Ross Elliott

LEED Canada for Homes: Program Review

June 5, 2012

CMHC
Room 104
700 Montreal Road
Ottawa

8:30 AM - 5:00 PM

This full-day workshop provides essential knowledge of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Canada for Homes Rating System. It provides the foundation required for more advanced LEED Canada for Homes training. Group activities help demonstrate and reinforce learning.

This workshop, like all CaGBC education programs, meets eligibility requirements for the Green Associate exam.

Full Course Description

200 level course, 7 GBCI CE hours

Event Contact | Notes

In 1999 the government launched the EnerGuide for Houses program, providing expert energy advice to Ontario homeowners. I was the 38th person in Canada to become a Certified Energy Advisor. In those early days it was thoroughly enjoyable working with clients who were just interested in learning how to make their homes more healthy, comfortable and energy efficient. Professional, knowledgeable advice, a thorough inspection and a detailed report on their home with a customized set of well-explained and prioritized energy upgrades were what they were paying for; they weren't simply paying the entry fee to the government coffers. There were no government grants in those early days! Almost fifteen years later the cost of an energy audit from some organizations is half what it used to be (adjusted for inflation); until this year a homeowner could get up to $10,000 in grants (currently only $5,000); and most people are only in it for the money. As a result, the quality of the energy audits across Canada as well as the motivations of the customers has declined substantially.

Now the program has been cancelled but the need for retrofitting our housing stock remains. The alternative to a government grant program? Truly useful whole-home energy audits, air tests, thermography and building-science-based energy upgrade advice and effective retrofits delivered by competitive, independent energy consulting businesses like the team at Homesol, advice you can truly count on to save you money on your energy costs over the long term. It's the best investment you'll ever make, and you really DON'T need a government grant to do the right and economically-intelligent thing. Good ideas fly on their own, bad ideas need government support.

You certainly won't hear that opinion from any other Service Organization except Homesol, the others are lining up at the government troughs right now and pressuring them to renew the program that's due to die on March 31st, 2012 (cue the crocodile save-ecoENERGY tears).

However, there are now thousands of trained, experienced and certified energy advisors across Canada who could easily continue marketing the same services they currently provide, only now as creative entrepreneurs freed up from government intervention. I hope they will let small businesses compete freely to deliver quality energy audits, I can't think of any other product so many homeowners really need and which actually pays for itself!

By the way, if you have already had your first ecoENERGY audit done, remember you have only 18 months from the date of your first audit to complete your retrofits and have the follow-up evaluation done in order to qualify for your grants. Although all work must be completed by March 31st, you will have until June 30th, 2012 to get your final inspection done. Despite my personal opinion that the program should not (ever) be renewed, I still strongly encourage you to call us to book your follow-up inspection and get rewarded by the government for making your home more energy efficient. We're here to help you, no matter who did your first evaluation. But your real lasting reward will be a better house that's future-proofed against inevitably rising energy costs. Homesol will still be here, providing you with expert advice, long after all the organizations who are just in it for the government grants disappear.   

After a long blogging drought I hope to get back to writing to you all once again. There's a tremendous amount of new developments in green building, and the pace of change in residential energy design is speeding up, particularly as we move into the new R-2000 standard. Passive House is capturing the imaginations of builders and buyers alike, and the specter of imminent peak fossil fuels has been replaced by shale gas and tar sands discoveries (as well as plentiful coal) that may be leading us to something far worse - the times they are a'changin'. But the primary message I bring back here from GreenBuild is one of hope.

I was incredibly fortunate to be invited to speak at GreenBuild, and presented on the Passive House / LEED Platinum candidate project built by Vert Design in Ottawa. Several hundred people attended my talk despite Amory Lovins speaking at the same time. Those of you who are in the know may be aware CanPHI (the Canadian Passive House Institute - specifically Malcolm Issacs and Guido Wimmers) contested PHIUS' (Passive House Institute of the US') certification of this project some eight months after the Passive House label for the home was delivered in Nov. 2010, with this dispute eventually contributing to the PHIUS / PHI split. Bottom line at our end, which I explained in the presentation (which I will post here if I can obtain permission from GreenBuild) is that this house, the first certified Passive House residence in Canada, WILL succeed in keeping its Passive House designation, once we make a couple of minor changes. More to follow...

