We’re so pleased to share one of the first coach homes by EkoBuilt, this one in the village of Pakenham west of Ottawa.
This great little project was designed as a seasonal cottage or chalet for today, with plans for it to become the owner’s retirement residence within five to ten years.
This new EkoBuilt passive home is located in rural west Ottawa. A bungalow, its design is slab on grade and it encompasses 1365 ft.² of living space including two bedrooms and two bathrooms. It was finished in time for the 2018-2019 winter season.
This new custom home is just a stone’s throw from the Governor General’s residence in central Ottawa. It’s a great example of flexibility in an urban setting. The home is situated on an unserviced laneway in a historic neighbourhood just east of the city’s downtown core. The home’s design had to be approved by the city’s historical committee before a building permit could be obtained. Construction was made much more interesting because the nearest intersection was closed throughout for the installation of a storm water collection facility!
All of these challenges made building this home exciting and rewarding. The family we built it for really love the area and it’s fantastic to share the end result with our followers.
We field requests constantly from people interested in building a passive house, including using one of our 13 energy efficient house plans. We’ve been working towards having cost analysis documents for complete house builds for all 13 of our plans, and now they are ready!
We’re starting 2019 with a great variety of projects, including single family homes, a two-family shared home, a net-zero multi-unit project and a very modern passive summer camp. Read along to learn more!
Many of you have indicated that you’d like to hear from us about retrofitting older homes, and we love that idea too. We know not everyone is in the market for a brand new home!
There are a lot of good reasons to address the comfort and energy efficiency of an older home, particularly if you live in a neighbourhood that you love and don’t wish to leave. Staying in place and fixing what’s not working about your older home could be a really smart decision.
Much of our audience is in the Ottawa area, and a lot of great neighbourhoods full of older homes spring to mind.
So what to do when your home is many decades old, drafty and dependent on steep energy bills to keep it cool in summer and warm in winter?
When we talk about ‘smart homes’, there is a general bias towards technology. Consider this definition:
Standard smart home definition: noun “a home equipped with lighting, heating, and electronic devices that can be controlled remotely by phone or computer.”
At EkoBuilt, we see the smartness in homes very differently, using a sustainability lens.
EkoBuilt smart home definition: noun “a home designed to be autonomous without the use of electronic devices for heating or ventilation control.”
We also think the smartest homes can be affordably net-zero, taking their energy from renewable energy sources. Truly there is much confusion over what a smart home really is. Conventional thinking holds that a ‘smart home’ is one that uses more technology for control. But is that really very smart?
We feel that a smart home is one that uses the least technology possible. It’s possible to design homes that don’t require all kinds of devices for control.
For example, a home should not need to be heated when the occupants are not there, and blinds should not be required because unwanted heat needs to be kept out. In a true passive house excess technology is not required because the space requires little heating or air-conditioning to be comfortable.
Using energy from the sun as a heat source, the home can be heated naturally even in extremely cold conditions. To reduce the need for air conditioning in hot summers, windows are strategically located to naturally shade themselves so unwanted heat is not coming into the home. This is a smart home!
It is more sustainable, and much smarter to use less technology, both environmentally and physically. There is simply no need to have a wi-fi thermostat. Why spend money to operate a furnace in an occupied or unoccupied home when you don’t have to? It is smart to spend as little money and to acquire as few devices for your home as possible.
Our point is of course, to communicate the intelligence of building to the passive house standard. It is, after all, the only truly resilient home known to man.
It is a home that uses so little fuel to heat and cool the space that the electric bills are approximately the same amount every month of the year, whether the home is being heated or not.
Not to be coy, every house, even a passive house, requires a heating system – especially in this part of Canada – but the passive house leaks so little heat (even during extreme cold conditions) that it costs very little to keep the space heated. Less energy, in fact, than a refrigerator uses in a year. Now, that’s a smart home.
A passive house is as close as you can get to living in a thermos! The key difference is the passive space has constant access to fresh air, while a thermos does not.
Seriously though – a good thermos can keep keep tea extremely hot for 24 hours, which is really quite unbelievable when you think about it. Well, a passive house is basically the same thing in a home. And that really is a smart home.
From a health perspective, it’s much safer to live in an environment virtually free of interior toxins or exterior pollution (propane or gas emissions), full of ample fresh air, and designed to last generations. Again, that’s a smart home.
