Imber Akse House – Burlington’s LEED home

Mike Leyer and crew worked hard today to get the floor deck and walls in place to complete the first floor shell. Space is really starting to take shape and it is the first reality check to remind us that it’s a cozy, not palatial space.

It’s also a good reminder to us that we have designed a conservative floor plan in today’s standards but not in tomorrow’s standards. As energy will inevitably become more dear, if not scarce, space and our perception of it will be the visual sign of cause and effect. Like the energy crunch in the ’70s brought on smaller cars, this energy crunch will also bring on smaller, more efficient homes. As we’ve been hearing, homes and buildings are the largest source of greenhouse gas and consumption in our society — fuel to build, heat, operate and fill with consumables and fixturing – all related to square footage. So, our thoughts are that in order to be sustainable, marketable and relevant to the next generation, we should build somewhat conservatively now.

One of the ways we’ve chosen to relieve the feeling of tight space is by designing with taller ceilings and increased light access through ceiling level windows — tall and bright. This solves other issues by reducing the load on land and lessoning the need for artificial light. Also brighter spaces increase enjoyment and improve health of the interior environment.

The framing started today. Yes framing and not ICF, straw, or otherwise. These and other technologies all have their merits, as well as faults if only by lack of practicality to our situation. Our situation being that we are building a house in a market where sustainable suppliers are currently hard to locate and far and few in between compared to the suppliers lined up to provide legacy ideas. We’re lucky, we’ve found a sustainably sympathetic building partner but what about everyone else?

It’s worth commenting that sourcing green materials and sustainable products is still too difficult. Not because they aren’t available; literally thousands of options abound on the internet and in every consumer mag you pick up today. It’s that the end suppliers haven’t picked up those magazines yet – the trades, renovators, supply companies, builders, wholesalers – the supply chain – and it’s here where the greatest influence lays, with the expert and the ones you trust with your home and your wallet. They are undoubtedly aware, but like most industries it’s easy to dismiss impending change or the demand for change as, impractical, or not relevant to the existing consumer.

I’ve read a number of articles by suppliers and builders that say the average consumer doesn’t want to pay for green building – and they can’t afford to carry the burden for the consumer. Meanwhile the consumer is looking for these solutions in ever increasing numbers but meeting resistance. It sounds like there must be a lot of pressure in the middle somewhere. As a business owner I understand the pressures of change and change management is a major concern and investment in any business – but it’s just that. A responsible investment in your business is education toward change, change in processes and procedures. In the case of building, change will be mandatory and waiting until regulation comes means suicide for business and unfortunately the ecology.

So this disconnect is very hard to manage for consumers and sustainable minded people who wish to build responsibly. We received a note from a reader preparing to build in ‘09 who concurs – feeling that already the weight of responsibility to source materials and provide green ideas will rest on them. I hope they can manage to inspire their contractor to learn and change and go along for the ride with them, it will be worth it for everyone.

This might have been our most difficult decision – windows. Not just a means to look out, the windows are the je ne sais quoi of the building, the invisible home element that can elevate a simple room into a spectacular room, or frame a purposely austere interior into context.

But more importantly, the windows are holes in your house if not selected properly and positioned in logical places. Windows account for a serious loss in energy because of many factors but simply their materials – glass and wood – are not insulating to the levels your walls are. They are a means of thermal transfer where the warm energy in the home during winter conducts to the colder exterior air – like an electrical connection it zips out through the glass. Conversely in summer, exterior temperatures are sucked toward the cooler interior temperatures while also the summer sun penetrates the interior through the glass heating up interior surfaces.

Consequently you need a good technology to lesson this natural problem with glass. Most windows sandwich a gas between two or three pieces of glass which provides a thermal break, lessoning the thermal transfer – (Low E). In addition many companies also add any number of coatings or films to the glass to keep energy from transferring in both directions (Low U). The result are high energy efficient windows that are Energy Star rated – the minimal expectation for a performance LEED home. That means sourcing a quality manufactured window with excellent thermal properties measured in E’s and U’s. Low E and low U windows are offered by most window companies and certainly by all worth buying from.

Selecting a window by quality and energy rating are certainly the top of the list of factors but in our case, especially when there are apples to apples comparisons between companies, we had other considerations. Other factors we considered when choosing our windows were:

+ Responsibility: did the company participate in material conservation or stewardship initiatives like FSC or their own version of corporate responsibility

+ Materials: has the window company tried to minimize negative materials in their production — VOC producing or harmful to employees

+ Locality: where are they made and how far do they have to travel – supporting a local economy is a benefit where possible

+ Cost: every extra dollar we spend on one technology means less for another technology

+ Knowledge: Understanding or compatibility with the LEED process

In the end, there were 3 manufacturers that made the short list: Pollard from Burlington Ontario, Pella out of Iowa, and Loewen from Manitoba. Each company had it’s advantages; locality, perceived quality, style, energy efficiency and natural resource stewardship. In the end we chose Pella for the balance of the majority of our criteria.

