Imber Akse House – Burlington’s LEED home

Let’s get complicated for a minute. Insulation. What’s complicated about insulation – throw some in the walls and ceilings to meet code, seal it up and you’re good to go right. Wait. Firstly, insulation may be one of the most important components or systems in the home but unfortunately it is behind the walls so you don’t get to stare at it when the house is done, nor do you get to see how it was done…

There are lots of useful website resources to explain insulation types and applications but there are some important concepts that are sadly missed or difficult to locate. Starting with the current and legacy system of insulation in the market – typical pink fiberglass batt and the R-Value.

Idea 1 – R value
Current code in our area requires at least R20 walls and R40 ceilings that will be exposed to the exterior. Traditionally insulation was measured with an R value – the result of a test where a sealed box without studs is lined with insulation and tested to see how long it takes for the temperature inside to change to a warmer or colder exterior temperature. Simple.

The problems with this system as it relates to the use of insulation are many but here are a few main that make the test useless when gauging insulation performance in a practical context; the box doesn’t account for air movement caused by wind or air pressure differences between in and out, introduction of lesser R-value materials like wall studs, leaks or openings in the box envelope to the exterior such as around windows and doors or the biggy, insulation settling over time. It just looks at insulation in a perfect and isolated context.

Idea 2 – Application
Like many materials, the issues with performance can come down to the details of installation and use. That doesn’t apologize for the material in this case however because in reality – this material is designed to fail because it’s a terribly outdated system. During install, the format standards associated with the product have it fit into the gap between studs as we all know – and this fit is relatively snug, enough to support the material most times but the flexibility of the material and lightness means it doesn’t really hand on and is to some degree supporting itself like a post using whatever tensile strength it has. The ends are cut by the installer and are sometime short or long – they are working fast. In the end the batts go in nearly even and almost the right length but there are gaps, lots and lots of gaps. Remember your R Value was 20 in a perfect sealed box – what do you think you have now.

Next remember that the insulation is trapped between studs that are approximately 2” thick and depending on construction method, 6” deep and extend all the way to touch the uninsulated external wall’s interior surface. This means that these studs will be making a conductive connection to the outside world. Studs when measured for R value are said to be approximately R 4 though I’ve seen estimates as high as R 7. None the less, when you add up the amount of studs per square foot, as well as account for all the gaps – between studs and around windows and doors – you end up on average with R 10. What? R 10? Yep.

Idea 3 – Settling and performance
So the vapour barrier goes on and next the drywall and you move in. Over the next few years, the insulation settles. You may have done a reno or two in your life and have seen this big gap at the ceiling when you ripped the drywall off the walls. Yes, a big 12” gap where the insulation sagged from it’s own weight and shrank to reduce the coverage in the wall by as much as 1/8th on an 8’ wall. But does this mean this reduces the performance of the insulation by 1/8th? No, a 1/2” hole in a 10” balloon doesn’t reduce it’s effectiveness proportionately – it fails badly and lets all the air out. And this is what happens to your house – the balloon lets out all the heat from where heat rises – to the ceiling where the walls intersect the ceiling.

Idea 4 – Health
Why is this always last – why does health not have an ROI? Well for us it does and this is why. Once fiberglass insulation starts sagging and air starts passing through the envelope in both directions due to warm air trying to get out or external air being sucked in to replace air whipping out your ceiling or out your hood fan – dirt, dust and organics move through the insulation in both directions – trapping these organic particles not to mention pulling free glass particles into your breathing air. Eventually tears and gaps in your semi permeable vapour barrier (clear poly) allow moisture to enter and get trapped, condensing in cooler areas and when mixed with your dust and organics, creates mold and lots of it. Next, you breath the mold spores which leads to one of the largest interior air quality issues of homes today.

So, not so simple after all. And worth considering. There is a great solution and that’s blown foam. Now nothing is without disadvantages but that’s for another post. Concentrating on only the advantages – blown closed cell foam solves all those issues. In brief the R Value is measured the same but in reality it can be measured using a performance value as a percentage of R. to illustrate, pink insulation has a performance of 40% – it sagged, installed poorly, was porous, had gaps and arrived at less than half of the rated R value. Blown foam is rigid and stays inert for the life of the home while also sticking to and filling all gaps, expanding into any place a vapour of the insulation can get to before expanding. The subsequent finished performance is 95+%, for good. What this means is that if you believe R 20 is an acceptable value to achieve an R 10 in practicality – than in foam the equivalent R 20 depth of insulation will have and R 40 practical relative performance rating. It’s twice as good.

