A real LEEDer in green building is ready to go
A newly minted apartment building in Southlands will be southern Alberta’s first affordable housing unit that meets certified environmental and energy standards above the norm.
“There’s likely nothing you can see on the building that says ‘That’s what they did differently,’” said John Bulmer with Medicine Hat’s land and properties department, on the 16-unit building on Southlands Blvd. that will soon welcome tenants. The building is set to meet the silver LEED standard.
“LEED is a voluntary green building standard that provides better buildings through better products and techniques,” explained Tyler Hermanson, LEED facilitator with 4 Elements Integrated Design.
And while many buildings have green elements to them, LEED-certified buildings are fully-inspected and verified by a third party to make sure various standards have been met, he said. The apartment building is one of the few LEED certified buildings in Medicine Hat, and the first LEED certified affordable housing project in southern Alberta.
It has 16 units, four of which are barrier free, four adaptable and eight “regular.” Four are studio apartments, while the rest are one bedrooms.
Durable siding, “more robust” shingles for handling hail, and landscaping that doesn’t require as much watering are just some of building’s features, said Bulmer.
“A lot of what you can’t see is between the siding, like a tighter seal,” he said, likening air leaks to “throwing money out of the walls.”
The strongest section on the building’s LEED evaluation is energy efficiency, said Hermanson.
“We have improvements to the lighting, we used all energy star lightbulbs,” he said. Central heating and infloor heating make the site more energy efficient, while heat recovery ventilation, hardfloor surfaces instead of carpets — even paint with fewer vapours — make for better air quality for tenants.
Use of construction material was reduced by using wider spacing on studs and wood tressing, said Hermanson, and there was also almost a 40 per cent diversion of construction waste from the project, with clean wood reused and recycled.
“I think we definitely saw improvements in the execution because the teams knew their work was being checked, so we did get tighter, lower test results,” he said.
Comparisons
The building is also “pretty much identical” to a neighbouring housing unit built a couple years ago, said Bulmer. This includes the same architects (Alvin Reinhard Fritz Architect Inc.) and same build team, although some different contractors. But the older building was built to regular code.
“This (new) one should be cheaper to run,” said Bulmer, estimating it will be five to 10 per cent cheaper to handle, plus the benefits of using more durable building material.
“It will be interesting to see if the buildings perform differently over time, if there’s different feedback from the tenants on what it’s like to live in the different units,” said Hermanson. “The theory is that the additional quality assurance that we do on the LEED building results in better operation, better education, better execution of the project.”
The main cost to reach the LEED standard was the couple thousand dollars needed to bring an inspector down from Edmonton, said Bulmer.
“There really wasn’t a lot of extra costs,” he said, so it doesn’t impact the economic viability of the project considering its $2.1 to $2.2 million cost.
An open house is planned for later this month.