Interview with Harold Orr, A Passive House Pioneer

To celebrate Earth Day, we are sharing our interview with Harold Orr, an engineer that is a pioneer in the Passive House Movement. He has received multiple awards for his work establishing energy-efficient housing, like the Order of Canada and Pioneer Award at the International PassiveHaus Conference. To learn more about what Passive Housing is, look back at our last blog post. Here Harold Orr shares how he started, and how the energy-efficient housing movement is influencing Saskatchewan’s homeowners now.

What’s your story?

I was working in Regina at the time and working on all the government buildings, basically all the government buildings in Saskatchewan. The first building I worked on was the Museum of Natural History. I was a draftsman on the building, all I did was the drawings for the garbage and shipping. The funny thing about it, was whenever we had a building to go to tender, the staff would get together to make bets to see what tender would come in and before they came in. I didn’t have a clue, and I didn't have a clue because it was the first building I was working on as an architect, and I looked down the list and took the highest number and added 10% to that, and won. I worked there as an architect.

One thing that I did was, the Department of Education had plans for one and two-room schools, and when someone needed a school, the school would get the plans from the Department of Education and go ahead and build it, and this was in 1954-1957. I was given the job of doing the drawings for these one and two-room schools for smaller towns. At that time they didn’t have school buses, so the community would decide they needed a one-room school. I did the plans for these and when the architect quit, they hired a new provincial architect and we just didn't fit together well. I decided it was time to go back to school and get my degree, two-year degree in engineering in Saskatoon. Previously, I had been traveling between Saskatoon and Regina because I had been courting my wife, and I had been spending too much time on the road. The result was I dropped out of the third year of engineering, and I dropped out before I needed to pay tuition. When I started my third year I was at the bottom of my classes and by the end of my fourth year I was at the top, they took the top three students and told us we had to go on to do a masters degree. I applied for and got a scholarship and went on to get a master's degree, and in getting a master's degree we had to write an experimental thesis. I chose it at the time because the Association for Heating and Ventilating had a method of calculating how fast the air was changing in a space and what they suggested you do is take a gauge to the window and measure the gap around the window and put this in a formula and out came a number. Usually, the number wasn’t correct but we didn’t have any idea what it should be. Professor Dr. Green and I thought about this and why don't we measure how fast the air is changing? We put a gas tracer in the house and we assumed it would change the same way the air does, so we selected helium because it was nontoxic, does not taste, and had no colour. We dumped helium into the house and then measured how fast the helium changed. I built an instrument to measure how fast the helium was in the air after the first two years I was supposed to get a master's degree, and I could have written about this but the stupid thing didn’t work. It didn't have adequate voltage control on the power supply. The third year I built a voltage controller and then the thing worked. Then I got my degree, and I was doing the work at the National research council because the University did not have the equipment I needed. The National Research Council put me on staff and started to pay me to continue to do the research on this instrument. I rebuilt the instrument, put the equipment into a house, and then dumped 100 cubic feet of helium in the house then measured how fast the helium disappeared. We found that this had a problem because when we first put it in the house, the helium was of high concentration, it would stay in the closets and closed spaces of the house and be ventilated out, then it would start coming out of those spaces, so what were we measuring? It had to do with ventilation. One of our researchers in Ottawa was doing some work on this, on where the leakage was in the house. What he did was take out a basement window, put a sheet of plywood in there and added a 12 feet duct into the backyard, and put a fan in there to suck the air out through that. What he was doing was he would cover the windows of a house with polyethylene so they don’t leak, and then cover the doors so they don’t leak then he would measure what would happen. He would then cover the rest of the house, then wrap the walls of the house and do this to find out where the leakage was. I was at the university at the time and watching what they were doing. The engineering people were doing tests on gasoline engines and they needed to know what the airflow into the carburetor was, and what they made which is known as a smooth edge orifice. We thought we would try that, we went to Princess Auto and purchased an aircraft pressurization fan, cut a piece of plywood that would fit the doorway, then mounted the fan in the center of this, made a nozzle to fit onto the fan, and then we have a blower door. We used this to pressure test houses to find out what the leakage was.

Saskatchewan Conservation House Drawing.

At the time, were there any other people developing blower doors?