Following that, the foam is a vapour barrier once hardened if not scraped so once a 6mil poly is applied on top, there is very little moisture passing in either direction. Also, since the foam makes a mostly air tight seal, little to no air moves reducing the chance of organics contacting your drywall and creating mold situations – foam cannot support mold growth.

Other benefits are the high acoustical insulative properties that make a home simply the quietest on the block improving your enjoyment and sleep – oh, and did I mention you’ll save a lot of energy. The no VOC after curing, inertness of the material and high energy rating also make it qualify for LEED points.

For our home we chose to go with closed cell blown expanding foam – R 28 in the walls and R 40 in the ceilings. The application is now almost complete and we’re ready for careful vapour barrier application and drywall next week.

Supplier – Jarvis Insulation
The Jarvis team has operated in our area for a couple of generations and has a solid reputation for all types of applications in commercial and residential. Though they would be primarily using traditional insulation, Dave Jarvis has studied insulation methods and materials extensively and tries hard to convince customers that blown foam is where it’s at for all the reasons above. He admits that the price is a barrier of entry for a lot of people but that more and more are making the informed switch. While evaluating contracts from various suppliers, we heard more than a few times that Jarvis was the most knowledgeable and qualified to blow foam in our high performance house and would provide the best guidance and value. This has indeed been our experience.

Recently part of our water collection and grey water re-use scheme was installed. Bushman Canada supplied our 2 x 1980 gallon cisterns that will collect our rain water from the home as well as shower greywater, post filtering and treatment from the greywater recycling unit, from the house. The water collected in the cisterns will be used around the home; irrigation of young plantings and trees, washing cars, topping up the pool and various maintenance needs.

Not only is collecting rain water for reuse a cost saver as you pay for both municipal water in and out, it is also an environment saver. Rain water that runs off a property to the street via hard surfaces and drain pipes simply fills storm sewers and heads to the lake, taking with it a broth of chemicals and particulate that chokes the aquatic ecosystem. Collecting the water and using it for irrigation slowly and responsibly means it gets used by vegetation – converted into natural air cleaning and air conditioning. Furthermore it is slowly released into the water table after being filtered by the soil and plants.

The installation, though seemingly invasive for the massive holes you require for such large tanks, was quick and painless with minimal disturbance of the site. The only downside following the install are the protruding vents and man covers that are necessary for maintenance of the units. With a little planning – which was not entirely afforded to us by surprise – you can do a lot to hide what can’t be avoided. We’ll simply extend the rear patio to cover what we can while building a box/bench to cover the remainder.

Next, the greywater recovery unit will be installed in the house. This unit will filter, treat and temporarily store shower water making it available for our low flush volume toilets and laundry machine. Overflow from the system will head to the cisterns. Eventually, once municipalities come to grips with ecological technologies, we will be allowed to cycle the cistern water back into the house for non potable household needs like laundry.

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.

We were recently introducing our house to some friends and the question of power source — or alternate power source — came up. When we explained that we had chosen Bullfrog Power over an “alternative” at site energy source they smiled patronizingly, adding that we should know that Bullfrog Power doesn’t provide clean power to your home when it comes via the grid silly.

I asked if we invested in an alternative power generation like photovoltaic roof panels or wind in our back yard, and generated in access of what we could use, what would happen to the over production? And if they considered that our power was arguably clean or carbon neutral, would it be possible that our neighbour might, if only for a moment, be using clean power from us? Hmm.

Well this is essentially what Bullfrog Power has to offer. We chose to use or invest in Bullfrog Power, if at least in the short term, as a alternative to investing in non renewable power generation supplied by Ontario Hydro and the local Burlington Hydro provider. Bullfrog Power invests in renewable and arguably clean energy sources, much of which in our area is wind, and channels it to the established grid.

Customers then chose their power provider to be Bullfrog Power and buy electricity from the grid. Bullfrog in turn invests profits back into supporting and creating more alternative and renewable energy production – in our back yard – so to speak.

One technology we’re excited to install in the house is a power monitor. We are considering a device from Power Watch – a design and manufacturer out of Oakville Ontario next door to Burlington where we are. Power Watch makes a clever little unit with big results. With a simple power clamp, it hooks into your electrical panel without need for disrupting wiring or any cutting – it reads current through the wiring insulation. After a couple minute install the unit begins to read energy load on all wires coming from the panel and is fed into an IP Based software program on a PC – wirelessly. Slick.

This is where it all starts as you can begin to see what the house is using and log it 24/7. After bench marking the average consumption of the home for a number of days, you can then begin to see what affects consumption, peak activities, appliances, lighting use behavior all are events that can be monitored. Once you are aware of benchmarks you can set goals for lowering consumption and adjusting mindsets on usage – perhaps you’ll see that the savings of a house warmed to only 19º is attractive compared to 22º — you’ll be able to calculate the savings in real time.

