The house factory: an adventure in pre-fab

We took the kids to check out the "house factory" yesterday, aka Green Giant Design Build's assembly shop, which is just outside of Picton. The owner, Adam, is just putting the final touches on it. It will be up and running this spring and our house will be one of the first off the line. 

The basic shell of our house will be made in Adam’s factory, loaded on to a truck, and assembled on-site in a matter of days (vs. weeks using traditional construction techniques). There are some major benefits to be had by going this route, not the least of which is cost. 

All the building stuff is very cool, but I’ll let Mark or Adam discuss it in more detail as construction approaches. 

Meanwhile, I’ll tell you a bit about the factory building itself. Adam’s shop is tucked inside an old airplane hangar that was once part of a WWII Army Barracks. The whole scene is surreal. Row upon row of identical, weathered, old, shingle-clad buildings – all of which are now commercially rented out, though you would never know to look at them. It looks like a ghost town. Inside the airplane hangar was a treasure trove of random objects like: the Niagara Falls fire truck, pair of Airstream trailers and heating ducts from a cement factory. So very bizarre and fascinating. Take a look at the pics.

No furnace

Our new furnace

This winter has been a particularly harsh one, with record breaking (and soul breaking) cold temperatures. In our older, traditional neighbourhood rental home, we’ve often had the furnace cranked up to 23° and have still been suffering from cold toes and sniffly noses. Even with a higher efficiency furnace, our Enbridge bills have been hefty this year.

It seems unfathomable that we could live in such a climate without a furnace. But apparently we can. We will not be installing one in our new home. Neither will we install in-floor radiant heating or a pellet stove. Nothing, nada: zilch. The heating requirements of our home will be mostly satisfied simply by living in it — heat from our bodies, cooking, bathing, etc. The size of heat source that we will need to make up that last little bit of heat will be only about as big as the collection of candles you see above.

Impossible you say? Wrong. One of our builders, Casey, built himself a Passive House last year in Manotick and tweeted this earlier this week: 

Energy cost for the coldest month on record in our 3000sqft #fossilfuelfree #passivhaus = $10.63 What do you think @LeoDiCaprio #WeNeedMore

Pretty impressive. I won’t be missing those Enbridge bills.

Another nice little tidbit: a Passive House can't freeze. So no worries anymore about having your furnace konk out or power go down during the middle of a polar vortex. Take that ice storm '98! What'd I tell you: makes sense.

Event: The Economics of Sustainability

Last night I attended an event put on by CSC (Construction Specifications Canada) with Mark. It was on “The Economics of Sustainability”. A hot topic, seeing as how the event sold out and many discussions continued to take place well beyond ending time. 

I really enjoyed what Nadine Gutz had to say. She’s from a company called Interface, which makes carpets from recycled nylon. And hearing from Economist Rob Conboy at Better, which is trying to get the ball rolling on financing sustainable building practices in the US. This is hugely important because there will be no widespread adoption unless the economics make sense.

Gunter Lang, from the Passivehaus Network in Austria also spoke. He's been building these houses for 20 years now and walked us through some European Passivhaus projects. Did you know that in Brussels, all public buildings MUST be build to Passivhaus? In Vienna, they are building Passivhaus skyscrapers? And in Heidelberg they are building a whole 7,000 unit community, including grocery stores, schools and even brothels, to Passivhaus? It's so commonplace over there. It wasn't 20 years ago. We're on the foothills of the revolution over here. 95% of the evening’s conversation ended up being about Passivhaus. Wow.

Adam Cronk, from Green Giant Design Build, introduced our house and our blog. I love this guy. His mandate is to “embarrass builders” by showing how affordable it can be to build by building pre-fab. Hip hip hooray. We are super excited to be working with Adam on our project.

So now the community knows about our blog. It's really happening. And I feel very excited by the level of enthusiasm there was at the event last night.

And now for some comic relief:

Slide from Gunter's presentation. An advert for Passive House from <can't recall where>. Apologies to those whose heads I've cut off.

Why can’t we be friends? Good design and Passivhaus

Can a Passivhaus building also win over architecture fans? Are good design principals and Passivhaus principals mutually exclusive? We certainly hope not. But as we are in the throws of designing our home, we are discovering that it ain’t easy being green.

Mark and I finally arrived at a design we loved. We went over to the lot, staked it out, and were generally feeling pretty fantastic about what we had come up with. *Pat on back* That is, until Mark started the energy modelling. The numbers weren’t looking as good as we had hoped. If we increase the thickness of our walls (from 18” to 24”), put in top-of-the-line triple-glazed windows, and added a sources of heat (radiant floors/ducting), we’d still be borderline for Passivhaus. 

If we had a large lot, with great exposure and few neighbours – building a Passivhaus that met our architectural/design snobbery requirements would be no promlemo. Our lot, however, poses several large challenges in terms of Passivhaus design:

1. It’s narrow. The narrow shape of our lot wills a narrow house plan. Plus we need to push the house as far over to the North side of the lot as possible, to allow for better exposure on the South-facing windows – further increasing the need for a narrow house plan. However, for best energy performance, a more square shape is preferable. How do we create more of a square plan while maximizing solar gain on those South windows?
2. Limiting distance. Limiting distance in the building code restricts the number of windows we are allowed to have on a side facade facing neighbours. Our South facade just so happens to be along the side of the house, facing the orange neighbours. So depending on the area of our south facade, we’re only allowed a small fraction of it to be windowed. We’re looking at 10–12% window coverage. This is pretty piddly compared to the area of window we would like to have. 

Never to back down from a challenge, we are readdressing the design to see what changes we might be able to make. Hopefully just tweaks, and not a major overhaul. We may feel slightly deflated by this set back, but are still determined to make friends out of these two…without breaking the bank…