video-building-guide / Green Building & Sustainable Home Renovation Information & Advice

The guiding principles during the design of Ecohome’s Edelweiss House demonstration home - passive heating and cooling, healthy living space, affordable to build and operate, resilient and flexible design.  The underlying goal of the Edelweiss House was to design and build a modestly-sized but functional home that wou...

WATCH MORE VIDEOs about passive solar home design & construction here This is the first in a series of videos on passive solar home construction, we begin with passive solar design basics, orienting the future house on the site to take full advantage of the free heat available from the sun while keeping it cool wi...

Slab on Grade foundation, detail design; the basics There are many different soil conditions and corresponding slab designs. This page is about how to build a thickened edge concrete slab on grade FPSF footing on soil with a high water table to prevent frost heave, by first installing drainage below the slab.  Related ...

Gabion walls are retaining walls built by stacking stone in a gabion cage or gabion basket that can serve many purposes but are most often used to create tiered or leveled ground in gardens.  They are rectangular baskets of metallic lattice filled with stones and their origin dates back to war times when they were erec...

LEED Platinum V4 Wall Design: Building Science  The wall we designed for the Edelweiss house, Canada's first LEED Platinum V4 Home is best categorized as a 'REMOTE' wall, a high performance building envelope developed by the Cold Climate Housing Research Centre in Alaska. REMOTE stands for 'Residential Exterior Membr...

Located in the bustling Griffintown neighborhood of Montreal, Canada, the mass timber Arbora mid-rise project is the largest complex of its kind in the world built with a wood-based structure. This innovative mid-rise development's time-lapse video of Arbora's frame and floor construction demonstrates how mass timber c...

Bluewater Health announced today that it has been selected as one of the first Canadian hospitals – and the first acute care hospital in Ontario – to achieve LEED® certification. Bluewater Health’s construction of a 588,000-square-foot complex at the hospital’s Sarnia location consisted of a new addition attached to th...

The Living Building challenge is one of the toughest green building certifications to complete, and has yet to be achieved in Canada. The Endeavour Centre, a not-for-profit trade school in Peterborough Ontario, is setting out to change that when they begin construction this spring on a 2,000 square foot three bedroom h...

  This article was inspired by a podcast I heard at Positive Energy, where I have yet to hear a podcast that I didn't want to listen to a second time, so check them out if you're like me and you think listening to building science  makes mundane tasks like folding laundry a joy. This particular episode was about phase ...

The University of British Columbia has opened the most sustainable building in North America, a $37 million 'living laboratory' that will help to regenerate the environment and advance research and innovation on global sustainability challenges. The Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS) is one of onl...

What is the Living building challenge? The Living Building Challenge is the most rigorous and comprehensive of all building rating systems. Performance requirements include net zero energy, water and waste, measured after a full year of operation only. LBC is broken down into 7 performance areas,  which are then subdiv...