BC may well be the best province to live in when it comes to available federal and provincial support for greening your home.

Sales tax exemptions on Energy Star windows, insulation and more, plus Livesmart BC – a rebate program that matches federal Ecoenergy rebates for BC residents, all make living greener more affordable out West.

On the East coast, even PEI boasts an impressive list of supports from low-interest financing on home energy upgrade costs, to sales tax rebates on upgrade expenses and renewable energy equipment.

In fact, up until this week, every province in the country other than Alberta generously offered financial assistance programs to help home owners reduce the carbon footprints of their homes.

In many ways Alberta was a black hole – a wasteland where little help was to be found for those wanting to save energy. Outdone by every province including the Maritimes, Alberta has now waged a come-back, and an impressive one at that. Continue Reading →

Gone are the days when the Eco-Sense updates bubbled with visions of our dreams, and anecdotal observations of absurdities in our society. Reality is here; now is when we find out whether all our talk and thoughts amount to much. Reality is always more scary than dreams.

Yes the house is sustainable… it is built with clay, sand, straw and pumice; majority of the wood is recycled; and we are the poster child for pooping in a bucket. But the question that remains unanswered is, “Is our modern high tech. mud home efficient?” Continue Reading →

Hi I’m Brad, and this is my first blog!

The purpose of this blog is to share some of the low tech but high common sense building techniques I used when designing and building my house to make it substantially more efficient than typical construction houses.

I demolished my old house in May 2006, and I just completed the landscaping for the house last fall (2008). I built the house on my own, acting as the general contractor, and had my step dad helping me. I think that’s pretty good for 1 person to build a house from scratch in 2 years. This blog will explain a bit how I managed to do that. 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 →

Nestled within Green Living Ideas’ collection of practical resources is a top notch piece on why air conditioning is best used as a last resort, if at all. It echoes a few concerns that I’ve been ruminating as this summer steams along.

Beyond an overall discomfort with consuming massive amounts of energy to rid our homes of heat (also energy) while warming the climate in the process, the Eco Air Conditioning piece points out the social and health costs associated with air conditioning systems, and reminds readers of both simple and technical solutions to an overheated home.

Still, it amazes me that as we control our indoor environments, we forget that heat is energy. Why have we not yet found a way to harvest this heat for domestic water heating and other applications? Let’s make like a martial arts master and ‘harness the strength and momentum of our opponent for our own benefit’.

While we await the next generation of heat harvesting-cooling technology, how about we embrace non-technical solutions that don’t rely on energy consumption to kick heat out of the house? Visit Green Living Ideas for the full article.

The human species has this ego that they must know everything about everything. What good is this if it increasingly wrecks havoc on everything else. Ann and I have come to understand, the more we learn the more we realize what we don’t care to know. This makes us stand out a little as we prefer to look to nature for ideas, and accomplish tasks with some basic observations paired with on the spot solution creation (not problem solving). The solutions are not as complex as many may think they are. Whether it is gardening, house building or making appropriate climate friendly decisions, we think the less complex you make the task the more sense it makes in the bigger picture.

Gardening is a prime example of where the common sense and instinct from observing your surroundings provides plenty insight on how plants like to grow. We equate it to our compost system, where lots of different life forms keep everything in balance, and anything that gets too great in numbers always has a predator to knock it down. Nature does the complicated stuff and we can enjoy these simple tasty fruits from a garden that has lots of variety, insects, snakes, lizards, frogs, spiders and the list goes on. Our only rule is don’t worry, if it grows it will grow… if not then it won’t, just watch and observe and work with nature. Continue Reading →