Your connection to the green home improvement movement in Canada. Free Articles, Green Building Forum, Tools & Resources, News & Events, Green Building Blogs, Do it yourself projects, Definitions, and more.
The temptation has always been there for eco-house builders. It’s those damn windows; they are just so useless once the sun goes down. There must be some way to insulate them once they no longer need to be seen through, right? Read the rest of this entry »
»
Mill Creek NetZero Home, December 15, 2009, 14:00.
As we approach the winter solstice and the three-month anniversary of our moving in, we continue to learn about our new house. These observations are mostly qualitative, because we don’t have the rest of our solar modules up, and we haven’t set up monitoring equipment yet. We are tentatively planning to remove the door of our wood stove on July 1st, 2010 and then monitor the house’s energy use for a year. Read the rest of this entry »
»
Mill Creek NetZero Home Heat Recovery Ventilator
I heard a story once about a man who built a house using insulated concrete forms (ICFs). While I don’t advocate their use in general, ICFs have some distinct advantages (certainly over conventional construction). The primary of these advantages is supreme air tightness. ICF homes (those that are built with ICFs from top to bottom) can achieve hourly air change rates of 0.2. In contrast, the Mill Creek NetZero Home has an airtightness measurement of 0.36 ACH, which is really amazing for a wood-framed house. Read the rest of this entry »
»
The best way that I can think of to add a large amount (20+ tonnes) of thermal mass to a solar home is by adding concrete floors. By doing this, one can get two uses, thermal storage and a finished floor, out of the same investment. Furthermore, since the mass of a concrete floor is so spread out around the home, thereby giving it a large surface area with which to absorb and release heat, it really is the ideal thermal storage medium for a house with large solar gains. Read the rest of this entry »
»
Mill Creek NetZero Home Living Room – finally some autumn sunshine!
Have you ever noticed that as soon as you move in to a solar house the sun stops shining? It’s been overcast since the beginning of October here in Edmonton – since just after we moved into the Mill Creek NetZero Home – and the fact that Edmonton has as many hours of sunshine as Miami has seemed hard to believe at times. Finally we have the return of sunny days, and the house is great to be in right now. Read the rest of this entry »
»
The Mill Creek NetZero Home is substantially completed.
The stucco is finished on the outside. We went with a cement-based stucco because of its looks and durability.
Peter Amerongen built a brick wall behind the wood burner. We used the bricks from the foundation of the house that used to be standing on the property. This wall adds more thermal mass (to capture both solar and wood heat) to the house, as well as a bit of history. Read the rest of this entry »
»
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. Read the rest of this entry »
»
You can’t put a price on your family’s health. When we set out to build the Mill Creek NetZero Home, we were determined to make it a healthy living environment for us, our children and those who visits us.
The factors that are most responsible for making a home’s air toxic are paint, formaldehyde and carpet. Read the rest of this entry »
»
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. Read the rest of this entry »
»
The lessons that I learned from the computer model of our solar hot water system are as follows:
»
