pour the cement topping, our final finished floor surface.

Recently the siding started to go up. Easily one of the most painful decisions to date, the clothing of the house – cladding. We chose a prefinished white cedar for a number of reasons: renewable if from well managed sources, long lasting, high quality look and a natural feel that synthetic finishes just can’t replace.

With a modern home shape, it would be easy to push the final appearance over the austere threshold with sleek materials. So we opted for a toned down but clean rustic feel — an effort to ease into the neighbouring landscape as best as we could while still appealing to our own aesthetic.

From the pace the siding installers are going, they should be completed in one more week.