Another vital feature of a truly smart home is that it be electrically operated. We’ve come to the point where a home designed to operate by propane and/or gas, is a home designed for the past. Fossil fuels are not the way forward. Homes for today and tomorrow need to be 100% electrically operated — it’s simply the only fuel source for sustainability. It’s also the best for our health and for our pocketbooks.
A home that helps to create a healthier environment is a home that is healthier for us, and energy savings translate into lower operating costs, and that means more money in our pockets.
In conclusion, a truly smart home designed for today should be one that is built to passive house standards. Realistically, every home in the near future will be required to be built this way, but why wait when you can start now!
Contact us if you’d like to learn more about building your passive home.
We were delighted to take part in the Toronto Green Living Show this year. It was a great event that really felt like a 21st-century show!
There were electric cars from a number of different companies, lithium ion power walls, vertical gardens for your living room, vertical farming out of a container, and geodesic domes where you can grow produce year round even in our climate.
We loved being part of the showcase of green living options and really enjoyed talking about about our electrically operated homes, which are designed to cost just pennies a day to operate.
Congratulations to the winner of our Eco-Feu raffle at the show, Stephanie Hahn of New Hamburg, Ontario.
Stephanie won a Cartier tabletop unit from Eco-Feu. These ethanol units make perfect centerpieces and/or accent lighting. Burning for 2 to 3 hours, they feature a soothing, vibrant, real flame.
The future is now and we need to embrace it! Photos below from the event.
Check out this video about the Green Living Show from The Tesla Model 3 owners club.
We recently came across a great, highly informative article on whole home ventilation for anyone looking at building a new home. Six Steps to Success With Heat-Recovery Ventilation by Bruce Sullivan was first published on the Green Building Advisor blog.
The article explains the difference between HRV/ERV and the necessity for highly efficient fresh air machines. At EkoBuilt, we prefer ERV (energy recovery ventilators) over HRV (heat recovery ventilators) because modern buildings should not only be airtight but also vapour tight.
It is extremely important for long term building health to make sure there is no condensation within a wall cavity. An ERV in a vapour tight house is able to maintain comfortable humidity inside the building while removing excess moisture (anything above 60% humidity). These machines also offer a constant fresh air supply for a healthy interior environment.
You can read the full article on the Green Building Advisor blog.
You might also like HRV Units and the Passive House (2016, EkoBuilt blog)
Please note: as of March 2019 base pricing for coach house plans and basic shell installation have increased. The cost scenarios here will be affected in terms of total pricing as a result.
We have been receiving a tremendous amount of interest in our Coach House offering for the 2018 build season. We thought it would be appropriate to talk about future possibilities for everyone we haven’t heard from yet.
The new coach house regulations in Ottawa create a great opportunity for additional income in the form of a rental property and potentially even more income from an Airbnb format. It can also make for an economical in-law suite or starter home for a son or daughter.
Unlike most builders out in the marketplace, EkoBuilt is focused on building a style of home that is future-proof, something that will actually appreciate over time. Most builders design to today’s building code, and the real problem with this approach is that codes are starting to change dramatically.
This means that a home built to code standard today will be sub-standard come the next code change just four years from now.
Current building code is solid from a safety perspective, but the energy efficiency of most homes built to this code has not kept pace with drastically rising utility costs.
It doesn’t cost much extra to build ahead of code, so why not build to the future code standard? This is our approach and it just makes sense for anything truly designed to be a 21st century home.
To help in showing how possible it is to build to future code, we have prepared a cost analysis documentation for a couple of our designs.
Tiny Canuck 499 sq.ft.
Size: 1 bedroom, 499 sq.ft.
Finished for $132,375:
Download the Tiny Canuck cost analysis
Nepean Point 720 sq.ft.
Size: 2 bedroom, 720. sq.ft.
Finished for $175,802:
Download the Nepean Point cost analysis
Including utilities would make these units really attractive to anyone in the market. Since the homes are ‘future proof’, they can be heated and cooled inexpensively with electricity (no gas/propane) which will be the fuel of the future.
Alternatively, if a coach house is built to current code standards, your mortgage rates may be slightly less (5%) but with substantially higher utilities, overall cost of living would be more expensive.
Make sure you visit our Coach House Plans page and review the kit pricing for our coach house plans based on CodePlus and on the Passive House standard. Questions? We’d be happy to answer them!
Please get in touch with us to explore Coach House opportunities for your property!
