If you live in one of the Stonetown’s numerous single-storey, “wartime” homes, and you’ve got an estimated $85,000 to spend, perhaps you could reduce your energy bill to nearly nothing.
Unfortunately for me, however, I live in a two-storey, double-brick, 135-year-old farmhouse with a stone foundation and an unfinished basement, exposed to the prevailing westerlies as they roll across open farmland. For me, $85,000 can either buy me enough renovations to plug up a good proportion of the holes (and leave me with 135-year-old basic construction, still leaking lots of warm air), or pay for demolishing the old one and pouring just the foundation of a new replacement.
The $85,000 figure comes from a project, originated in Toronto in 2008 and now rolling out in three other cities across Ontario, called the Now House. It was the only renovation-centred winner, out of 12 (the others were all newly-constructed), in the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s EQuilibrium Sustainable Housing Demonstration Initiative. And, if the Now House organization’s promotional material is to believed, it turned a Toronto wartime (post World War Two) home into “a near zero energy home.”
Even from the outside, it’s immediately evident the Now House is different: on the roof are solar panels and coils of hose for heating water. Inside, specialized equipment and building materials transfers heat from the drains of showers and appliances, stores solar-generated electricity, and restricts the loss of warmth.
“If I knew a way to make insulation sexy, I’d become a rich woman,” said Now House’s Lorraine Gauthier last year, in an interview with Global TV.
The dream of her organization, meanwhile, is to make other people rich — or, rather, make them less likely to be poor by drastically decreasing the amount they pay for home energy.
“There are a million of these houses across Canada,” she told Global TV. “If we can come up with the formula to do it for this house, we can do it a million times across the country.”
The first step in that formula, according to more than one website exploring energy-efficient renovations, is airproofing your home. That’s where, in my own home renovations, I hit a brick wall — in more ways than one.
Anyone who has ever renovated a farmhouse of similar vintage knows the toll taken by the removal of lath and plaster. We should all tattoo a symbol to our foreheads so, when we travel along life’s byways, we — like Kenworth drivers or Harley-Davidson riders - can nod and wave to each other in shared wisdom. Even as we curse the dust and horsehair from which we may never free our pores, we marvel at the square nails, masonry work, plastering prowess, elbow grease and sweat that went into these structures. And, barring incidences of roof malfunction, we marvel at how decades of Canadian weather has failed to seriously affect the walls.
That’s a large part of the reason we choose to renovate, even though most financial modelling suggests it would pay, long-term, to build new. Energy-wise, as well, the predominance of new homes among the CMHC contest winners hints that new construction generally comes out on top. Still, the way I hear some new home-owners talk about how, after only a few years they find the need to redo this or that, or add one thing or another, I wonder if that would really be true among the general home-owning public. Plus, with a family tradition tied up in this old brick home, the decision to renovate isn’t hard to justify.
The problem with airproofing (and, to a lesser degree, insulating), however, is that double-brick homes weren’t designed to be airproof. The interior temperature of the brick is supposed to gradually rise and fall, taking much longer to reach high and low peaks, and being much less susceptible to daily changes compared to the outside or inside air. According to one research website, restricting the flow of air through exterior walls means the bricks don’t have the opportunity to gradually change temperature. Condensation forms, then freezes. The bricks degrade more quickly.
Double-brick construction went out of style in the early part of the last century, mainly due to building code requirements for insulating all exterior walls. There’s no space in these walls for insulation, and - even though it’s recommended that insulation be applied on the exterior, rather than the interior — home-owners wince at the thought of losing the aesthetics of the skillfully-crafted brick facade: hence the taxing task of lath-and-plaster removal, to allow for interior insulation installation.
Even though building codes effectively eliminated double-brick homes, they’ve proven their ability to withstand our weather. And, comparing the aftermaths of the recent earthquakes in Haiti and Chile — where building codes, or the lack thereof,  clearly affected the level of suffering experienced by the populace — a lot of Ontario residents should be thankful for that. We should be thankful we live in a country with the wealth to ensure all buildings are constructed using what are understood to be suitable materials and methods.