Changing for Climate Series *
You can make your home super energy efficient, eliminate your utility bills and make your home climate resilient and save a lot of money.
Gone are the days when you would simply change some light bulbs, do a little caulking and change your weather stripping to make your home energy efficient.
This is our guide to the key things you can look for in a new home or do to an existing home that will reduce emissions, save money and get you on a pathway to zero emissions.
In Edmonton, buildings are responsible for one-third of our greenhouse gas emissions. To make our homes climate ready, we can dramatically improve insulation and energy efficiency. Happily, these efforts will save us money, increase the value and make our homes very comfortable places to live. This is often called climate mitigation.
Since Canada is already experiencing the impacts of climate change, we can adapt our homes to be more resilient to storms, heat waves and other severe weather impacts of climate change. This is often called climate adaptation.
Today we focus on climate mitigation and all we can do to save energy, reduce emissions, improve efficiency and make our homes great places to live.
We met up with Stephanie Ripley at the NAIT/City of Edmonton climate-ready home demonstration trailer to learn what we can do.
Stephanie is a graduate of the NAIT Alternative Energy Program who now works on developing innovative financing programs for home energy efficiency and solar upgrades, now available through the City of Edmonton’s Clean Energy Improvement Program (CEIP). Her fellow students of alternative energy also helped design the demonstration home with Rick Young of Habitat Studios, a net-zero home builder in Edmonton.
Do one thing at a time, do it very well, and then move on
The goal is to get our homes to net-zero eventually which will save us money, and reduce our exposure to the vagaries of energy pricing and climate policy.
The secret to energy retrofits is to do the right steps in the right order.
As Major Charles Emerson Winchester III the snobby doctor on the MASH TV series said “I do one thing at a time, I do it very well, and then I move on.”
It’s better to do one thing right, rather than dabble in half measures. The results will be better, and you will not regret it when you decide to take your home to the next level.
Stephanie calls this the retrofit pathway and it consists of four steps.
Four steps to a super energy efficient home
1. Get a Home Energy Evaluation
A home energy evaluation is essential for you to make the best investments to improve your home and understand how each step relates to the other.
The EnerGuide evaluation shows how much energy your home requires and how each action will reduce your energy use on the pathway to net-zero.
A net zero home is a home that produces as much energy as it consumes over the course of a year. So, your net energy consumption will be zero gigajoules a year.
2. Make it Tight and Insulate Right
After your home evaluation, Stephanie suggests improving the insulation of your standard 2×4 or 2×6 walls and plug all the air leaks in your home.
If you are building a new home, you can use double-studded walls that provide 12 – 14 inches of insulation. If you have an older home, you can add another outside 2×4 section, pack it with insulation, then seal it up with a water-permeable air barrier.
This insulation is added all the way down, below ground, to the footing of the building. Below grade you will use encapsulated polystyrene (EPS) or other foam insulation.
EPS insulation and rain screen, (slats of wood that create an air cell), are added before installing a climate-resilient siding such as Hardie board which is non-flammable.
Double-pane windows can be replaced with energy-efficient triple-paned windows that have insulated frames.
Adding insulation to the attic will help regulate your home’s temperature. Net-zero homes shoot for about R80 in the attic.
Air sealing your home is also very important. Home builders check the air seal of a home by measuring how many air exchanges it has per hour. Older, inefficient homes can leak 4 – 9 air changes per hour. Once the renovation is done, you can get this number to less than one air change per hour and you will be saving plenty of energy.
3. Zero Emissions Heating and Cooling
Stephanie says most of the energy used in a home is for heating. Now that your home is well insulated, it requires a lot less energy to heat it. You now have the option to switch to a heat pump to both heat and cool your home.
Heat pumps come in two varieties: an air source heat pump that extracts heat out of the outside air, (even very cold air), or a ground source heat pump connected to a geo-exchange loop, which draws heat out of the Earth, which is often called geothermal.
That’s exactly what Darcy and Darren Crichton did in their DIY home renovation after they experienced the 37-degree Celsius temperatures that came with the record-setting heat dome of 2021.
The “cool” thing is that heat pumps can heat or cool your home, a welcome benefit as summer heat waves become more frequent, thanks to climate change.
Heat pumps are two to three times more efficient than a furnace at heating and up to four times more efficient when cooling your home.
Since they use electricity instead of gas, you can power them with a solar system and if you go far enough you may be able to cut the gas line and bill.
You can also install a heat pump water heater which runs very efficiently on electricity instead of gas.
Another simple innovation to save money and energy is drain water heat recovery, a loop of copper pipe around your water drain recovers the heat as hot water from the shower or dishwasher goes down the drain.
Now that your home is well insulated and sealed up, you will need a heat recovery ventilator (HRV) to provide fresh and filtered air to your home. HRVs provide plenty of fresh air to your home and recover 70-80% of the heat from your exhaust air as it’s released from the home, thereby saving more energy.
4. Generate Your Own Renewable Energy
Your insulated home now requires only one-third the energy of a conventional home to heat. Since your heat pumps run on electricity, you can now produce all the energy you need on a net annual basis with a solar system on your roof.
Solar can save you money, protect you from future energy price increases and are the final step in getting to zero emissions.
Incentives are available from the City of Edmonton and the federal government for solar.
The final key to getting on the pathway and staying on it is to avoid “incremental upgrades” as described by net-zero builder Peter Amerongen in this video.
*(David Dodge of Green Energy Futures worked with the City of Edmonton to produce a 14-part series on people Changing for Climate – we are pleased to present an adapted version of the original story here)