By David Dodge and Kay Rollans
TerraView Homes from Guelph, Ontario doesn’t just build homes—they build state-of-the-art, net-zero ready homes that are 80 per cent more energy-efficient than code-built homes.
TerraView has been perfecting its formula for building affordable net-zero energy homes for years.
But the greatest challenge of net-zero construction is not in the building, but the selling of net-zero homes. TerraView’s biggest accomplishment is taking these super-efficient homes to the market and actually selling them.
“I think the public has become far, far more aware and they see the benefits to the environment and to their comfort and their air quality and their pocketbook,” says TerraView owner Andrew Lambden, who has been building homes in Ontario for 30 years.
TerraView president David Brix makes the company’s sales success sound almost easy: “For the most part, we’re preaching to the converted already.” says David Brix.
TerraView has built 50 net-zero homes, has 20 more on order and has plans to build 230 net-zero ready homes.
Gueph, Ontario—home of Guelph University—is “renowned for its forward thinking about green technologies.” Clearly, TerraView is playing to a friendly audience. But Brix notes that “the world itself is opening its eyes to the fact that we are destroying the planet and we need to do better.”
And the future of net-zero looks brighter than ever. “The younger generation is certainly more enamored with a net-zero ready house,” says Brix.
TerraView’s secrets for building net-zero
“The biggest difference between a code-built in a net-zero built home would be the thermal envelope,” says Brix.
A thermal-enveloped home is wrapped in an unbroken layer of insulation, including beneath the basement slab. The 2-by-6 walls are R32 insulated with two inches of foam insulation outside the walls, as well. The attic is R60 insulated, and triple-paned windows let in tons of light while minimizing heat loss in these super-efficient homes.
More than insulation, though, these homes have standard features that leave code-built homes in the dust.
Code-built homes often include traditional water heaters. This is “like putting a kettle on in the morning because you might want tea in the afternoon,” says Brix. “It makes no economic sense.” TerraView homes instead use gas-fired, on-demand water heaters that efficiently heat water when it’s needed.
TerraView homes also have super-efficient, Canadian-made Dettson combo heating systems. These systems use both a small conventional gas heating unit and a super-efficient electric heat pump. Heat-pumps can struggle in minus-30°C weather, but for the vast majority of the year they provide heat much more efficiently.
Tight homes are not stuffy homes!
For years people fought back against building tighter and tighter homes, says Brix. But he believes “you can’t build a house tight enough.”
And TerraView builds some of the tightest homes on the market.
Energy auditors measure the airtightness of a home using a blower door test. A standard code-built home might be leaky enough to allow five air changes per hour. That means five times per hour, all of the air in the house is completely replaced by cold outside air.
“If you’re building an Energy Star home, it has to be under 2.5 air changes per hour,” Brix says. “And net-zero ready has to be under 1.5. So we’re down to 0.6 air changes, which is a passive-house-level of construction.”
But wait—doesn’t that mean that these super-tight homes are full of stuffy, stale air?
Not at all. TerraView net-zero homes provide an abundance of fresh, filtered air using an Energy Recovery Ventilator (ERV) that recovers 75 per cent of the heat from exhaust air as it brings fresh air into the home. This greatly reduces the heat needed to keep the home warm. As an added bonus, the ERV also maintains the humidity in those cold and very dry winter days.
COVID spurs on the net-zero revolution
Green Energy Futures wondered how COVID has impacted TerraView’s home sales. Considering the wide-ranging economic impacts of the pandemic, we braced for the worst—but were more than pleasantly surprised.
“It’s actually exceedingly robust. It’s…almost like a market we’ve never seen,” says Brix.
“When COVID hit, you know, I thought, oh, here we go. And this is going to be 2010 all over again.”
Things did come to a grinding halt during the COVID-19 lockdown. But “After [people had] spent six weeks to two months sequestered in their small, old, little spaces, they decided that it’s time to move into something that meets their needs,” says Brix.
This has been particularly true in Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). “There seems to be a mass exodus out of the GTA,” says Brix—and TerraView’s net-zero ready homes are an appealing landing pad both for the environmentally conscious and those just looking for a comfortable, beautiful, and convenient place to live, and work.
Brix says the massive shift from office work to work-from-home has also had an impact. “Those who were buying closer to the GTA so that they could have a shorter commute are now realizing they can move further afield, have more space, and only commute to the office maybe once or twice a week, not five days a week.
Solar or no solar? That is the question
TerraView is only building Canadian Home Builders’ Association–certified “net-zero ready” homes: net-zero homes that don’t come pre-equipped with a renewable energy source. This allows consumers to buy a super-efficient home at a more accessible price point—and they can, of course, always add solar down the road to make the home fully net-zero.
But Brix says customers are starting to appreciate the benefits of wrapping a solar energy system into their mortgage. They are even launching a free solar program to nudge consumers in this direction.
“We need to, as residents of this planet, stop polluting the environment and creating CO2. And it is achievable now if somebody is going to put the solar on the home to begin with,” says Brix.
The next stage in net-zero evolution for TerraView will be to replace all gas-fired appliances in the home with solar or other renewable-energy-fueled and energy-saving technologies.
It seems people’s love affair with fireplaces in dwindling. “We haven’t installed a gas fireplace in at least a year now, whereas prior to going net-zero ready, probably two thirds, if not more of our homes had a gas fireplace in them.”
In the long run, this will not only benefit the planet, but will save homeowners money. No gas-fired appliances means, of course, no need for gas at all and no gas bill—and no fixed charges, either.
David Brix and Andrew Lambden first latched on to idea of building super-efficient homes in 2006 after they attended a green conference in San Francisco. At the time, “Everybody was waking up to the fact that…you can build better and create homes that aren’t impacting the environment as greatly as others,” says Brix.
It’s been their mission ever since to build better, affordable, super-efficient homes. Just this year, TerraView picked up an Energy Star for New Homes award for its use of innovative technology in their net-zero and net-zero ready homes.
“We’ve embraced programs that have come out over the years, Energy Star being one and then moving to net-zero, I think that in the very near future we’re going to see a move to carbon-neutral as well.”
Carbon neutral now
In fact TerraView has already started work on Terra a carbon neutral condo project in Guelph, Ontario. The units will be heated by geothermal heating systems and all energy will come from solar on a net-annual basis.
It’s been only a decade since national net-zero pilot programs set the groundwork for net-zero homes. Since then builders have been working very hard to take those first expensive pilot net-zero homes of the early days to streamlined, hyper-efficient and increasingly affordable designs that now seem ready for a future of zero-emissions buildings.
A Canadian Green Building Council report says a green recovery that prioritizes green buildings could contribute 1.5 million jobs and $150 million in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2030 while cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 53 megatonnes compared with 2018 levels.
Sure net-zero homes helps mitigate climate change, but it also revolutionizes the idea of our homes as independent power plants that produce all of their own energy and wean themselves from the vagaries of electricity and energy markets. This means drastically reduced utilities, exceedingly high levels of quiet and comfort and perhaps best of all: basements that are toasty warm like the rest of the home.
