Imber Akse House – Burlington’s LEED home

Brian Miller of Creative Woodworks delivered our bar stools that he made for us the other day. Wow, what a beautiful job. These stools integrate into our island so that when we aren’t using them, my obsessive order personality won’t be urged to constantly arrange them.

The great thing about designing for working with artists and craftspeople like Brian is in the collaborative process. We design to our needs and esthetic and the artist uses their experience and guidance to make it work better. The collaborative result is greater than if you just asked someone to make something and follow specification to the letter. As long as the process involves open communication as to what will evolve and for what reason, there are no surprises except for how dam good it can be.

A little about the kitchen and stools. The cabinets are made from solid and veneered walnut harvested locally in Dundas. Many of the Walnut trees in that area are coming to the end of their lifespan and falling naturally where a number of mills are collecting and milling for lumber. The counter tops are both solid Walnut from Dundas and Maple — both protected with a natural oil except for the cooking countertop which is an Ontario granite called Kodiak (brushed). The cabinets are no VOC formaldehyde free veneered plywood and coated with a no VOC waterbase sealer.

Creative Woodworks (905.659.8888) www.creativewoodworks.ca

—–

Incidentally, some health conscious readers may wish to wade into the learning about Radon and its relation to Granite and new homes. Though we may opt to test our home for radon emissions, we’re not worried with the materials we’ve chosen including this Ontario Granite.Make sure you read the comments following the article as the article is a little leading and fluffy to base an opinion.

http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/07/28/granite-linked-to-high-levels-of-radon-gas-exposure/
http://www.nsraweb.com/forums/news-5/radon-granite-testing-9130.html

It’s down to paint, wood coatings and a touch more tile now — just a week or so to go. Everything looks amazing and we’ve been testing all the systems to ensure they run as planned. I’ve updated the gallery with many great images of the kitchen and stairs with more to come soon.

The final finesse work is underway – paint is finishing, bathroom tile underway, vanities and the kitchen goes in next.

Last night I had the opportunity to present an overview of our home and our experiences of building LEED to the Burlington Sustainable Development Committee. Steve Stipsits and myself had 20 minutes to cover subjects that could have been days worth of discussion but as an overview, I think it was informative. It was also a very good sign that there are people surrounding the city with progressive ideas. I applaud them.

There were some very good and telling questions – many of which were impossible to answer however in such a short time. For example, we are often asked “what does building LEED cost above building regularly?”. A good question but a philosophical one as I’ve highlighted in previous posts. See Rationalizing Building Sustainably or Sustainable Building is Upside Down.

Another great question was were there any hurdles or impedances with the city? Ikes. Again, the answer is deep but in short – some very small practical issues. Yes there were a couple of situations which were unusual and unreasonable. For example when we submitted our finished plans to the city for approval, we were told we couldn’t use cork flooring in the kitchen…

When we asked for a reason, we were told that it wasn’t durable enough for the kitchen — no further explanation. No consideration that it is recycled, recyclable or even that the subjective judgment didn’t take into account the user and their habits for wear. Never-the-less we adjusted the plans to not show cork and resubmitted. Now this seems like no big deal. But think this through. How much time did this cost us and how much money aside from time delay — Branthaven had to do the paperwork to submit twice, go down to the city twice, and have an architect redraw the plans for us and reprint multiple sets, twice. I would estimate that this arbitrary and uneducated off hand conclusion by the city cost us $1000 or more dollars.

So what. In the grand scheme of things this issue is tiny – compared to the mounds of paper and plans, compared to the overall budget. But, if you consider that every dollar we have to make has an exponential negative effect on the ecology and resources than it was more like tens of thousands or piles of carbon footprint. But I think the greater issue is in what the situation represents.

What it represents is a general lack of understanding or engagement by the city. That this person practices in the city without an education on sustainability in even a basic sense is challenging. That this person, independent of the standards within the city, can affect a project that is looking to make change and improve our community is addidng difficulty to an already tedious endeavor. And also that their is no process internally at the city to connect planning, engineering and permitting to understand the needs and differences in LEED or Green builds so that they can have a more communicative and proactive involvement with this leading form of construction within their own fence. This is the real issue – the city is not engaged and doesn’t yet have a process for change management with regard to LEED or sustainability. They suffer, like most of the industry, from ignorance and a passive resistance to change – leaving it for someone else to deal with, the next shift, on another day.

To reach sustainable goals, we all have to get involved, all absorb the R&D costs and do our part. This can’t exclude the city, or any of us.

Barry Imber and Leslie Akse are just a few weeks from moving into one of Canada’s first LEED homes. The Burlington couple’s house meets the stringent criteria of the new LEED Canada for Homes program, which was launched in early March. Built by Branthaven Homes, the Imber Akse house was part of the Canada Green Building Council’s (CaGBC) pilot project, to deliver a Canadian version of the standard for the low-rise residential market, a standard that is recognized as the pinnacle of green certification.

