Saturday, March 20

• Seminar: 10am to 12:30pm
• Tours: 2pm to 4pm

Seminar: Designing and Owning a NetZero Energy Home

• Grant MacEwan University, CN Theatre Rm. 5-142, 105 St. Building at 105 St. and 105 Ave
• Peter Amerongen (builder), Gordon Howell, P.Eng. (solar engineer), Conrad Nobert (Mill Creek homeowner)
• Seminar and tours: No need to register. Cost: free

Open House Tours - see ideas you can use on your own house

• energy- and water-efficient construction and appliances reduce space heat by 65%, hot water by 75%, and
  electricity use by 50% for upgrade cost of less than $20,000. All electric. No need for natural gas line.
• air and water heat recovery, LED lighting, rainwater harvesting, passive solar, active solar, solar electricity
• sustainable materials, healthy indoor air quality, eco-landscaping, net zero emissions

Mill Creek NetZero Home, December 15, 2009, 14:00.

As we approach the winter solstice and the three-month anniversary of our moving in, we continue to learn about our new house. These observations are mostly qualitative, because we don’t have the rest of our solar modules up, and we haven’t set up monitoring equipment yet. We are tentatively planning to remove the door of our wood stove on July 1st, 2010  and then monitor the house’s energy use for a year.  read more... »

Mill Creek NetZero Home Heat Recovery Ventilator

I heard a story once about a man who built a house using insulated concrete forms (ICFs). While I don't advocate their use in general, ICFs have some distinct advantages (certainly over conventional construction). The primary of these advantages is supreme air tightness. ICF homes (those that are built with ICFs from top to bottom) can achieve hourly air change rates of 0.2. In contrast, the Mill Creek NetZero Home has an airtightness measurement of 0.36 ACH, which is really amazing for a wood-framed house.

So back to this guy who built the ICF house. He apparently wasn't aware of how air tight his house was, or at least the consequence of that air tightness. Six months after he moved in, he had to rip all of the drywall out because it had rotted. He had built a house as tight as a plastic bag, and forgotten a critical aspect: ventilation.  read more... »

You may have heard about Edmonton's next net-zero house, particularly if you're on Gordon Howell's mailing list. The Belgravia net-zero house is under construction, with demolition of the the previous house (built in 1948) on June 30.

Hi, my name is Bob Heath, and I'm the owner of the Belgravia NetZero (BNZ) house. I'd like to thank Conrad for allowing me to post to the Green Edmonton site. I'll be posting frequently over the next year about various aspects of the house, but I thought I'd devote my first post to how I came to make the decision to build a net-zero house.  read more... »

The lessons that I learned from the computer model of our solar hot water system are as follows:

• insulate the pipes leading from the basement to the collectors to at least R6, preferably R10
• insulate the storage tank to R50
• install a 1000 litre storage tank
• install 3 collectors
• there is extra heat - install a system to harvest it

We bought the collectors, drainback tank, pipe insulation and other knickknacks from Trimline Design Centre just down the road from the Mill Creek NetZero Home. My builder Peter was very impressed with the clever, simple design of the flat plat collectors that Trimline manufactures. Yes, that’s right, they manufacture solar hot water collectors right here in Edmonton!

Overview

(schematic of the MCNZH solar hot water system)  read more... »

(MCNZH concrete floor being bathed by sun through a 9’x6’ window)

The most important design considerations for cold climate building are insulation, building envelope, and passive solar design. Given our lofty goals for the Mill Creek NetZero Home (MCNZH), we pushed hard to maximize our return on every one of these fronts.

The MCNZH collects 54% of its annual space heat through passive solar design – that’s 8747 kWh or 31.5 Gigajoules. It does so by:

1. having huge south windows that are specially manufactured to maximize solar heat gain
2. containing a large amount of thermal mass to absorb the solar heat when the sun shines
3. having movable solar awnings that allow 100% of the sunlight to hit the windows during the heating season (the awnings are strictly speaking not a passive part of the solution).

I’ll discuss the first two bullets on this list, given that I’ve already described the movable awnings at length.  read more... »

We’re having an open house next Saturday. Please stop by if you like. We’ll have the main and second floor concrete floors poured by then, and we hope to have the wood stove installed too. I’d love to meet you if you’ve commented on the website before. Actually, I’d love to meet you regardless!

The idea is that you can see the two houses in different stages of construction. The Riverdale house is completely done. If you haven’t been down there yet I highly recommend it. My house uses many of the same techniques as the Riverdale house, and many of the construction details are still visible.

See the flyer attached to this post for more details. See you on the 14th!

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.  read more... »

I met a fellow active community member recently. She mentioned that she had read about the Mill Creek NetZero Home (MCNZH) here, and included a short lament about how her family would afford to upgrade her own home. I felt a pang of guilt - why should my family be empowered to build our way to energy independence when so many others aren't?

For The Record

For the record, we can afford to build this home due to a mixture of a very simple lifestyle, luck, fiscal prudence, fortunate career choices, and luck with real estate (did I mention luck?).  read more... »

Photovoltaic modules about to be installed on the MCNZH roof

Things are progressing nicely on the Mill Creek NetZero Home. The exterior is almost complete, not including the stucco that will be applied in the spring. 

MCNZH - the roof and wire and paper are now finished.  read more... »