As consumers or specifiers we all have the privilege of choice. Choice to consume, choice in what to consume, choice in with whom we’ll chose our products to consume. Consequently we have a lot of power with our dollar, much more than we realize. Over the decade there has been a quiet revolution – the consumer choice revolution. Consumers have been quietly expressing forms of idealism while shopping; sometimes called responsible or simply choosy they are directing their dollars towards products that resonate and make sense to them – green, responsible, philanthropic, community minded – these are the attributes consumers are using to make critical differentiating determinations between brands or manufacturers because we can. We have that luxury.

In a consumer perspective, one such responsible differentiator is FSC. Forestry Stewardship Council certifies companies within a chain of custody, following a tree from its managed forest, through the mill, to the manufacturer and finally to the retailer. This chain is managed, audited and always traceable to ensure that every stage maintained a responsible use of the material as well as responsible management of waste materials with the goal of achieving a very high rate of recycling. It really makes sense.

For LEED, sustainable or green homes, FSC is a key concept as it does the work for the purchaser, saving you the trouble of responsibility up the chain where you might have had little control in the past. On an earlier post we talked about the idea of upstream pressure when considering change and responsibility and FSC is precisely this idea at work. With FSC, the end user is empowered in their decision – to choose FSC or not.

Unfortunately FSC is still in its early years and consequently supply of materials are limited – a chicken and the egg scenario because consumers aren’t yet driving the FSC demand, and the FSC supply isn’t driving consumer demand. What can we do? Well a few years ago a local lumber supplier, Nicholson and Cates, decided to go down the road of certification because they felt it was the right thing to do. Nic Cates supplies retailers in Canada and the US so they considered that this would be a benefit to their customers, the retailers, as it could be a good differentiator between retailers among consumers. Now that they have their certification, they’re finding demand for FSC material slow to pick up and to make matters worse, the supply of FSC material from up the chain is more difficult to source than regular goods.

Nevertheless they insist that FSC is right for their industry and they will do what they can to educate their customers and supply anyone who wants the FSC material. We met with Nic Cates recently to review the possibilities for our home as we require framing and roof deck materials as well as exterior cedar. We wanted to know what retailers/resellers would be carrying these materials and they are going to act as a sourcing agent to direct us to available FSC materials at area retailers as well as work with a retailer of our choice to bring in specifically what we need. Hopefully we’ll be able to make FSC a practical requirement.

If you ever want to feel the meaning of footprint in all its emotional and physical impact – build a house. We have forms. With it we can see the beginning of the home take shape in terms of proportion and scale – an amazing feeling of reality and familiarity with a floor plan shape we’ve stared at for years on paper now sitting in the ground at hundreds of times larger than we’re used to seeing. Tomorrow, concrete.

Years of dreaming, planning, designing and preparation and we’re finally here. Demolition day – the beginning of a schedule to build our home. We watched the bullish efficiency of the demo and could only think – we’re committed now. Hopefully the remainder of the project will go with such apparent confidence and ease.

One of the passive technologies we’ve designed into the house and hope to utilize is the passive fresh air vent. Airtight efficient homes require fresh air to supply not only a forced air heating system but simply fresh air to breath. If allergies to outside air is not an issue as in our case, there is no need to filter outside air before it enters the home, you need only acclimate that air so that you don’t have to waste energy to heat or cool it. This is done by pulling air from the outside close to the ground, through air intake tubes that run underground, then through your foundation and tie into your ventilation system. Tah dah!

Instead of using electric fans to pull the air, this system uses the natural high and low pressure zones that occur in the home when warm air rises to the ceiling. The low pressure on the floor is a vacuum which pulls for any air it can get. Instead of that air being yanked from wall sockets or under wall baseboards (you’ve all seen the black streaks on white carpet at the base of walls), the path of least resistance is through the tube.

The pulling of the air through the underground thermal mass acclimates it to roughly ground temperature (12ºC+-) in summer or winter before bringing it into your home. This is essentially what a component of a good HVAC system does. We’re guessing that with the right thinking we can tie this into the heat exchanger so that we bring the air to interior temperature even further and reduce humidity in the summer. This system is passive and replaces electronic methods that might have pulled air from the roof or soffit height wall vents. This passive vent is sometimes called the Earth Tube. More info at TheNaturalHome.com