Sustainability in Designing a House

By Tate Zingle, Lucy Gagel, Joshua Soquilla, and Henry Bibby

Eco-Home

Intro

For our project, we decided to create an eco friendly house. We have focused on implementing new and groundbreaking technologies into a regular residential home, in order to create a house of the future. We really wanted to create a home that created minimal waste, so as to use all resources to their fullest potential. This kind of home may sound very far off, but many of these features are becoming mandatory in Europe. We hope that our house will create ideas for a new standard of Canadian homes.

Natural Resource Cycling

One of the main ideas behind our house is the reuse of materials. The house is based off of today’s ideas and methods of sustainability. We have tried to reduce the waste that we create, so that all of the waste is in its minimal form. We have implemented many new and progressive technologies to reuse the waste that an average house usually creates in an active, environmentally friendly way.

Water is one of the main wastes that a house creates, and it is one of earth’s most quickly dwindling resources. On average, a Canadian person wastes 329 litres of water per day. A large amount of that is used in showers and baths. That’s why we have implemented shower timers into our house. They will limit the amount of time a person can use water for a shower, hopefully reducing our house’s initial water waste. We’ve also done a similar thing for baths. We have implemented a timer that fills the bath to an appropriate limit, and then shuts the water off, so as not to overfill a bath. This will also limit our initial waste. After these first measures, we will store any leftover water as grey water, and reuse it in our toilets or to water our rooftop garden. Residential use of water is very high, and only 40% of indoor water intake is non-reusable with 10% being used in kitchens for making food, and the other 30% is used in toilets. We would be replacing the water used in our toilets with grey water, to reduce our indoor clean water intake by 30%. We would also water our rooftop garden with grey water, to reduce water usage further. We would also have multiple rain barrels to help reduce our filtered water use, so we could use that exclusively for uses that require filtered water.

We would get our grey water from bathtubs and showers, as well as laundry water, meaning we would reuse 60% of the water an average house uses, and reduce our overall use by 30%. To use all these water resources safely we would have to implement a double piped drainage system throughout our entire house, as well as easily accessible coarse filters. Coarse filters take out any solid materials suspended in the water, and since grey water has a higher amount of this than basic clean water, they need to be easily accessible for maintenance. To filter and purify the water, we would be using a Greyter HOME, a new system that is designed specifically for residential homes.

Heat energy is another resource that is largely used and wasted in households. To combat this, we have made our house a passive house, meaning we use the sun’s energy to its fullest extent. We have carefully placed windows, in order to utilise the sun’s energy to heat our house. All materials used to make the house are tightly sealed to keep heat in, and we have no concrete balconies, which often act as thermal bridges, sucking the heat out of houses through the floor, and then releasing it outside. To keep the air in our house fresh, and to minimize heat loss, we would have a heat recovery ventilator, and the surface area to volume ratio of our house would be minimized. One of the factors we are most excited about are the curtains of our house, made from recent groundbreaking technology that can absorb and release heat on demand. This will allow us to reduce our energy usage, as we will collect heat from the sun, as well as excess heat from heaters around the house, and then at night the heat will be released to keep the house warm. We will also have a nest thermostat, which controls heating systems, in order to make sure that when we do use energy, it is used at its most efficient level.

To keep all this heat inside the house, we have triple pane windows, which are much more heat efficient, as well as soundproof. Triple pane windows are basically three panes of glass with spaces between them. The spaces are injected with gas, which help trap heat and stop sound. Triple pane windows are very popular in homes, considering the environmental and personal benefits. We will also have a lot of insulation around our house to trap heat. Unlike most houses, we will not use basic insulation, which is not the most environmentally-friendly, but instead use hempcrete, an insulator made up of the inner woody core of hemp plant mixed with a lime based binder. Hempcrete is a biocomposite, which means it’s also biodegradable, unlike basic insulation. We will also have plants surrounding our house, creating an extra layer of natural insulation, as well as cleaning the air the house’s inhabitants breathe.

Our house is very heat-efficient, and with our lack of air conditioning (to save energy), our house may get hot at some times. Our first measure of defense against this is having openable doors and windows, to allow airflow during hotter months. We also have venting skylights, which have two main functions. One of the most beneficial features is that they create airflow, cooling the house in the hotter months. When the skylight is open, the hot air is sucked up through the skylight, creating a cooling effect throughout the house. They also act as natural lights. Having them on the roofs of our rooms will create lighting, which will again reduce energy costs. Another benefit is their ability to light smaller, usually darker areas. “Sun Tunnels” are tubes that are open to the sky, and they act as lights, bringing natural light into smaller spaces. Natural lights is also known to improve moods, and calm people down.

