A new contender for the title of Canada's Greenest Home

We don’t currently have plans we can offer unfortunately. There arePassive House and LEED certified prefab kit homesavailable that may meet your needs, other than that we would recommend you look through our building guide pages to learn high performance building techniques.

An ‘Eco Home’ could take many different forms, but they would share a few common threads. You could therefore look at home plans online for inspiration, then once you have a general design you find appealing, you could then green home building techniques to that design. We would recommend you first start with determining exactly how much space you need. In general,smaller homes use less resources and less energy than large ones, so the smaller you can build the better.

And choose your materials carefully –natural insulation materials and non-toxic building materials protect indoor air quality, and will usually pollute less during manufacturing. A green home would be an energy efficient home, so be sure to have awell-insulated building envelope.

这里是我们的链接Green Home Building Guide, theEcohome planning and design pageis a great place to start, and as you get further into you planning please feel free to check back with us and post a more specific question in our advice column and maybe we can help guide you further.

It’s great tobreak thermal bridgesin wall assemblies and improve the overall thermal performance of a home as well an increase home durability, which is what happens when you build more efficient homes. What I DON’T really like at a glance is that they are insulated with spray foam.

However, if the company that makes these insulated wood studs is building them in partnership with spray foam manufacturers that have changed tosafer blower agents with lower GHGs(Greenhouse Gases), that would certainly be a mark in their favour in our opinion. There are two such manufacturers we know of so far, Demilec and Elastochem. The GWP (Global Warming Potential) of the standard HFC blowing agents was as high as 1,430, where the GWP of the new HFO blowing agents is only 1, meaning that HFO blowing agents are on par with Carbon in terms of theclimate change impactrather than being 1,430 times worse.

I would also wonder about the cost, since they don’t look cheap. We know it takes an investment to build a more efficient home, we just aren’t sure yet without knowing a price if that’s a wise investment in thermal performance. What I mean, is that the money it costs to buy these insulated T-studs may yield more energy savings if it were applied to an extra inch of insulation over the entire wall assembly for example.

So, in conclusion – We think it’s great that a manufacturer is coming to the market with something like that, hopefully there won’t be a significant increase in cost and environmental impact.

For interest’s sake I would also point you to the following page link, a few years ago we helped a carpentry school build a LEED Platinum home that was donated to Habitat for Humanity, and in the process of exploring ideas for efficient home designs we had experimented with I-joists that we had insulated with Rockwoolrigid insulation boards(photo below). They were surprisingly easy to build, we just ripped the insulation panels on a table saw and just pressure fit them in place. It didn’t end up making it into the mix, but we sure had fun getting students and teachers to explore innovative building techniques!