BROOKFIELD’S PASSIVE HOUSE
Pilot project structure designed to use 90 per cent less energy for heating and cooling
In many homes across the Calgary area, during the frosty winter months, the furnace is kept busy.
But through a new pilot project, Brookfield Residential is bringing on a home in northwest Calgary that won’t even need one.
The company is constructing a home in Symons Gate built to the Passive House standard, the only performance-based construction standard recognized internationally.
While other homes in Alberta have been registered through the Passive House Institute, the Brookfield build looks to be the first in the province to receive certification.
One of the benefits to homes built to this standard is that they are designed to use 90 per cent less energy for heating and cooling purposes than similar new homes available today, says Doug Owens, senior director of operations at Brookfield.
“It’s a catchphrase commonly used when it comes to a passive house, they say ‘you can heat it with a hair dryer and cool it with an ice cube,’ ” Owens says.
The passive house approach zeros in on energy usage per square metre, making conservation a priority.
“It’s always more inexpensive to focus on conservation before turning to renewables,” Owens says.
Moreover, this home’s superinsulated walls and ceilings are critical, along with air-tightness and orientating the home to passively capture the sun through cold winter months, he adds.
For example, even “when it’s minus 30 (degrees Celsius) and we barely have daylight in Alberta, this house doesn’t have a furnace in it,” says Owens.
“That’s being done by walls that are 16 inches thick,” he says, adding the entire house is wrapped in a blanket of insulation, providing a thermal break.
“When one of these homes is complete and you’re inside of it, it’s an incredible feeling. It is so comfortable, so quiet,” Owens says, referring to the thick walls and windows. “You can’t hear planes, you can’t hear cars.”
The walls were built and shipped from a factory in Germany. Its triple-pane windows were imported from Austria, as well.
“It’s made of cross-laminated timber and fibreboard,” says Owens. “The best way to describe it without seeing it is — think of a really big wood cutting board. The walls are made out of that, the ceilings are made out of that and the floors are made out of that. It’s just solid timber.”
A heat recovery ventilator unit certified by the Passive House Institute will play a role in the home, as well.
“It extracts all of the heat from any outgoing air from the house and reuses that ( heat) inside the house,” Owens says. “Similarly, when the house is, perhaps, 24 degrees Celsius on a hot July day, it will switch to a cooling mode — without using any energy — and take advantage of the cool air that Calgary has at night.”
The home located at 274 Sage Bluff Drive N.W. is expected to be complete sometime later in 2017, with a formal opening slated for early 2018.
It will be an estate home that measures about 2,500 square feet. A price for its eventual sale has not yet been determined.
“We’re going to see how this house actually behaves, because we are going to operate it as a demonstration house for a year,” Owens says.
During this time, the plan is to show the project to schools, various groups, and government leaders, the builder says.
“We’re going to have an energy monitoring system inside of it so hopefully we’re going to connect to that and people can see how much energy the house is producing through its (solar panels), how much energy each of the appliances are consuming, and what the temperature is on an annual basis.
“We’re going to get one year’s data with the house relatively unoccupied and see how it performed.
Then we’re going to sell that house, and it will be sold to the purchaser with the understanding that we’re going to collect the data (over a one-year period), and we’ll see how that changes the energy profile,” he says.