“When the clients approached us and described the sustainable home that they wanted, all of the features fell within the LEED standard,” says Steve Stipsits, president of Branthaven Homes. “We approached the CaGBC and the house became part of the pilot project. This house meets LEED Gold certification and it may even achieve Platinum, which is the highest certification you can receive.” The Imber Aske home replaces a dilapidated house, in an infill site in Burlington. Branthaven Homes had to first demolish the existing house and successfully divert 90% of materials for recycling. The home’s mechanical systems include geothermal heating and grey water recycling. For passive heating and cooling, windows have overhangs, to shield out the sun in summer and to attract heat in winter, when the sun is lower on the horizon. The house has ample windows for natural light and all windows open to allow breezes to flow through the home.

“The more breeze you have, the less need there is for air conditioning,” Stipsits says. “Even some of the interior walls have windows, so that a breeze can pass easily from room to room.” More stringent than the Energy Star for New Homes standard, LEED Canada for Homes takes into consideration criteria above and beyond a home’s energy efficiency. Materials used and percentages of waste, water efficiency, indoor air quality, innovation and design and the location of a home in relation to public transportation and accessibility to amenities all earn a project credits for LEED certification. Awareness and education is a key component, and the Imber Akse home even has a dedicated website (www.imberaskehouse.ca ), which chronicles details about the home’s construction and its small environmental footprint. The LEED Canada for Homes program applies to single-family homes and multi-family buildings of up to three stories. In Whitby,

Liza Communities’ Shorelands is Canada’s first LEED townhome community. A total of 227 homes feature a combination high-velocity natural gas heating systems, thermal fixed-glass low-E windows and living fences that have greenery growing against interwoven lattices.

“With the expansion of green certification programs, people have become a lot more inquisitive about the environmental features of their homes, and the community at large,” says Nargus Mansouri, director of sales and marketing for Liza Communities. “Shorelands showcases sustainable living in a townhome community. Purchasers love the LEED designation, but they are also impressed with the look of the community – its overall design, the architecture of the buildings and the layout of floor plans.” Various green certification programs, including Energy Star for New Homes and GreenHouse, provide builders with several options as they move to develop more sustainable communities in the new homes market. LEED Canada for Homes’ holistic approach to home construction delivers more than 30 to 40%savings in energy consumption, which saves homeowners in energy costs and improves the environment. As demand for the program grows and awareness increases, builders will be encouraged to offer this option to the home buying public.

“At the Chapter level, our members are green building specialists across southern Ontario, with a membership that is 1,700 strong,” says Lyle Shipley, executive director for the Greater Toronto Chapter of CaGBC. “For years, people have been looking to LEED, as the next logical step in green certification, and now Toronto homebuilders have that option.”

Most, if not all of the conversations we have about our home centres around the choice to go sustainable and inevitably the costs associated with this choice. How much extra does it cost to build sustainable or LEED?

Well, presuming those are both the same thing and I don’t believe they are entirely, you have to decide first on your philosophy around EXTRA cost. Oh no you say, here he goes. Wait. I’ll break the argument into multiple parts over a series of posts.

Part 1 – Quality vs. Sustainable

Really, this is a good question. I’ve known many people who’ve either had a custom home built for them or have purchased a new production home and have in all cases been at the helm of the selections of materials from the guts to the finishes. The burden of choice.

In all cases they had to come to terms with the level of perceived quality that they wished to balance — costs versus return of enjoyment. This can be apposing scales where you pay too little and there is product failure or you pay to much and there is buyer’s remorse. However, in most cases, they chose perceived quality and they paid. That said, and cynicism aside, was there a possibility that the products were actually of good quality? Of course. In any product is there a guarantee that it is of best quality? No. But chances are that the highest quality is also the most costly to produce and therefore the most costly in market. So if you combine perceived quality with price…

If anyone has been through the selections process, they’ll know that there is no shortage of choice out there. All choices come with differentiation; imported, efficient, trendy, inexpensive, beta, designer, sustainable etc. — all are attributes associated with the product or the buyer but not what defines its use. Sustainable is only an attribute in the end no matter how intrinsically important we may believe it is.

The long point I’m heading to is that one of the key features of a sustainable product is in its quality. Sure, measuring sustainability is a complex matrix that includes cost of manufacturing on the environment, human health, geographic location relative to build site, economic disparity and so on. But a big component is still quality in performance and longevity of use. So, if quality accounts for a large part of the cost of a product or material, how much of the cost of the material is locked up in the purely sustainable portion. As likely none as much as it may be all.

In all practicality, I’m guessing next to none. My guess and philosophy is that beyond quality, the cost impact on sustainable goods is being absorbed by the manufacturer and our economy for now, perhaps not purely altruistically but rather in a muddle of  R&D minus grants plus pollution controls less tax breaks plus worker safety and process reporting etc. minus cheap fuel and money. In the end, the most practical cost basis for pricing sustainable goods is cost of material in, plus, labour and overhead — the same as making any decent quality product in a domestic market.

So, to sum up, we believe that because our house is built of quality and long living products and materials first, with a focus on sustainable best practices as a decisive differentiator between a myriad of product choices, sustainability had little bearing on final cost. Choice and an open market based on competition regulates this naturally.

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.