Princeton University was working on the same problem. They made something similar at the same time. A chap from Minneapolis, read my paper that I wrote about this, and he came up to Saskatoon to see what we did, then went back to Minneapolis and started a company there, “Blower Door,” and that’s where blower door comes from. Literally, you could put a blower door in the hallway and do a test in 15 mins. The equipment we were using with tracer gas would take a week to get the results. I did the blower door, then later on we had the energy crisis in the early 70s when the price of oil doubled overnight. Overnight the result was that the Saskatchewan government which was NDP at that time wanted to do something about this. They asked the Saskatchewan Research Council to build a solar house appropriate for Saskatchewan, and the man they put in charge was Dave Eyre. He had no experience in building, since he had no experience in building he asked the Saskatchewan home builders to provide some experienced builders, and asked the University of Saskatchewan to sit on the committee, and the National Research Council to provide people. I was working at the National Research Council and got assigned to sit on this committee. We got together and some of us did some calculations on the envelope, and we came to the conclusion that if we were going to build a solar house that is appropriate for Saskatchewan is that you have to store the heat in the summertime because you can’t collect enough heat in the winter time to heat the house. You have to heat the water in the summertime and store it to have heat for the house in wintertime, and when you do the calculations you have to have the same amount of water as an Olympic swimming pool in each house to store the water. We discussed this, and someone suggested more insulation to cut the heat loss. I knew we were going to have to go farther than that, I knew that we had to make the house more airtight. I suggested certain insulation for the walls, and different for the ceiling, and with an insulated crawl space instead of a basement. We had an architect assigned to the committee and he designed the house. We had a nice overhang that the summer sun didn’t shine in through the window and the winter sun would shine in the window. Then they put exterior electric shutters on the windows. Upstairs we put shutters that would slide into the wall. The shutters were not very successful, the ones downstairs affected the weather stripping. The shutters upstairs were manually operated, and nobody took the time to close the shutters so that didn’t work very well. The house did work well when it came to the air tightness since I had carpenter's papers and knew what I was talking about and we didn't know anyone with experience in making a house air-tight. I and one of the technicians went down to Regina and installed the vapor barrier and we made it very tight. It was half an air change an hour. We went out and bought every caulking known to man and tested them in the lab, and the problem with all of the caulking compounds was they harden and come off the vapor barrier, but the acoustical seal didn’t. We made the house and achieved half an air change per 50 pascals. It was remarkable at the time, Dr. Wolfgang Fest came over and saw what we had done and he went back to Europe and established the PassivHaus. Their requirement for a passive house has 0.6 air changes, he gave himself a little bit more room. We’ve covered basically everything up until now that I’ve been involved with, of course, everyone and their dog comes up to me and ask how do I do this? When we first built the Saskatchewan Conservation House, we looked at them and said we can repeat this for your house with no problem. For the Saskatchewan Conservation House, we used the wall as a structure and built a separate wall inside. The problem with that is when it comes to an interior partition, that’s a break in the vapor barrier, which is a problem, how do you solve that problem? We did some thinking about this and we thought why don't we make the inner wall the structure and place the vapor barrier on the outside of the inner wall partitions? The outer wall doesn't need to be structural anymore, with headers and all of these things, it could be made by 2x2’s, but 2x2’s are more expensive. What we came up with is what is called the prairie double wall. We made the inside wall exactly the same as what you would do with an outside wall but made it with 2x4’s instead of 2x6’s. While it was lying on the floor we would secure the vapor barrier to the studs and put the sheeting on, personally, I would have liked to buy what they use in the southern states. It’s a fiberboard that is about 3/16ths thick, its a heavy-duty cardboard and gives you racking strength, you put it on and nail it down and it holds the polyethylene in place while you put the outer wall on. Then you stand the wall up and the wall can sit outside the foundation and can be insulated between the walls and on the outside wall before you ever stand it up, and that makes it go faster. Then you put the insulation on the interior partitions before putting the ceiling on. It makes sense and saves money.

What got you interested in energy efficiency?

One thing, during world war 1 I started doing carpenter work, I was 12 years old, and at the time during the war, you could not buy building materials to build a house. You could buy barns, so my father bought the material to build a chicken coupe, and the next year he built a barn. In the third year, we got enough material, and we collected cement for two-three years and got enough to pour a foundation but we didn't have any lumber to build the walls of the house. He had read an article in Mechanics illustrated about rammed earth construction, and with that, you take three 2x10’s one on top of the other, and make a framework from these 2x10s with bolts across, and you you put in a layer of clay. We built a house with walls 18 inches thick, with the chicken coupe on one side and the barn on the other. We built this house, 24 feet by 24 feet, and had a full basement. He bought one of the first coal stokers, and you would fill the furnace with pea-sized coal, and it would burn all day. We could go away in the winter for a week, and the house wouldn't freeze because of the walls. That’s my earliest experience with energy, then of course the Saskatchewan Conservation House.

Did the Saskatchewan Conservation House make influence how Saskatchewan builds today?

In Europe definitely, but only recently has it started up in Saskatchewan again. Let me tell you about a house in Saskatoon. A young couple, bought a house and the first thing they did was look up in the attic and there was only so much insulation. The next year decided to change the furnace to a high-efficiency furnace, the contractor doing it said you have a problem here because you have a great big old chimney, so you would have to put in a new chimney for the water heater. After replacing the furnace, the owner looked in the attic and there was tons of frost because of the dead chimney and the air leaking into the top of the house. The problem is that eventually over years the ceiling would cave in from the frost rotting the wood. I told him to try a chainsaw retrofit. You get a chainsaw and you cut the eves and the overhang off the roof, and you take polyethylene and wrap the house. We got together and cut everything off, nailed strips of plywood across the raw edges, put polyethylene over it, and then we put a 2x8 at the edge of the roof, one at the center of the roof, and one at the peak. We put new rafters on that stuck out 3 ft and nailed 2x4 to the side of the rafters, put in R40 on the walls, R42 on the ceiling, we actually got a backhoe and dug down to the footings, and on the basement wall what we did was 2x6 horizontally on the edge, then we made panels of 2x6s and filled it with insulation so we have R44 insulation. The energy bill before he started was $11,047.90 for the year, $1,380 his second year, but when you subtract $420 which is the gas line and energy. He did this, then he put his furnace in, and the price dropped down. When you do this, you put in a half-size furnace.

What do you hope to see in the future?

My hope is we should be building everything with R40 in the walls and R60 in the ceiling. You can likely make a case, for doing R60 in the walls and R80 in the ceiling.