It will take over a year of collecting data on energy and water use before it’s known if the home qualifies for meeting the Living Building Challenge guidelines
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From the outside, it looks like any other modern West Coast home.
What passersby don’t see are two tanks buried under the driveway that can store 35,000 litres of collected rainwater, enough to flush the toilets and water the garden. On the roof and a backyard trellis, an extensive solar panel system feeds excess power to the grid.
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In a recent blog post, B.C. Hydro asked if this custom-built, 5,400-square-foot home in Vancouver’s Kerrisdale area could be the greenest in Canada.
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That remains to be seen, but the owner and builders are aiming for it to meet some of the toughest standards for assessing the sustainability of a building. It will take over a year of collecting data on energy and water use before it’s known if the home qualifies for meeting the Living Building Challenge guidelines set by the International Living Future Institute, a Portland, Oregon, non-profit.
Stipulations include generating at least five per cent more electricity than is used in a year, and being able to to operate essential services for seven days without grid power. There is a long list of toxic chemicals and materials that can’t be used, and a requirement that at least 25 per cent of the site is used to grow food.
“It is a really ambitious project,” said Arthur Lo, owner and founder of Vancouver-based Insightful Healthy Homes, which designed and built the home.
The home is split on six levels to accommodate a family of three generations living together. The design and planning took two years to complete, and construction took more than six years, said Lo.
Other projects that have met the Living Building Challenge — or parts of it — are ibraries and halls on academic campuses, buildings for large foundations, and companies in the U.S., in Australia and in Europe.
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In B.C., there are two examples, one at the VanDusen Botanical Garden building in Vancouver and the other at the UniverCity Childcare Centre on Burnaby Mountain.
There are fewer residential homes on the list: on Bainbridge Island, in Seattle and in Edmonds in Washington state, in Bend, Ore.,San Antonio and Austin in Texas, and Ann Arbor in Michigan. In B.C., there is only one example of a residential project, a family home in Cowichan Bay on Vancouver Island.
For example, to qualify for the full Living Building Challenge, there is a requirement that an equal parcel of land equivalent to the size of the site must be set aside or funded through a habitat exchange program.
Lo has spoken to the owners about donating money to a land trust. They haven’t committed to this yet and in this case, there is also the argument there was an existing house on this city lot whereas other projects seeking to meet this requirement sit on large plots of land that have never been developed.
Lo declined to give a ballpark figure for the Kerrisdale project, but said this kind of venture takes deep pockets.
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In 2011, his company built a Burnaby home that was B.C.’s first to be net-zero certified. He thinks that investing in expensive, one-off projects can lead to new and better practices that can be affordable.
Dan Butler, construction manager at Insightful Healthy Homes, said the project allowed them to push for sustainable alternatives and, while suppliers initially balked at the requests, they later became interested.
Lo said that to reduce the overall carbon in the home’s materials, the outside is clad in reclaimed lumber from the frame of the 1930s era home originally on the property, in addition to three other projects the company was developing.
“I always say the bones of the old house became the skin of the new house,” said Lo.
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