County Trail House

Located in pastoral Prince Edward County, this elongated, low-slung home is designed for maximum passive-solar winter heating. Large, south-facing windows allow the low winter sun to enter the main living spaces and bedrooms, providing free passive heating. This house performs impressively well, with an EnerGuide rating of 87.

The clients wanted a forever home ideal for entertaining guests, accommodating visiting family, cooking, reading and relaxing. The environmentally conscious pair saved up to build a fully environmentally-integrated home with the ability to collect its own energy through a rooftop PV solar array. The design of this house, and its passive and active energy collection strategies, enables our clients to minimize their dependence on the grid as much as possible, and creates an opportunity for long-term investments in renewable energy sources.

Besides passive solar heat gain, supplementary heating needs are met by an electric hot water boiler, which is tied into domestic solar hot water panels positioned on the roof. These hot water panels deliver heat through in-floor heating pipes. The residence also feeds into the Ontario Power Authority’s (OPA) MicroFit Program by way of a roof-mounted 3.2 kW photovoltaic solar panel array, allowing our clients to collect their own renewable energy and feed it back into the grid for a profit.

The home stands one storey tall with no basement, with a spacious garage connected to it with a breezeway. A large L-shaped porch hugs the house’s western and southern walls. The great room takes up the western end of the rectangular home, with large southern windows and a spacious, north-facing kitchen. It also includes a large dining area and a sitting area, so the couple can entertain large and small parties comfortably.

A long hallway runs from the Great Room to the home’s eastern end. Along this hallway, three bedrooms – one with an ensuite bathroom – line the south side; and a large mechanical room, an extra bathroom, and an extra bedroom line the north side. The hallway opens up to a southeast reading room, with plenty of inviting lounge chairs and its own small porch with stairs leading down to the property.

The house is designed in true passive solar fashion, with large southern window exposures, and a southern roof overhang to shade the hottest summer rays. The high, asymmetrical roof slants upwards to the north, and two separate window systems line the northern wall. The first is a long row of operable clerestory windows that bring light to the central hallway, collect heat in the winter, and can be opened for cooling and cross-ventilation in the summer. These windows are also protected from high summer sunlight by the pitched roof’s overhang. A second, lower row of northern windows fills the north-oriented rooms with natural light.

The home’s footprint is 2500 sq.ft. including exterior walls. The home’s structure is mostly made of Durisol ICF (Insulated Concrete Forms), on the north, east, and west walls; the south wall is constructed of conventional 2×6 in. wood framing. All the walls are additionally insulated with spray foam on the structure’s exterior, giving us R30 walls. The exterior wall siding is a mixture of sheet steel and factory painted wood.

The roof is built of engineered roof trusses, with spray foam applied to the underside of the sheathing. The roofing is sheet steel, with a 3.2kW solar array installed on the southern slope.

The house is impressively air-tight, with an air change rate of only 1.33ACH@50pa. The house is so air-tight and well insulated that there is no need for an air conditioning system. In the summer months, the house only uses 209-286 KWh of electricity per month. A regular house of the same size might use four to five times that amount. For heating, the home’s southern windows collect passive solar heat, and in-floor heating pipes provide additional heating. The small electric hot water boiler kept in the mechanical room provides hot water to the in-floor heating, as well as heats water for domestic use.

The 3.2kW Solar array installed on the roof was both an efficient and environmental choice as well as a smart investment – the array cost $26,000 CAD to install, but generates about $3,000 CAD per year through Ontario’s MicroFIT program, which feeds the energy collected back into the grid for a profit. Seven years is all it will take for them to recover the cost of the system. Then, for the remaining 13 years of their 20-year contract with the OPA, their array will be bringing them an income.