House at Roses Crossroad

House at Roses Crossroad is one of our highest EnerGuide rated projects. With a score of EnerGuide 88, this house ranks among Canada’s most energy efficient homes, and is the highest our experienced energy testers at Blue Green Group had ever measured.

The rural new build sits on an 85 acre property in Prince Edward County, with 55 acres of cropland, a bog, and a woodlot. The 2000 sq.ft. bungalow is designed to passive solar guidelines, built on an east-west axis with a long, south-facing exposure. The owners were a couple from Toronto who wanted to retire to the rural community where they could live lightly on the land. They also aspired to collect renewable solar energy, both for their own personal use, and to provide income by feeding the surplus energy back to the grid. These became main considerations during the building process.

The project uses a double-stud wall construction, filled with spray-applied cellulose insulation, making this house extremely well-insulated. The meticulous application of the project’s air barrier, Tyvek’s exterior house wrap, ensures airtightness. The home’s impressive final air change rate is a low 1.8ACH@50Pa.

Accessibility was a driving consideration for this one storey bungalow, as the retired couple wants to enjoy the home with ease for many years down the road. The front door and foyer are located centrally on the north side of the rectangular structure, opening to the large Great Room with a long southern exposure. Right off the foyer is a large laundry and mechanical room and a spacious coat closet.

The expansive southeast Great Room contains a kitchen with a large island, a living area, and space in the southeast corner for our clients’ baby grand piano. Connected to the north side of the Great Room is a home office, and on the east end is a large, screened-in porch with direct access to a vegetable garden. The western end of the house is comprised of another office, a bathroom, a guest bedroom, and in the southwest corner is the master bedroom with a large walk-in closet and en suite.

The home is built using a 13 in. thick, double-stud wall construction, made with 2×4 in. studs on the inside, a 4 in. gap, and 2×6 in. studs on the outside. This assembly is filled with spray-applied cellulose insulation, giving the walls an insulation value of R48. The roof is insulated with 19 in. of blown-in cellulose, which achieves an R70 roof.

All windows are triple-glazed, argon-filled units from Accurate Dorwin. The south-facing windows have a lower R-value than those on the north, east, and west walls, which gives the southern windows the full potential of winter solar gain, which passively heats the interior space and the in-floor heating tubes. The south windows are shaded by a 3 ft. roof overhang that shades high summer sun angles to keep the space cool. The windows on the north, east, and west sides of the house, where there is less solar exposure, have higher insulation values to keep out the cold winter temperatures.

An exterior house wrap by Tyvek acts as the air barrier for the walls, and a 6mm polyethylene sheet acts as air and vapour barrier in the ceiling. We took extra measures to ensure an airtight seal in order to prevent leakage at ceiling openings, which is often a difficult spot to seal. One such measure was simply to favour track lighting over pot lights wherever possible, and where we did specify pot lights, we installed plastic enclosures behind them and sealed those to the 6mm poly sheet above.

For systems, an Energy Recovery Ventilator (ERV) by UltimateAir provides fresh air circulation, and the in-floor heating system is tied to a recirculation pump, which we’re especially excited about. The house has zoned temperature sensors that correspond to the circulation pump; when sun through the southern windows in the Great Room heat up the space and floor, the pump is alerted by the sensor to begin circulating that heat through the house.

This project is also equipped with active energy systems, with both a solar PV array and a solar thermal hot water system. Both systems are installed on the south-facing roof slope, which was designed and oriented particularly for this purpose. The solar photovoltaic (PV) array is a 10kW solar panel system. Energy captured from the sun gets sold to the grid through Ontario’s MicroFIT program. The solar thermal system in this home not only pre-heats the domestic hot water, but it’s also connected to the in-floor heating tubes. When the domestic hot water tank is full, such as when they’re away, the system channels the pre-heated water from the solar thermal system to the in-floor heating tubes, allowing the boiler to rest.

Interiors in this home are simple, clean and bright. The floors throughout the house, which encase the in-floor heating tubes, are polished concrete with fine to medium grain. The kitchen is an IKEA system with a custom butcher-block island counter. Impressive interior features include custom bookshelves and the fireplace, all of which flank the Great Room and were beautifully installed with care by the project’s builder, Kyle DenOuden of Hickory Homes.