Mike Holmes’ eco-friendly reno rescue
Christina Kovalik wrote a tearful seven-page letter to reno guru Mike Holmes, in 2005. Two years previous, Christina and her husband, Joe, hired a family friend to fix up their small bungalow in Toronto. The $200,000 job went off the rails very quickly–shoddy work and unexpected costs–so they put a stop to it. In retaliation, the renovator put a $535,000 lien on the house. Amid piling debts and a crumbling house, Christina made her appeal to Holmes, hoping he and his crew could fix thingsup.
Their wish came true, but instead of fixing up the Kovalik bungalow, the house was torn down. Holmes said the damage to the foundation and other spots was too immense for a regular renovation. He replaced the house with a state-of-the-art example of green homebuilding, with green roofs, grey-water and rainwater collection systems, spray-foam insulation, in-floor radiant heating and solar panels. Why go to all this trouble? “This house is a prototype for the houses I believe we should all be building,” Holmes says, whose mantra–“If you’re going to do something, do it right the first time”–was never more apt.
Sustainable, system-led design “takes into account everything from air quality, resource efficiency and the type of building materials used, plus what’s called universal design: creating a house that’s accessible, with wide doorways, curbless entranceways, levered door handles–a house that can accommodate all types of people through all life stages,” says Mark Salerno, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.'s (CMHC) Toronto district manager.
From a distance, the house looks like a giant box opened at the front (and I mean this in a good way). At the front, large concrete slabs mix well with myriad windows and wooden cladding to create a feeling of strength and warmth. This super-green house is also a home; the Kovalik’s have lived here since January.
Low-tech, high gain
“This room is great any time of day,” Joe says, leading me into a living room fit for a Roman emperor. Massive laminated-cedar beams climb up the three-storey, 24'-high ceiling flanked by remote-controlled windows. The high ceiling and windows encourage convective airflow: hot air is expelled through the windows, naturally cooling the house. “It means we only need to run the air conditioner on really hot days, if at all,” Christina says.
Natural cooling and heating continues with large, south-facing windows gathering passive solar warmth during winter months. The recessed windows are hidden from the high-flying summer sun, which can create oven-like conditions.
A low-tech and highly efficient design permeates the house. The walls are painted with volatile organic compound (VOC)-free paint; non-allergenic carpets line the stairs; easy-to-clean tiles and hardwood flooring eliminate mould and dust buildup; and a high-tech filter system and ultraviolet furnace filters provide superior interior air quality.
“[Consumers] are starting to get the message that indoor air quality affects health,” says Thomas Green, project manager for CMHC’s EQuilibrium healthy housing initiative. (See A refined balance.) Off-gassing from engineered wood products, paints and other finishes laden with VOCs–to say nothing of mould, dust and dander in carpet–can combine to create an indoor air index three to four times more polluted than outside air, according to CMHC. In other words, green homes aren’t just about creating healthy structures but also heal-thy homeowners.
On the high-tech end of the spectrum, the home has an elevator that was installed for Joe’s back problems. “You can see how well insulated this house is,” Christina says, pointing to the exposed concrete forms stuffed with spray-foam insulation, visible through the see-through elevator door. The entire house is made with huge slabs of prepoured concrete, a building material that requires little maintenance, resists mould, rot and fire, and is made from easy-to-replenish ingredients, which makes it an affordable, efficient building material. What’s more, concrete provides what’s known as thermal mass, which means it absorbs heat from the daytime sun and releases it during the night or in cooler conditions, again reducing heating and cooling costs.
“The furnace hardly ever fires up,” she adds, which is also thanks to the radiant in-floor heating in the house, including the basement and garage. “You can walk around barefoot and in a T-shirt in winter,” Joe adds. “There are no hot or cold areas, everything’s just...nice.”
Rooftop panels and plants
“They call this the utility deck, but it’s more like a secret oasis,” Christina says. Indeed, the home by Holmes is filled with high-tech devices with hefty upfront costs but long-term energy and maintenance savings. The ping-pong table—sized photovoltaic panels–“Operation is idiot-proof,” Joe says–help power household appliances, while the second set of four panels produces battery storage power fed into a 10,000 W backup system for use in the event of a power failure. “We can also sell back to the grid any power we generate but don’t need,” Christina says.
Since the Kovaliks have been living in the house for only nine months, they can’t give a cost-savings breakdown; however, a 2- to 3-kW grid-tied solar-power system, which costs about $12,000 installed, would pay for itself in 15 to 25 years, says Wesley Johnston, policy and research manager at the Canadian Solar Industries Association.
Still on the roof, on another “secret” deck accessed through a top-floor door, is the green roof. Since it was first installed in winter, the Holmes crew had to come back to replant–“But now it’s good for life,” Christina says. She plans to add herbs and annuals alongside the varieties of sedum, tough little plants hardy enough to withstand heat and cold without requiring irrigation. They typically grow a foot high.
“We’ll have to water the roof during really hot periods,” Joe says. While there are different kinds of green roofs, this one is a modular system made up of trays of plants grown offsite before installation. Other systems include intensive roofs, where the greenery takes up the entire roof; or blanket roofs, the lightest option, with plants growing in thin organic tiles rolled onto the roof. While such roofs seem novel here, more than 10 per cent of flat-roofed houses in Germany have green roofs.