Homesol was also represented at the GreenBuild trade show, as a member of Passive Buildings Canada (of which I am Vice President). Although the PBC booth was tucked away in a far corner in the non-profit section, in the BIGGEST trade show I've ever seen (too big for just the main show venue at the Toronto Convention Centre, so there were actually two trade show venues, all on green building products - amazing how far this industry has come!), we still attracted quite a crowd as people actively sought out our booth, because everyone wants to know more about Passive Buildings. At every presentation I was at, there was at least one question about Passive House. And I had a very interesting conversation with Vancouver architect Richard Kadulski of Solplan Revue about how Passive House is being represented quite poorly by some well-meaning proponents who are woefully ignorant of the Canadian context, a topic that will certainly continue to develop. As one of only six Certified Passive House Consultants in Canada at this time, I can see this is really going places faster than any of us ever imagined.

What I came away from GreenBuild with was a sense that we are on the cusp of a new era in buildings, well beyond the baby steps we've taken so far, to where energy saving technologies are going to rock your world and change the building industry in ways we can scarcely imagine. I will tell you more about that soon....

I want to keep this post short, although with so many months since my last post I have a lot more to say. I'm heading to Ireland tomorrow for 3 1/2 weeks; will be visiting several Canadian-built SuperE projects over there as part of our Passive House research we're doing for CMHC; heading over to Darmstadt, Germany for a few days of Passive House Trainer Training with the Passive House Institute; then over to The Eden Project in the UK before heading back home, so watch this blog space for more Homesol Building Solutions news!

When it comes to “higher education”, I have tremendous respect for anyone who completes all the schooling required to become an accredited professional, like an engineer or architect – or physician, which at one time was the path I was on. Five or ten years in university will teach you a lot of things you’d never learn “on the street”. It’s not easy, and only the strong survive, so although a degree may not always signify brilliance, it at least proves perseverance.  

On the other hand, a lot of smart people find traditional classroom learning too slow, too rigid in thinking and too focused on regurgitation rather than knowledge. Many people in the latter category have no degrees to show for their knowledge, yet have life experience credentials to rival many PhDs. Unfortunately, most of those folks applying for high level jobs in government and industry get turned away from the door quicker than a Harper bouncer will bar someone seen with Ignatieff on Facebook, but I digress into Canadian election politics... 

Last week I went to San Francisco for the 25^th annual Affordable Comfort conference, and while I was there I dropped by to see Fred Stitt, the founder of the San Francisco Institute of Architecture. I wanted to talk to him about receiving advance academic credit towards completing my masters degree at his non-traditional design school.  

I met Fred on a warm and sunny late-March day at his marina-view office in Alameda, California, an architect, professor and author I have long known of but never previously met. I’ve read some of his works, including the Ecological Design Handbook, and particularly remember him saying "the only problem with all other architecture schools is…. everything". That got me intrigued, and I read through the entire SFIA website, at www.sfia.net . Since residential designers make peanuts it really makes no economic sense for me to go back to university full-time to become an architect just in order to design houses. And I’d like to design a lot more Passive and Net-Zero houses… Hence my meeting with Fred.

Fred subscribes to the notion that walking into a building should be like entering a piece of music. Good architecture should sing to us. Responsible architecture is deep-green regenerative, not just sustainable any more (the Earth is already past the point where breaking even will do – I love the analogy to a marriage: if someone asked how your relationship was and you said “it’s sustainable” would that be a good thing?… we should aim beyond that!).

According to Fred, traditional architecture schools stifle and destroy the creative thinking we need to bring to designing innovative organic, ecological, nature-based buildings. He says 20 years ago (and perhaps still to this day) the higher education needed for future-based architecture simply didn’t exist, so he founded the San Francisco Institute of Architecture.

We had a very pleasant chat, and he gave me a lot of good advice. For example, don’t waste my time learning to be good at AutoCAD, hire an architectural technologist instead. Don’t be afraid to design, I’m already far ahead of most people who claim to be designers. And that I’m unstoppable. I like that last part, it does pretty much sum it all up. He suggested I create my own program of study, and submit it to SFIA for approval, along with some of the design work I’ve done over the years, and get started on learning more about ecological architecture. I guess I'm going back to school!

My first assignment I've set for myself is to read A Pattern Language cover-to-cover and write a report on every chapter explaining what I learned and what I feel about the information presented, since although I’ve never read the book in any formal sense I have skimmed through it enough to know it’s a basic residential design text. I already know I disagree with the way some designers get obsessed with meeting every detail in the book, and I can always recognize a house designed by someone who has taken A Pattern Language a bit too much to heart; the unnecessary ceiling level changes and silly extra corners flying in the face of the simplicity of someone like Frank Lloyd Wright (an architect I can also disagree with in a lot of ways) who said: “Form follows function - that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.”. Sounds like Passive House, I think Fred Stitt would agree… and I look forward to having him as my mentor along with the rest of the faculty at San Francisco Institute of Architecture.