passive-house-ice-box-challenge / Green Building & Sustainable Home Renovation Information & Advice

Ice dams form at the bottom of roofs, letting water penetrate and cause damage to the interior of walls and roofs.  When snow melts on a roof it runs down until it meets the unheated bottom edge of a roof and then freezes. This chunk of ice is called an ice dam, and it can cause water to backup beneath shingles and Ice...

LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) is an internationally recognized rating system for commercial buildings and homes administered by the CaGBC (Canada Green Building Council)  to encourage sustainable building practices. While the commercial program has been in effect for much longer, LEED for Homes C...

What is a Passive House? The term 'passive house' refers to an extremely high performing energy efficient home, in the sense that the heating and cooling is largely passive. To achieve this, homes have to be designed to take advantage of the free heat available from the sun, and heavily fortified with insulation to han...

Why pay for a green home certification? As more people pursue high efficiency green home rating certifications, they become increasingly well known and trusted. Consequently, more people seek them out. Developers build smarter homes when consumers demand them, and the existence of certification programs raises the bar ...

First, the background to this Passivhaus My partner and I are geeks. Our idea of a romantic dream was to build a house so well insulated you could heat it with a hairdryer. For added fun, we wanted to do this on a tight budget while raising a young child. The hairdryer part wasn’t a pipe dream – it’s a common way of de...

What is Passive House certification? The term “Passive House” was once obscure jargon used solely by construction engineers & technically-minded home designers, but now "certified Passive House" is being increasingly specified by construction professionals and homeowners across North America. The concept of Passive...

Building a Passive House that's also LEED certified This is an owner blog EcoHome posted following the personal experience of Sarah Cobb and William Murray of Rocket Construction Inc. as they built a home in Abercorn, Montérégie, Quebec. Setting the bar about as high as you can, they targeted both LEED certification an...

Vancouver has set a goal of being the greenest city in the world by the year 2020. Some of the policies included in that plan are expanded public transportation, bike lanes, encouraging laneway houses for urban density and requiring all new civic buildings to be zero emissions. The city has also imposed upon itself a m...

Passive House construction on Vancouver Island Building the first certified Passive House on Vancouver Island, a duplex shared with our son Mark’s family, convinced us that the market in Victoria was ready for Passive House market condominiums. To follow through, we built the North Park Passive house, a six-unit urban ...

Bella Bella is a small community located on Campbell Island between the northern tip of Vancouver Island and Haida Gwaii. Approximately 90% of its 1,500 residents belong to the Heiltsuk First Nation. In 2004, a fire destroyed the staff housing complex at the RW Large Memorial Hospital, and Vancouver Coastal Health [VCH...

Prefab Home kits are ideal for Passive House or LEED certified homes Écohabitation the French language Quebec affiliates of EcoHome, in conjunction with experienced Architects & Kit home manufacturers, have launched a series of Canadian Manufactured stylish & affordable, prefabricated sustainable green kit home...