Imber Akse House – Burlington’s LEED home

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

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.

We can’t seem to hang out enough in the house now that the drywall is up and finished (hard hats on of course John)— the rough shape and feel of the house is mostly complete which is very exciting. This week, our painter extraordinaire, Bonita Adamson of Bonic Design (905-466-1806), will begin the process of applying perfection to all the surfaces using waterbased, no VOC paints and sealers.

Bonic will be using paint from Sherwin Williams -Harmony is a range of no VOC and more sustainably manufactured paints that should do the trick and are available in Canada. Most other manufacturers now have products that meet or exceed LEED standards but availability can be limited in Canada for some reason – for example Benjamin Moore’s new Natura is just launching – better late than never I suppose.

http://www.sherwin-williams.com/pro/green/greensure_designation/index.jsp
http://www.sherwin-williams.com/greensure/

When choosing paint for no VOC toxicity and air quality, keep in mind that the volitile compounds are concentrated in the pigments with many paints. That means, the darker more saturated, the worse it gets. Keeping paint light is better for your health and better for the light reflectance and reduced heat load to save on the energy bill.

If we can say we’ve learned anything through the experience of building our own home it’s to make sure you get a good builder. Of course this means the obvious; quality minded, on time, passionate. But it also means standing behind you when things aren’t perfect for them.

We’ve got a great builder. With the financing climate being less than ideal there have been stresses but above all, Branthaven Homes has supported us, believed in the build, and kept on moving ahead. For this we are very thankful.

Over the summer months, following the window and roof completion, the electrical and ductwork began and is now almost complete. Also an extensive overhaul of the pool structure moved along, replacing the energy leaking legacy windows and skylights as well as the roof membrane.

Next up, stone exterior and interior stone wall (thermal mass) and drilling for the geothermal heat pump units.

Following the roof membrane, the next stage has been windows. Over the last couple of weeks, Pella has been carefully installing all of the glazing with only a few more to go. We’re loving this stage, the quality of the product is excellent, beautiful to look at and they have really done a lot to frame the building and bring it into proportion a little more.

If there is consideration for the next time we do something like this, we’ll review the size of the smaller windows and make them a little larger. By proportion, the reducing effect of the window frame and trim on the overall window glazing opening is more apparent on the smaller windows than the larger one. Small windows get really small – large windows just a little smaller.

Following a few weeks of freakish weather – heat, cool, daily rainstorms, hail like I’ve never seen in my life – the roofing contractors finally we’re able to install the TPO Roof Membrane! And beautifully. This means the interior work can now begin safely!

TPO stands for Thermoplastic Olefin or Polyolefin, a roll sheet material that is unrolled, and in our case glued to the roof deck and hot seamed using special irons to ensure a pool liner like continuous membrane. For flat roof applications like ours, it doesn’t get much better for the cost. Of course there is arguably better performance with some other technologies like “Liquid Plastic” but when compared to cost vs. minimal improvements, this is the stuff.

Aside from great leak protection, the TPO provides:

+ great UV resistance
+ excellent puncture resistance, but it’s not a dance floor
+ long term puncture repair-ability
+ responsible light reflectance
+ reasonable “green” factor when compared to other roof technologies
+ effective root membrane for living (green) roofs

In a practical sense the TPO roof was chosen for many reasons that can’t be understated. Firstly the white colour simply doesn’t collect heat in the summer. That means a cooler roof above and below the surface. Recently Toyota Canada installed this surface on one of their plants and saw an 8ºC performance increase in their cooling. That’s huge when you consider the goal is a 24º setting equating to essentially 30%. While showing the roof to a friend, we stood on the 2nd floor deck at noon when the sun was blaring. Though the air temp was just 20ºC, a regular black roof would have been unbearable, but this surface was still feeling like 20º though we needed serious sunglasses. The nice thing was that just inside the house, there was absolutely no warm air blowing in from the surface.

Secondly the white roof colour reflects light (not heat) into the house through the clearstory windows and illuminates the rooms. It’s really spectacular. Have a look at the two ceiling shots and see how well they are lit up considering the shots were taken at 7pm. This should equate to a major reduction in our need for artificial lighting during the day and evening.

Lastly we hope to install a living roof in some sections which with most surfaces would require a special root membrane of inorganic material to resist the plants from breaking down the surface and causing leaks. The TPO is an excellent root membrane so with the additional load capacity we’ve design into the structure, we can freely add to the green roof as we need to.

Maintenance on the roof is simple – keep it clear of debris and give it a wash once and a while if you don’t like the gradual staining due to our dirty cities and blown organic material.

Our house has taken the final shape and size. Thanks to the fine work of the framing crew and of course the effort of the Branthaven design team, our drawings turned out very true to plan without compromise.

Even with detailed drawings, having time to be on site regularly provided us many opportunities to identify potential issues before they came up. More importantly, spending time in the house at this stage prepares you for more detail at a later date.

The 2nd floor is moving along and the final look of the house is taking shape sculpturally. We’ve dreamed, lived and breathed this house plan for so long now that looking at the structure and walking around inside feels like we are taking a walk inside our own heads.

There are a number of passive cooling and heating methods our house will utilize to reduce the need to mechanically condition the living space. One main passive system is the breeze maker or lungs of the home.

The center main floor of the house is flanked front and back with sliding patio doors that can be opened on nice days when interior temperatures are higher than exterior. In most homes, exhausting this warm air quickly can be a problem. With the design of high ceilings throughout the breeze zone combined with clerestory windows at the 14′ ceiling height on three walls, the rising hot air is allowed to escape which in turn does two things. Firstly the rising air creates a low pressure zone on the cool mass floor, pulling air along the floor from other areas of the house as well as any open doors. Secondly the rising and escaping air creates an interior low pressure that should pull in large volumes or exterior air from the patio doors. Depending on the primary wind direction and which doors are opened relative to time of day and shade, we can create a breeze of cooler incoming air.

Since air movement changes the relative feeling of temperature, we should stay comfortable longer with just cool mass floors and exterior air temperature.