Preliminary air test results on our Passive House

Before any of our electrical and plumbing work begins, we did a blower door test. This tests to see how air-tight our house is. The test we did was only a preliminary blower door test to ensure that our walls are on track to hit the target, even though not all of our windows and doors are completely sealed yet. We did some temporary taping in a few locations in order to perform the test. We also only performed a depressurization test this time (PassivHaus requires both a depressurization and pressurization test). This is because the temporary taping would have failed under pressurization.

The PassivHaus Standard requires an air tightness of 0.6 ACH50 or better. ACH50 stands for Air Changes per Hour at 50 Pascals of pressure, or the total number of times that the entire volume of air in the house will be exchanged through leakage at a given pressure. 50 Pascals is roughly 5 times the pressure that a house would experience on a cold winter day due to difference in temperatures between the inside and outside, so the test ensures that performance at everyday pressures will be ensured.

The results? We achieved 0.47 ACH50 on the first try!! We are very happy with this result. We will retest the house after the last few windows are completely installed to see how we can bring this result down even lower. The lower this number gets, the smaller and more effective our heating and ventilation system can be.

Early results predictions/friendly wagers. Here's hoping we reach Mark's 0.18 with the final.

Construction week 29 – interior walls

Interior walls somehow make the spaces feel bigger

Interior walls are complete. We are holding off on building our service cavities until Mark can perform an air test. He can’t perform the air test until the shell is completely sealed. He can’t finished sealing off the shell until he gets more tape, which he ran out of late on Friday. So...the air test will have to happen next week.

It’s important that the air test happen at this early stage because if we find gaps now, they’re easy to fix. If we wait until after we build the wall cavities, we’d have to take them apart to get at the leaks. The air test is important because the performance of our house hinges on it being of a certain value. Any amount we exceed this value, drastically improves our energy model. Our target is very aggressive, so we’re not expecting to beat it by much. But we hope so. We hope it breaks records ;)

Mark is contemplating whether or not to Periscope the air test. If you want to see it, let us know! Once we’ve run it, we’ll write another post going into a bit more detail.

What else happened last week?

• Our flat roof was insulated. Mark spec’d a ‘dense pack’, but the installer gave us more of a ‘pillow pack’. So they had to return and fix it. Which goes to show it really helps to have a general contractor who knows what to look for. Good job Mark!
• We installed the air vapour barrier against the basement walls, which forms part of our continuous air barrier line.
• The plumbing vents rough-ins went in.
• AND we settled on the lighting for our open space. It’s been a major design dilemma. And had the potential to cost muchos dineros. We got clever and are designing our own lighting system, which you shall see when it comes together in real-time. We’re very excited about ticking that one off the list.

Next week: air test!

Basement air and vapour membrane

Plumbing vents through the roof (pre-insulation)

Attic insulation (blown-in cellulose)

Our building shell carpenter crew

Now that the shell is complete, I’ve been meaning to write a retrospective. What was good about our wall assembly and what wasn’t. What we learned and what we'd do differently next time. I’d like to get some input from the guys who actually built it: Justin, Mark, Blair, Tyler and Kyle from Cornelis Grey. Look for it soon. But for now, I just wanted to give our crew a shout out.

Hats off to them. They were great to work with, super professional and genuinely nice guys. Even our neighbours have commented on how courteous they’ve been, which is a huge bonus (gotta keep them in our good books seeing as how we are borrowing power, water and do need to live beside them eventually). Justin Corkum led the team. Mark really enjoyed working with him. They had a great dialogue back and forth and were able to forge a strong, trusting working relationship. Justin is moving on to another company. While we are keeping most of the crew, we are sad to see him leave. Thanks for all your help Justin!

Justin working on our temporary door — check out the routered handle!

Construction week 22: wall framing complete

The girls are happy (and toasty) in these walls.

At long last, our house has been framed in. (We still need a roof over our heads — a minor matter.) It feels good to have that massive task behind us. Our builders are, no doubt, also quite happy about this.

Our walls were no ordinary walls; they were an experiment/idea Mark had as to what they needed to be and how they needed to come together. This wall phase took a couple weeks longer than anticipated by Mark. There were bumps along the road, and a definite learning curve, but the team hit their groove, in spite of the bone-chilling temps, and put together one helluva house shell. We were fortunate to have such an open-minded and capable team, headed by Justin at Cornelis Grey.

We've rented a crane, for this coming Tues, to lift our roof trusses up so the roof can get going this week. Yay! And we're starting to line up tasks to follow. Windows, insulation, siding... Not to mention a whole slew of decisions requiring our attention, e.g. cabinetry, fixtures, flooring... There's no shortage of things to do.

And here are some shots of the shell from today.

Hello walls

Welcome inside

In the kitchen

The wander window in the 'void'. Only 19'10" high (HA!)

In the loft

Looking towards the back of the house

Rooftop patio

Construction week 15: wall to wall

This week our crew squared up the first floor walls, installed some LVLs (laminated veneer lumber) to support the floor above, framed some interior walls and started putting up floor joists for the floor above.

With the first floor framed in, it's starting to look and feel like a proper house :) Have a look at Mark's Periscope from this past Friday.

We can't believe our luck with the weather these past couple weeks. It has been positively balmy. If mother nature keeps this up, we can shave R-20 and a foot of insulation off our house. Just kidding...I have full confidence that Mother Nature will show up with a vengeance. As she always does for us here in Ottawah. We'll take what we can get.

Floor joists going in.

Our spectacular kitchen window. Deep walls = added counter top!

Construction week 14: first floor framing complete

The sun sets over another week. 

The last two walls went up this Monday. Here is a Periscope from the weekend with a special guest star appearance. Teaser: it was me. We put the final touches on the walls together. 

We are counting our blessings lately for all this "warm" weather. 

Periscope wall framing

Mark's broadcast from site this morning. 

Periscope removes the videos after 24 hours, so I'll start posting them up here for those who may have missed them. (You won't see the questions and comments from viewers, but the content is still all-good).