A green roof improves the outdoor air quality, while preventing heat from escaping from the house during the winter as well as creating a sun-absorbing blanket during summer, a time when a black, shingled roof becomes hotter than Hades. A green roof also absorbs rainwater and snowmelt, which reduces the amount of water drained into municipal drain systems–all with little maintenance (the odd watering here, the odd weed clip there).
It’s easiest to add a green roof to a new house or major addition, Holmes says, but retrofits are possible too. Flat or sloped–the big factor is weight and waterproofing. Have a structural engineer check how much weight your roof can support, and then make sure it’s 100 per cent waterproof. Costs range, depending on the type and size of green-roof system, but expect to pay between $12 to $20 per sq. ft.
Grey’s the new green
“These remind me of the urinals at the old Maple Leaf Gardens,” Joe says, pointing to the rainwater collection troughs along the side of the house. The troughs are part of a system that runs along the house’s exterior, collecting rainwater that flows into a concrete cistern and treatment tank buried beneath the front lawn.
According to Environment Canada, toilets use about one-third of a household’s total water consumption. If you fuel your toilets and laundry with grey water, you’re looking at a huge slash in water usage. “We were worried we’d run out, but with the amount of rain we get, it’s more than enough,” Joe says.
Not all provinces allow grey-water systems (Quebec, for example) or, if they do, there are different technical requirements; however, most areas allow at least rainwater collection, which can save about 150 l of drinking water per day per household, according to Environment Canada.
“It took a little to get used to the colour,” Christina says, pointing at the greyish water in the toilet. “It looks like you haven’t quite flushed.” While it might not look pristine (think: septic tank water), this grey-water system is perfectly suitable for watering lawns, powering washing machines and flushing toilets. Just don’t drink it.
Like everything else high-tech, prices for grey-water systems range depending on size and complexity, but expect to pay about $1,500 plus installation, with yearly savings of about 35 per cent.
Surreal but so real
“It still feels so unreal,” Christina says as we sit around the quartz-topped kitchen counters. “Like we’ve won some sort of lottery.” After spending almost two years living away from the house, the homecoming was pretty sweet, even if it happened between midnight and 4 a.m. on a cold winter morning. “Let’s just say there was lots of champagne.”
Lengthy construction can take its toll on any friendship, let alone neighbours, but the Kovaliks say they’ve received many cards and gifts welcoming them back to a neighbourhood they’ve been in for more than 10 years. Of course, now their home is the model citizen, driving neighbours to increase their own efficiencies. (One house, three doors west, is now powered by Bullfrog Power, a renewable-energy company.)
As a reminder of this dream come true, the house sports a metal insignia from Holmes, his stamp of approval. “Driving up the road is still surreal,” Joe says. “This is where we live?”
A refined balance
To win this competition, a house must net zero
What’s the best way to show the benefits of green technology? “Build actual houses,” Thomas Green says. Green is the project manager for the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.’s (CMHC) EQuilibrium Competition, a cross-country contest to design and build, or retrofit, net-zero houses: homes that use as much energy as they create. “These are real homes for real people, not some sort of R&D or design project.”
The competition began with a call for entries with criteria that encompass CMHC’s five core, healthy-housing principles: health, energy, resource conservation, environment and affordability. The initial call garnered 72 responses: “Way more than we expected,” Green says, “especially considering our tough requirements.” How demanding was it? “We’re talking about homes that use 80 per cent less energy than regular homes,” he says. But the challenge went far beyond energy use.
“Our house uses 30 per cent less water compared with a regular house,” says Sevag Pogharian, a Montreal-based designer whose EQuilibruim entry, Alstonvale Net Zero House, was one of 12 winners. The house also features “net-zero transportation.” Adding an extra few 1.5-kW photovoltaic panels onto the house “creates enough energy to power an electric vehicle for 25 km daily.” The house also incorporates basic food production. “We’re not saying the homeowner has to be a farmer, but the site does allow for basic food production, such as vegetables.”
Canadians pioneered a lot of these technologies in the 1970s and 1980s, says Luigi Ferrara, author of Canada Innovates: Sustainable Building. The problem is, while Canada was a pioneer, other countries actually started building more innovative houses long ago, most notably in Austria, which has a climate similar to Canada. In that country, “normal people are living in homes designed to work with Nature.”
Pogharian is building the single-family, detached house in Hudson, Que., a high-end neighbourhood about 45 minutes from Montreal not used to vanguard design. Pogharian says a big obstacle was a threatening residents association. “While they commended me for the effort, they didn’t want anything ‘weird’ in their neighbourhood,” he says. Luckily, Pogharian was eventually able to win over the locals, but this mentality “doesn’t bode well for the future,” he adds.
Other winners include the Minto Manotick House in Ottawa, which features an “all-off switch” that not only turns off all lights but also computers and such when the homeowner leaves the house; and Calgary’s Echo Heaven project, 25 houses featuring all things green plus a community greenhouse, guest accommodations and work-at-home offices.
All EQuilibrium winners will be open for public viewing for six months after they’re built. Visit the CMHC website for viewing dates.
