Yesterday the public was invited to see a house under construction in Nanaimo that is being built by the local chapter of the Home Builder's Association using volunteer labour and materials.
It is intended to be a platinum rated Built Green home. This program (and its predecessor, the R-2000 program) have helped to give builders the training and hands-on experience of how to improve a house's energy performance by 20 - 40% over the older homes.
A local reporter privately told me he was rather disappointed with how "green" the house was. He had overheard me ask if they were going to use waste-water heat recovery. (They aren't planning it.) Why would they not want to recover over a third of the energy invested in heating the hot water, especially when it can be done for less than $1000? A very good question.
They are also using windows that don't perform as well as a truly green building needs, and are using forced air heating. And no heat recovery ventilation. Soon this will be required in all new homes.
I know that there are real cost barriers involved in adding any of these better options, and that the purpose is to showcase some of the things they are doing (such as sealing it up well) before selling it to raise money for the home builder's headquarters in Victoria.
As electricity prices rise close to 10% per year for the foreseeable future the homeowner will be glad for what they did do, but may be disappointed that their home, for an additional $10K - $20K, could end up costing them half as much to heat and cool.
The next generation of "green" homes will do this, and even more.
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Sadly an arsonist burnt the Green House down last week, adding more pollution and waste, and preventing this house from being a show-case this fall.
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