On top of using natural light, we also have electric lights, to light the house during darker months or times of day. These lights, however, are on motion sensors, as well as timers. They will turn on when a person enters a room, and then turn off automatically after a certain amount of time. This makes sure that lights will not be left on for more time than needed, cutting energy usage, as well as making things more convenient for the inhabitants of the house. We also have photovoltaic (PV) solar panels around the house, to change the sunlight we get into usable energy. On top of this, we have solar water heaters, to use the sun to help heat our water as well. We would use an active, indirect circulation system, based around heat transfer fluid. This fluid is circulated through collectors and the heat exchanger. This then heats the water that will enter the home.

To reuse resources that any house, passive or not, creates, we have implemented features such as composting. We would have a compost box outside of the house, allowing us to put our food waste back into the soil that we would be using in our garden. We would also have a community compost box in our neighborhood, which would be used for soil for the community garden. We would have a community garden to increase diversity of life and nature in our residential area. It would also allow us to use more natural resources in our homes. Hopefully our garden would create a home and feeding area for species such as bees and birds whose homes are started to disappear due to urbanization.

Overall, we have used the ideas of resource cycling and efficient resource use that we learned in the garden this year to create an eco-friendly house that reduces resource use, and uses every resource used to its fullest potential. Many of our features reduce carbon dioxide emissions, as well as water waste, food waste, and energy waste. It is meant to be an energy and water efficient as possible, to save our earth’s dwindling resources. Our house helps protect the resources that our earth needs to preserve.

Diversity

This house design is very good for biodiversity, with many attributes that help and increase the diversity of the native Vancouver species. With this house being vulnerable to insect infestations, we have decreased the probability of this happening by using an abundance of different plants that possess certain properties that can be beneficial to others plants such as rosemary, basil, or mint. These plants act as natural pesticides that repel unwanted insects such as mosquito’s flies, and other insects that can be harmful to plants. This stops our use of pesticides that could harm the insects we want to help like bees. As an addition, some of the plants we could plant, such as bee balm and lavender are bee friendly. The bee population is in decline due to use of pesticides, loss of habitat, and cold weather. CBC reported that after conducting a BC beekeeper survey it showed that 31% of wintering bee colonies in BC died, compared to the average death rate of 18%. Bees are very important for the environment, as they are the world’s main pollinator. If you want to know just how important bees are, they pollinate 70 out of 100 crop species that feed 90% of the world. So, hopefully our efforts will make somewhat of an impact, because if the bee population declines, too much the entire ecosystem would feel the impact. Bees are a big part of diversity.

Like all other houses, this house is somewhat susceptible to fire, flooding and overheating. We have decided to diversify the building materials to make it harder for a fire to start or spread. This includes putting materials that are more fire resistance in places like the kitchen. This would mean having concrete floors and placing wooden cupboards away from the stove and oven. To stop the overheating of the house we implanted lots of venting and windows. This would include a large skylight which when opened would allow the hot air to escape and the cool air to come since hot air rises quicker. To stop the flooding we will put the roof on a slant so the water drains off the roof onto the ground where it can find its way to the drain. The plants around the house will also be able to suck up the water.

To support biodiversity we have also decided to place a couple of bird feeders and houses around the house to help the birds that live here or are just passing through. Since some birds are negatively impacted by humans because of loss of habitat or decline of food sources, we are trying to even the odds for the birds. By also helping birds who migrate, we could also help the bird populations in other places. These bird feeders would not only help the local diversity but the diversity wherever the migrating birds are going. We will also put anti reflectors in our windows that birds can see so they do not harm themselves by flying into them.

Developing a Collaborative Relationship with Nature

Our house relies on water, sunlight, and plants. Water for basic household functions and watering plants, sunlight as another source of energy, and plants for insulation, purifying air, and preventing soil erosion.

People benefit from our house because the plants filter the air and the vegetables and fruits will save money from buying groceries, and eating fruits and vegetables from your community can help reduce allergy symptoms.

Outside and around the house there will be trees to help cool off the surrounding area. There will also be bird houses, baths and feeders to help support the native and migrating birds. We will also put plants in our garden that will help as a nature corridor for animals with longer range.

Our house also relies on pollination from animals around the house because plants are an important for insulating the house and if there were no bees or butterflies to pollinate the plants then the plants would die.

Conclusion

Overall, our home has created a new way of living for us and other organisms alike. We hope that we see more homes like this in the future, where the homeowners are not only taking into account their living, but the earth’s as well. The goal of our house was to create a home that met 1st world living standards comfortably, but also helped the environment thrive. People living in Canada would not feel the difference in this home, compared to a regularly constructed home today. Because of this, we hope that people start implementing some of the features listed above into their own homes, as many of these features can be added on to a current house. We hope that reading this has opened your eyes to what you can do to help save our environment, in the comfort of your own home.

Bibliography

Ecological Literacy Through Gardening

by SPEC & Riley Park Community Garden

Sustainability in Designing a House