You may have noticed that things look a little different around here! The Raising Spaces team has been itching to update our online look and is pleased to roll out our new site.

We apologize if you’ve been searching for something during the transition. Please bear with us as we continue to make the updates and changes necessary to raise our new site. In the meantime, here are some quick links.

To find our Green Building Professionals Directory ‘Green Pros’ go to http://greenpros.ca

For our online store, see http://shop.raisingspaces.com

This weekend marks the NetZero Home tour.  Last year a couple friends and I went on an exciting bike tour to see the different styles and design elements of each gorgeous home.  This weekend, Raising Spaces will be showcasing some fantastic products and materials at 7615 111 st.  The Belgravia Homes, as seen in the Raising Spaces “Building the Ultimate Green Effect Homes” will also be a part of the tour, so if you missed the construction tour, now’s the chance to check out sustainable home building at its finest.  Click Here for details on tour information.

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Imagine the ultimate dream home.  A home that produces its own heat and electricity, perfectly designed to generate as much energy as it needs to function annually.  A home with a tangible monetary payback.  Dreams of this perfect home are no longer dreams at all.  As our perspectives on sustainability rapidly adapt with fantastic innovation through design, it is becoming more evident that green design will save the world.  The dynamic Edmonton Net Zero home projects are transforming those dreams into reality, and they’re doing it in style.  Typical home design can find itself lost in a cookie cutter labyrinth lacking both efficiency and creativity. The Net zero home projects in Edmonton are anything but typical.  Effect Home Builders are changing the way we see the home  from the inside out. Each innovative design has a specific function that is carried out with delicate precision and glorious teamwork.  This coming weekend, join the Effect Home builders on an informative construction tour to learn more about the projects.

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The importance of air tightness in building construction cannot be overstated. Very few factors affect energy performance in a cold climate more than air moving in and out of a building.

The Mill Creek Net Zero Home (MCNZ) has achieved an air tightness test result of 0.36 air changes per hour (ACH) at a pressure of 50 Pascal. In other words, when it’s really cold out, which creates a big pressure difference between the inside and the outside of a house, the 0.36 of the air in the MCNZH would leak out and be replaced with cold air over the course of an hour. It has the equivalent of a 13.8 square inch hole in it leaking air all of the time. Continue Reading →

Oh, curse the green product tradeoff! Case in point: Polystyrene insulation is oh so effective at keeping the heat in…or out. Pity about the toxic benzene required to manufacture it and the nasty toxic and bioaccumulating HBCD (hexabromocyclododecane) it contains.

Saving Energy = Good, but Toxic Chems = Bad. And what’s the solution? Perhaps it’s time to make friends with thicker walls insulated with less toxic but slightly less effective materials. Check out the original article at BuildingGreen.com

The construction of today’s modern house expends a lot of energy and creates a lot of waste. We’ve worked hard to reduce waste while building the Mill Creek NetZero Home.

Wood

Green Door Builders framed the home, and along with building us a very airtight double-walled system, they were extremely conscientious about keeping their waste to a minimum. Here is a picture of 100% of the OSB waste that they created:

(a tiny pile of OSB waste, considering that a 2000+ sq. ft. home was framed with OSB sheathing)

Our LEED inspector was very impressed with this tiny pile. Continue Reading →

The lessons that I learned from the computer model of our solar hot water system are as follows:

• insulate the pipes leading from the basement to the collectors to at least R6, preferably R10
• insulate the storage tank to R50
• install a 1000 liter storage tank
• install 3 collectors
• there is extra heat – install a system to harvest it

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(MCNZH concrete floor being bathed by sun through a 9’x6’ window)

The most important design considerations for cold climate building are insulation, building envelope, and passive solar design. Given our lofty goals for the Mill Creek NetZero Home (MCNZH), we pushed hard to maximize our return on every one of these fronts.

The MCNZH collects 54% of its annual space heat through passive solar design – that’s 8747 kWh or 31.5 Gigajoules. It does so by:

1. having huge south windows that are specially manufactured to maximize solar heat gain
2. containing a large amount of thermal mass to absorb the solar heat when the sun shines
3. having movable solar awnings that allow 100% of the sunlight to hit the windows during the heating season (the awnings are strictly speaking not a passive part of the solution). Continue Reading →

I spent the afternoon putting pipe insulation on the hot water pipes in the Mill Creek NetZero Home (MCNZH). I can’t believe how cheap the insulation was – around $100 for the whole house. Its price and the ease with which it is installed make it a must, in my opinion, for those interested in energy efficiency. Anyone can install this stuff, and the insulation is so useful because it just sits and works, saving you energy every single day and never breaking. Continue Reading →