The Lot Selection

Well, now it's my turn to write a post for all of you. Ali asked me to talk about our lot, and all of the factors that went into choosing it. We can't really talk about the lot without first going through the technology used in the Vereco home. 

The Vereco design uses passive solar heating to absorb sun during the day, and radiate it at night. The home contains a huge amount of solar mass, primarily the concrete in the home, which heats up during the day while sun is out. The solar mass radiates the solar energy that was absorbed at night when it is cooler. This reduces the heating required by the mechanical system, especially during the winter. In order to absorb the sun, the house itself needs to be in the sun.

In Saskatchewan, the sun is predominantly in the southern portion of the sky, and its height in the sky depends on the time of the year. This sun is higher in the sky in the summer, and lower in the sky in the winter; so some conveniently-placed awnings will reduce the sun intake in the summer, and keep the house cooler.

Now, the best way to maximize the sun intake is to have plenty of windows on the south side of the house. That works great on paper, but in a city, there are trees, bushes, and other houses that block the sun (interestingly hills aren’t a problem in Saskatchewan).

Clearly, a west or east-facing lot is out then? Well, it’s not out, but it’s just less desirable, and might require more creativity or planning to be really great for a Vereco house. If your lot faces east or west, you’re going to have a neighbouring house and trees on your south side which is going to block the sun. They’re not all bad though. If your lot is on a corner, there might only be an empty street on your south side, so you may get enough sun. Or, your lot might be wide, and so there’ll be enough room to get some sun.

Our West-Facing Lot

So then a south-facing lot! Maybe. The trouble with a south-facing lot comes in an older neighbourhood (where we were looking for a lot). In many of the older neighbourhoods in Saskatoon, there are City-owned trees lining the streets. While these trees are beautiful, they pretty substantially block the sun, and you can’t get rid of them.

A north-facing lot, provided it is deep enough, should give you the most amount of sun. With a north-facing lot, you can control the trees in your backyard, and ensure the proper amount of sun gets to the south side of your house.

Every lot is unique. Our lot for example faces west. This works well for us though because the lot is 50 feet wide, and we’re going to build on the most northern half. We have plenty of space for our house to bask in the sun that’s outside of our neighbour’s shade. Depending on the size of the lot, the surrounding trees, the neighbouring houses, or something else I haven’t thought of, it might make a lot better or worse for building a Vereco home on.

In the beginning

Braden and I are both young professionals, who, like many, were interested in doing what we could to help keep this earth stay healthier longer by minimizing our impact to it.  But, again like many, we struggle with how much we should modify our lifestyle to achieve "being green" or "eco friendly".  So when we started looking for a home in the summer, incorporating eco-friendly technologies was not even something that crossed our minds.  We thought it would be both too inconvenient to achieve, too expensive and would involve really modifying our lifestyle.

We knew we wanted to live centrally in Saskatoon- such that we were both in at least biking distance to work as this is where we spent most of our time and energy commuting and we want to minimize driving and maximize time at home.  We also knew we loved the quality and character found in older homes.  Lastly we wanted something between 1500-1800sq ft with greenspace for gardening.

Being young and naive though, meant that we were in for a wake-up call.  Old homes required a TON of work-basically stripping down to the studs and renovating.   After a few weeks of looking, we realized that we weren't going to end up with a home that we wanted unless we did major renovations to the home prior to living in it.

Vereco homes

This is when I remembered looking at the Vereco homes website in the spring.  Vereco homes provides energy efficient home design and consulting specific to homes in Saskatchewan.  We took a look at one of the plans and were wowed by the space efficient layout and how "normal" the house seemed even though it could be designed to be net-zero.  We met with the owner Ronn, who comes at homes from his background as a Chartered Accountant and then with a Masters in Environmental Strategy.  His approach essentially stratifies eco-friendly technologies into how much their payback is and many of the technologies available to homes will pay themselves off in 5-10years time if not sooner.  I feel that if the average person is going to make their home "green", it's going to have to pay off because we have to face the fact that most people aren't ready to fork out extra cash to help the planet- we just aren't there yet.  In addition, the home that appeals to a wide audience has to be "normal".  Not everyone is going to want to live in an underground lair, a home made of tires or one without all the amenities.
You can check out their website here: http://www.vereco.ca

The eco-friendly home

REDUCE

For starters, the home isn't huge.  Remembering our stratification of recycling-you'll hopefully remember that the first thing is reduce, then reuse, then recycle.  It's key to reduce the amount of space you think you need in a home.  The design we chose has few hallways (wasted space) and is open concept (to create different sized spaces depending on your needs).  We found that after looking at hundreds of plans, this 1500ish sq ft design that we chose really measured out to have rooms like a 1700sq ft home because there was such little wasted space and lots of flexibility with how we choose to use the main floor.  In addition, this home is a rectangle.  Why? Because that is the shape that maximizes space and minimizes materials. It also is a standard size for building materials so that all materials ordered will be used with minimal waste.  Other features of the home include items that last a lifetime, thus reducing the need for more materials.

REUSE

Several technologies in the home promote reuse.  It will reuse hot water (both with showering and heating the home), reuse materials for the build where possible, and will reuse the sun's energy through heating and cooling mechanisms.

RECYCLE

The recycling comes in with the old home that we bought on the lot we desired.

So more on reducing, re-using and recycling later!

For now, we wanted to just give you an overview of how we got into this build and the basics of technology. We hope you enjoy this blog and that it has something for everyone.

Ali and Braden