Passive Housing: a Building History that Saskatchewan Forgot About
Saskatchewan’s Conservation House built in Regina in 1977.
We caught up with Harold Orr, a pioneer of the passive housing movement, before we share the interview, we will tell you more about the Passive Housing Movement.
The passive housing movement began in the 1970s, and Saskakatchewan’s Conservation House was built in Regina in 1977. Architects and engineers started looking into more energy-efficient housing when the fuel shortage of the 70s made life more expensive. A modern passive house aims to reduce a home’s energy by 80% when compared to a code-built home. This means that to receive a Passive House design certificate the following are important: have computer modeling, construction methods, and a blower door test. Attention is given to solar gain, shading, thermal bridging, mechanical, and ventilation. The Saskatchewan house was one of the earliest conservation demonstration projects in North America.
Drawing for Saskatchewan Conservation House.
The provincial government commissioned the building of a climate-appropriate solar house. The team of designers, engineers, architects, and building experts, was led by David Eyre from the Saskatchewan Research Council (SRC). At the time, Harold Orr worked as a research officer at the SRC. In the 1970s Orr created a blower door to define air tightness in a building, which involved a fan to exhaust air to depressurize the house.
The Conservation House research provided a greater understanding of the inadequacies in building standards, mainly comprehending the heat loss in an average home during that time. The heat was calculated to be lost by 30% lost through air leakage, 25% lost through the basement, 15% from the ceiling, 15% from the walls, and 15% through doors and windows. The design and build of the Sask Conservation House was calculated to consume 85% less energy than an average home in the 1970s.
The home was built with specifications to consume less energy, the following are some of the specifications. Rather than being built with a furnace, it contained one of the first residential heat recovery ventilators for space heating. The house’s solar system collected heat from the sun and stored it in 10,000 litres of water and used that to heat the home. The house was also equipped with a grey water heat exchanger for water heating, it was originally built with solar energy collectors to assist in generating electricity for HRV and water heat exchanger, the house was sided with dark brown cedar to absorb heat from the sun, and designed with insulated window shutters. It had additional design principles specific for energy-efficient housing like tight air-vapor construction, high levels of insulation, housing design that optimizes passive solar gains, controlled and efficient air management, well-insulated windows and frames, and well-insulated exterior doors with good weather-stripping. Unfortunately, the cost of maintaining the solar system-water heating outweighed its energy savings, within the first year it was a $10,000 upkeep charge, and $5,000 in its second year. Other technologies used in the building put the house ahead of its time.
Saskatchewan did not continue with energy performance standards resulting from the research, in which Orr states, “four million Canadian houses would not require expensive energy retrofits today,” if the technology would have been applied to new houses being built in the 1970s. The Conservation House was an example studied by Wolfgang Fiest, who used its technology to develop a passive house standard in Germany and he later founded Germany’s Passiv Haus Institute. There are now more than 25,000 certified Passivhaus buildings in Europe and thousands more under construction around the world. Today’s air leakage testing is based on the practice Orr and his colleagues developed in typical air vapor barriers comprised of two-millimeter poly or wax paper which was loosely applied to the structure. Because of this work, Harold Orr was honoured by the PassivHaus Institute in 2015 with an award for the team that pioneered work in the field.
Look out for our next post where we interview Harold Orr!
References:
“Passive house on the prairie, the Saskatchewan Conservation House”. Journal Of Commerce, November 27, 2017. https://canada.constructconnect.com/joc/news/projects/2017/11/passive-house-prairie-saskatchewan-conservation-house
“A closer look at the Saskatchewan Conservation House and four others”. Saskatchewan Research Council. https://www.src.sk.ca/blog/closer-look-saskatchewan-conservation-house-and-four-others
“Step Inside the Real Home of the Future: Passivhaus”. The Tyee, January 25, 2011. https://thetyee.ca/News/2011/01/25/Passivhaus/#:~:text=The%20home%20of%20the%20future,called%20the%20Saskatchewan%20Conservation%20House.