John Schroeter of Power Watch tells me that this technology is so compelling that some municipalities are making it a standard in new construction both commercially and residentially. Apparently some regions are installing this type of equipment as part of the service which they control and monitor because they understand that the more we are aware of energy use, the better we will become at reducing our dependency on and waste of cheap energy.

Contact John Schroeter
905.338.2900 ext. 11
www.powerwatch.com

The solution to save thousands of megawatts and carbon output for Canada is at our fingertips, and in our minds, already. It’s simple – change our perspective on comfort. There’s a reason why Canada and the US consume considerably more energy than the rest of the world and it’s not climate. It’s that we’ve developed an overly keen awareness to comfort — we are far more particular than other cultures. We like it warm in the winter and cool in the summer like everyone but consider the energy necessary to keep a house artificially cooled at 24ºC as compared to 26ºC. It doesn’t sound like it should be much but it usually takes a system a couple of hours to shift 2 degrees throughout the home and that accounts for a lot of energy.

But what if we just decided that 26º or even 28º was perfect in summer and 19º in the winter. That’s it. Then for most of the summer or winter the house would only require venthillation and little conditioning. Then also the system in summer could run the condensor on a low fan speed to remove humidity to make the air feel cooler in a relative sense. Nation wide this would be a major savings.

Using this perspective how would we judge other mechanical systems that require energy? Say lighting? Well we could consider a slightly darker room romantic, especially if we used accent and task lighting instead of a center of the room high wattage bulb trying to do too much. And then there’s our thirst for cold water compared to room temperature – image if we just unplugged all water coolers concluding that room temperature water was just as refreshing.

In the end we pay, as does the environment, for our desire for perceived comfort – for our perspective that’s unrelated to need, health or even average human comfort.

That being said, how will we change or relate our comfort consumption to cost especially when it’s an individual, house by house case scenario. I believe the start is knowing what the real cost is and that’s with a Power Monitor. Over the next year you will be hearing a lot about these devices and ideas. More.

Our feeling is if you’re going to do it, do it well. So when we decided to maintain a romantic throwback to a less efficient era of home, the wood burning fireplace, we agreed to look for the best of both worlds. The criteria was beauty combined with quality and of course efficiency. Beauty and quality are subjective and relative to one’s current condition but efficiency is a standard that is quantifiable.

We found Stüv a few years ago and fell in love. The short list of benefits are:

+ high end of efficiency at 80+% (measured by energy converted from material burned)
+ air tight – for a long hot burn that doesn’t suck your heated home air out the chimney or cause your HRV to cycle to keep up with pressure loss
+ fresh air intake – ported from an outside intake, the combustion air is brought in from the exterior, burned and exhausted through the chimney
+ air to air heating – the interior air is pulled (optionally from the cooler basement) into a heating chamber (not combustion) and blown back out optionally into your ductwork or into the room without pressure or energy loss to your home

The North American distributer, Stüv America is in Montreal which is a plus when dealing with import furniture like this – a Canadian distributer has a smaller market and is often more approachable and inspired by love of the product. Stüv America are great to deal with and delivery is quick with a variety of models in stock. Depending on your area they have set-up a number of dealer installers so check the site. And it has a BBQ on some models but don’t tell the code officials. Recently reviewed on Treehugger.

Not every decision we make can be related to sustainability but this one is easy. In our last home we used sinks and a shower base from WetStyle out of Montreal that we discovered at a design show and have been hooked on ever since. Beautifully quiet styling that is an instant classic. Oh yah, the sustainable part:

+ timeless design and quality means enduring
+ wear resistant and repairable surfaces provide longevity
+ truly recyclable or cross-cyclable material – WETMAR
+ domestically made

Our experience with the product is that it holds heat well – it’s warm to the touch like a wood rather than porcelain or metal surfaces making it a very comfortable. Apparently WetStyle claims the material is a great insulator and holds water to temperature longer than other materials.

An important factor in the decision for us is the domestic story. This product was designed and developed in Canada and is still manufactured here. This means not only 2 weeks delivery from a close locality – it means a sustainable industry that supports our economy, maintaining a sound and responsible relationship with domestic labour at dollars that are relative to our standard of living. Idealistic understanding our dependency on foreign imports of style but a great start at regaining control over our economy.

Our builders, Branthaven Homes and Mike Leyer, have been working with suppliers to source as much FSC Lumber materials as possible. Much of the framing and sheathing comes from FSC mixed sources while other materials are made primarily of recycled chip. Rona, Canada’s largest Canadian distributer, has been a large source for this material and the local store has been paying special attention to the build.

See more on FSC materials at the Canadian site or our post on FSC.