from the ground up - The Tyee

Step Inside the Real Home of the Future: PassivhausCanadians helped invent a house so efficient you could heat it with a hairdryer. Then we forgot about itBy Monte PaulsenArticle first published on January 25, 2011 by TheTyee.ca.The home of the future was built 34 years agoin Regina. It was called the Saskatchewan ConservationHouse. It used less than a fifth of theenergy consumed by comparable homes. Morethan 30,000 people came to see it. But Canadianhomebuilders ignored the ideas it offered, and theCanadian public forgot about it.The world would have forgotten the Saskatchewanhouse, too, were it not for a quirky German physicistinterested in energy-saving buildings. After studyingthe Saskatchewan house and a handful of similarbuildings, Dr. Wolfgang Feist wrote a mathematicallyprecise -- and elegantly simple -- criterion for designingbuildings that require less than a tenth of the energyof average buildings. He called it the Passivhausstandard.Feist’s formula has gone viral. There are now morethan 25,000 certified Passivhaus buildings in Europe,and thousands more under construction around theworld.But, here in Canada? There’s just one.Sans furnace in SaskatchewanThe Saskatchewan Conservation House was built in1977 by the Saskatchewan Research Council, withsupport from partners including the University ofRegina and the University of Saskatchewan.It was built without a furnace. Instead, the northwestRegina home features a nearly airtight envelope withABOVE: Saskatchewan Conservation House, c. 1977.R-40 wall insulation and R-60 roof insulation. Thisenables a small hot water system to heat the house,even through the winter.The house is cube-shaped to expose a minimumamount of exterior surface area per square foot offloor space. Dark-brown cedar siding enables thehouse to absorb heat from the sun. And deciduoustrees on the south side of the house provide shade insummer and allow solar heat to enter the windows inthe winter.Together with the “Lo-Cal House” at the Universityof Illinois and the “Leger House” in Massachusetts(both of which were built about the same time) theSaskatchewan house was among the earliest conservationdemonstration projects in North America.American physicist William Shurcliff summarized thecommon elements of these cutting-edge buildings in a38