Energy transformation

A leaky, older home in Ottawa promises to become one of the most energy-efficient homes in Canada


By Patrick Langston, Ottawa Citizen
 
 

 
A disreputable septuagenarian in Ottawa is about to become a model citizen.


Scott and Jenny Demark bought a rundown, environmentally heedless house in the city’s desirable Glebe neighbourhood. Built in the 1920s and leaky as a BP oil well, it scored an abysmal 39 on the EnerGuide scale during a recent energy audit. That’s the equivalent of having a three-and-a-quarter-square-foot hole in the wall.

Promising to make this nothing less than one of the most energy-efficient retrofits of a single-family home in Canada, Demark plans to push that EnerGuide rating to a perfect 100, cut energy consumption by 90 per cent, and install a hulking 10,000-litre cistern in the basement to capture rainwater for use in toilets and to irrigate the garden.

"We’re just worried about the planet," says Demark, a father of two youngsters. "We’re sort of a tree-hugging family."

His partner in the project is Rodney Wilts. The duo own Ottawa’s BuildGreen Solutions (www.build-green.com), which provides consulting and development management services for green building projects with high sustainability aspirations. Part of the Windmill Developments Group of companies, BuildGreen Solutions has been a player in larger-scale eco-conscious projects in the United States and Canada, including Ottawa’s The Currents, which is awaiting certification as the city’s first LEED Gold/Platinum condominium building.

"We’ve been looking for an opportunity to demonstrate things we’ve been doing on large-scale projects by applying them to a single-family home," says Wilts, who’s helping to manage his business partner’s retrofit. He explains that, like some other projects the two have worked on, the Ottawa retrofit will meet the strict standards of One Planet Communities (www.oneplanetliving.org). That organization offers 10 principles for eco-conscious development including carbon neutrality, using healthy and sustainable building materials, minimizing waste and using water more judiciously.

Demark, who’s designing the Ottawa project with help from Ottawa architects Tobias Fellows and Carolyn Jones, says he and his wife searched for seven months before settling on the vacant two-and-a-half storey, red brick home with the big maple tree in front. "We live on McLeod Street now and wanted to keep living in the core. There’s less of an ecological footprint than living in the suburbs."

Unable to find an infill lot that provided the passive solar heating they demanded, the couple settled on the Ottawa house.

"We paid a lot for a house in very bad shape, but if we need to sell, we’ll be in a decent area to get our money back."

All told, the retrofit will run around $400,000.

That doesn’t include extras, such as raising the roof to convert the home to a full three storeys. The whole adventure, including lots of technical detail, is being posted regularly at www.buildgreen.com/blog.

The ambitious retrofit is not without hurdles.

As part of their plan to radically upgrade the building’s envelope, for example, Demark and Wilts decided to insulate the walls to R50. Exterior insulation was out of the question, because the city’s setback regulations restricted increases in the home’s physical footprint. They also wanted to retain most of the brick cladding.

Adding a lot of interior insulation meant losing floor space in a home that is already less than 20 feet wide. After considerable number-crunching and pondering such eco-issues as the troubling petroleum content of some insulating foams, they’ve settled on a combination of Icynene, polyiso and Roxul insulation. That means walls, which are 17 inches in some spots, are dandy for keeping heat and cold in their proper places.

Wilts says the insulation will be so effective that the family can count on warmth generated by their bodies and daily activities, including cooking and showering, as one of the home’s heat sources.

Insulation will also trap large amounts of solar heat from the planned expanse of glass on the home’s south-facing wall (the maple tree shades the house in the summer), a small wood stove will help keep things cosy and, on the coldest days, baseboard heaters will kick in.

The retrofitted home will include a three-kilowatt photovoltaic solar system on the roof. Demark plans to feed the electricity generated by the system into the grid under Ontario’s microFIT program for renewable energy from small producers. Under the plan, producers sell the electricity to the Ontario Power Authority at 80 cents a kilowatt hour and buy back what they need at standard homeowner rates.

Coupled with the cistern and passive solar heating, that rooftop system should make the house a net-zero energy consumer. Mentioning Minto’s demonstration EQuilibrium house in nearby Manotick, Wilts says: "There are examples of net zero homes around here, but they’re in suburban or quasi-rural areas. We wanted an urban one."

Since the home is within walking distance of city amenities and public transit, Demark and his family will rely only minimally on greenhouse gas-producing automobile transportation when they move into their new home by Christmas.

The house, which Demark says will have a modern esthetic while retaining traditional elements, including the red brick facade, will use non-toxic new materials whenever existing ones can’t be reused.

"We’re hoping people in the neighbourhood will ask questions about it," says Demark.

"We don’t see what we’re doing as financially possible for most people, but we do have to upgrade our existing housing stock." he says.

"Investing in the building envelope is a good place to start, and people understand how that impacts their footprint."

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