Clear Water Off-Grid Lodge

This off-grid, owner-built home is located in a remote poplar forest near Bancroft, Ontario. To accommodate the project’s rural site and to save on time and cost, the house was designed to enable simple construction techniques. Easily accessible and transportable off-the-shelf materials were used whenever possible.

The house is constructed with Durisol ICF (Insulated Concrete Forms), a versatile product that is both structure and insulation, made of 100 percent recycled cement-bonded wood fibre with a rigid mineral wool insulation insert. In addition to the house, the property has a ground-mounted photovoltaic solar array with battery bank and a backup propane generator, allowing this one-storey home to run fully off-grid.

Our clients, a couple previously located in Brampton, moved to rural Ontario after retirement, where they could enjoy the outdoors and live off the grid. They purchased a 40-acre property rich with delicate poplar trees and un-serviced by electrical, gas or water and sewage mains. They decided to act as their own general contractors and build their home themselves, hiring Solares to design, plan, and oversee the project. The house is sturdy and long-lasting, and able to survive the harsh Bancroft winters with little upkeep. This suits our clients well, as they often spend months away travelling in their refurbished Airstream trailer.

For a view into how our clients are using their Solares-designed, passive solar home as the centre of their modern-day, off-grid homestead, watch this 17-minute documentary produced by Exploring Alternatives.

The house is one storey with no basement, and configured in a “T” Shape. The top of the “T” faces south, and the stem runs east/west. The Great Room makes up the entire south-facing branch, with a kitchen and dining area, a living room and a screened-in porch. As well, our client is an avid quilter, so our design incorporates a large quilting space for her in the Great Room with windows on all three sides to provide all the natural light she needs.

Next to the quilting area sits the dining area and open concept kitchen. This space is wide enough to hold a dining room table and large kitchen island with ease, making it a great space for congregating. Beyond the kitchen is the living area with a wood-burning stove, and a large screened-in porch with a seating area and table for relaxed outdoor meals.

The home has two entrances. The main front door is located on the west end of the building, on the same side as the driveway and separate garage. The secondary entrance provides direct access to the forest from the screened-in porch on the east end of the building.

Through the main entrance is a central foyer that connects both branches of the home’s “T-shaped” plan. From this space, one direction leads into the Great Room and the other leads to the more private rooms of the house, with a hallway that ends with the master bedroom and an additional bathroom. Off the hallway are a small office, a bathroom, and two guest bedrooms with views of the east. Across from these rooms are the laundry room and a large mechanical room.

The structure of this house is composed of ICF by Durisol, which do not use foam or polystyrene. Instead, they are made using post-industrial recycled wood fibers, which are bonded together with cement. No certification is required to build with Durisol, which made it an attractive choice for this owner-built project. To ensure an air-tight seal and to add more R-value to the ICF blocks, 2 in. of closed-cell foam was sprayed on the outside of the blocks. The foam was then cladded with factory-painted steel panels.

The heating and cooling is controlled by in-floor heating pipes embedded into the concrete floors, powered by a propane boiler. There is a separate HRV for ventilation, and a fully separate air-handling system that draws hot air from the ceiling of the Great Room and dispenses it into the bedrooms. The Great Room is the warmest room in the house, not only because it’s where people collect to eat and spend time together, but because it also collects heat due to its passive solar design, cooking, and the wood-burning stove. By circulating air from the Great Room to the rest of the house and replacing it with the cooler air from the bedrooms, the amount of energy used in heating this house is impressively low. In addition, no air conditioning system is required because the surrounding dense poplar forest helps keep the home cool even in hot weather.

Energy for the home comes from PV (photovoltaic) solar panels, in a 4kW ground-mounted array installed on a tracker. Additionally, the house uses a small amount of propane, and our clients burn wood in the wood stove. Our clients have kept us informed of their energy use, and are pleasantly surprised at how little propane they use. The air-tight, passive solar design keeps the house comfortably warm even in the coldest temperatures, with minimal help from the in-floor heating system.