Coolearth Architecture at IIDEX 2017
Last Wednesday and Thursday Coolearth was at IIDEX and Construct Canada. We had a booth with the Passive House Canada team and gave two seminar talks to the audience as part of Construct Canada. The energy at the conference was great and we met and chatted with so many interesting people. The major take-away is that we, as Canadians, have the knowledge, skill, and willpower to meet our Climate Change and Sustainability targets. Having talked to so many committed passionate people has given us reasons for optimism that we can make our buildings more resilient, energy efficient… and also better looking!
As part of the Passive House Canada pavilion we helped communicate and advocate for Passive House design in Toronto and Ontario. It was great to be able to share the details of passive house and answer such questions as “what is the difference between passive house and net-zero?”
On Wedneday Sheena Sharp and German Vaisman gave a seminar on our net-zero conversion of a semi-detached residential building. The overview of the presentation is: Ontario’s climate action plan seeks to improve the energy efficiency and performance of buildings in order to reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions. The province has identified that we need to take all buildings to Net-Zero or near Net-Zero Energy Use. This means upgrading the leaky, badly insulated homes which pre-dominate much of Toronto and were built after World War 2. We will present a Toronto semi-detached home that we are doing an envelope upgrade on with the aim of making it Net-Zero. We are doing this by adding external insulation, making the home air tight, replacing the original single-pane windows with new high performance windows and doors, installing efficient heating and ventilation equipment, and mounting solar panels on the roof. The upgrades to the home will make it more comfortable, improve the appearance of the home, and reduce energy consumption and therefore lower Greenhouse Gas Emissions.
On Thursday Sheena Sharp, and Trevor Nightingale, the Program Leader, High Performance Buildings at National Research Council presented a seminar entitled “Making Net-Zero Commercial Buildings a Reality”. From the Construct Canada Website: “For the early adopters, it is typically not a simple ROI but rather there are often less tangible outcomes and benefits. In this session, the National Research Council Canada (NRC) will present information on the incremental cost of the NZEB to begin building the case. The speaker will discuss the business case as well as technical issues, including those associated with retrofit and energy positive. The session will also include an examination of real and hypothetical scenarios to identify the considerations and implications and to show the delta between traditional energy systems and Net-Zero”.
Sheena’s and Trevor’s talk is also reviewed in detail by Brownen from the Canadian Consulting Engineer website:
Thanks again to everyone who came out to the seminars, and to everyone we met during the show: we look forward to crossing paths again in the future.
🙂