The Citizen, 2017-10-26, Page 19THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2017. PAGE 19.
Lees' Walton -area passive house planning continues
Ready for next year
Chris Lee, above, and his wife Judy have lived in their Walton -area home for years. The house
is more than a century old. Now that the couple have taken a step back from running the
Walton Raceway, they plan on building a passive home that incorporates greener technologies
and allows them to live with a smaller economic impact. (File photo)
By Shawn Loughlin
The Citizen
With plans progressing on the Lee
family's passive house project, Chris
Lee has already had a chance to get
his hands dirty and, maybe, take a
look into the future.
Around a year ago, Chris and his
wife Judy Lee began succession
planning at the Walton
Raceway, where they live in a home
built in the 1880s.
Succession planning led the Lees
not only to think about building a
new house, but to think about the
future and leaving the planet in
better shape than they found it.
As life advanced at the motocross
course around him, he would return
home at night to a house with
technology over 125 years old. Lee
recounts a conversation he had with
a dairy farmer who felt he was in the
same boat, saying he would employ
robotic milking and the most
advanced technology in his farming
operation, but return home to a
house stuck in an era generations
earlier.
The Lees started looking to build a
new house at the east end of the
property, near the newly -installed
Edge of Walton Challenge Course.
Chris's curiosity about building an
efficient home took him down a
rabbit hole where he would
eventually end up considering a
passive house as an option.
The initial concept of a passive
house dates back to the late 1980s in
Germany, where the first
"passivhaus" was built in the early
1990s. The term pertains to a
voluntary standard of building
applied to a house that makes it
incredibly energy efficient and
requires very little heating or
cooling.
Due to the orientation of the
building, strategic placement of
elements such as windows and
awnings and extremely efficient
insulation in the walls, roof and
windows, there is no need for a
furnace or air-conditioning unit. It
does, however, use a heat recovery
unit (HRV), which provides the
inside with fresh air without letting
the house's heat escape.
A properly -constructed passive
house is said to use 90 per cent less
energy than a standard house built to
today's building code. The
remaining 10 per cent of heat can be
provided by body heat, the sun,
appliances, light bulbs and
electronics.
Currently, the number of passive
house structures (the term "passive
house" is not restricted to houses,
but can be used for commercial
buildings, office buildings and
apartment buildings, etc.) number in
the tens of thousands around the
world, the vast majority of which are
in Europe.
The standards for a passive house
are laid out, chapter and verse, in the
Passivhaus Planning Package,
meaning that while many
environmentally -efficient structures
may use elements from the passive
house concept, a structure must meet
certain goals in order to be certified
as a passive house.
First, the building must be
designed to have an annual heating
and cooling demand of not more
than 15 kilowatt-hours per square
metre per year, or be designed with a
peak heat load of 10 watts per square
metre.
Second, total primary energy
consumption must not be more than
60 kilowatt-hours per square metre
per year. And third, the building
must not leak more air than 0.6 times
the house volume per hour at 0.0073
pounds per square inch as tested by a
blower door.
When Lee first wanted to build a
new house, he wanted it to be as
energy-efficient as possible. He says
that North Americans have a great
environmental responsibility and he
wanted to do his part.
He began looking into
environmental standards like R-
2000, the Home Energy Rating
System (HERS) Index or LEED
(Leadership in Energy and
Environmental Design), which is a
standard to which the Canadian
Centre for Rural Creativity in Blyth
will be built. However, as he kept
researching and trying to find more
and more efficient ways to build a
new house, he found the passive
house concept and it just made
Continued on page 22
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