The first time I saw Rob Dumont’s house I was unimpressed. I was visiting an ex-girlfriend in Saskatoon, I mentioned that I was doing some research into sustainable homes, and she said “there’s one near here, we should walk by it.” It just looked like any other house. The Dumont house is in the colonial revival style, it’s simply built and doesn’t stand out in the neighbourhood, which has a suburban feel to it (though it’s not far from the downtown). I’m used to seeing half million dollar ecohomes, so when you take away the architect and expensive finishes, solariums,
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Harold Orr’s Superinsulated Retrofits
Recently I had the privilege of interviewing Harold Orr, who was the project leader on the Saskatchewan Conservation House in the late 1970’s. He was involved in the invention of the residential HRV, and blower door tests, and his work influenced the Passive House and Net Zero movements. Now in his eighties, his brain contains a library of information on energy efficient building, and he talked to me for two hours straight. Orr’s main passion for the past several decades has been superinsulated retrofits of existing buildings, and he says the need for deep energy retrofits was obvious to him
Continue readingThe common origins of Superinsulation, Passivhaus, and Net Zero homes
A lot of valuable lessons were learned as a result of the oil crises of the 1970’s. Unfortunately in the 1980’s many of the conservation initiatives from the 70’s were abandoned – but the skills, knowledge and awareness garnered at the time were not lost, and we’re benefiting from them today. In building science big strides were made in insulation and air sealing of houses, and a lot of this knowledge came out of two projects in Illinois and Saskatchewan. In 1976 a group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign developed a design which they named the “Lo-Cal” house, which used
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