24 Oct 6 ways to incorporate energy efficiency into your Vancouver home design
In Vancouver, home design is moving toward a standard of better energy efficiency. The reason? Energy efficient homes are more comfortable and sustainable. But it’s more than that: Municipal regulations and provincial policies are beginning to make energy efficient mandatory.
If you’re planning to build or renovate your home in Vancouver, use these six simple ways to incorporate energy efficiency into your home design.
Achieve passive heating and cooling with window placement
Intelligent window placement can heat your home in winter, and keep it cool in summer. By using a Vancouver home designer that understands the sun’s angles in your relation to your lot, your designer can draft a home that cools and heats itself without much need for artificial heating and air conditioning.
By placing more windows, or larger windows, on the southern walls of your home, solar heat gains in winter help heat your home in winter.
In summer, the sun moves north so to avoid solar heat gains on the south side your overhangs should be designed to provide shade. Also, to avoid heat loss during the winter, windows along your home’s north side should be smaller and can be triple-glazed to reduce the need to use heating.
Designer tip: The living and dining rooms should be placed along the sunny south side of your home to make the most of the natural winter heat gains.
Optimize indoor airflow for efficient heating and cooling
Indoor airflow is a major factor in comfort and energy efficiency. Your Vancouver home designer can implement a design that optimizes how heat is transferred between rooms and spaces in your home. Walls can be used to control the flow of air, while open spaces allow air, and therefore heat, to move more freely around the home. This avoids a problem that exists mainly in older or poorly designed homes that results in certain rooms that are significantly hotter or colder than the rest of the home – requiring artificial heating or cooling to regulate the temperature.
Design a smaller building envelope for your Vancouver home design
Passive House design practices have studied the effect of building a smaller building envelope for a home, and the result is that smaller is more efficient. It is not hard to understand why – a smaller building envelope means less contact between your home’s exterior walls and the elements of the outdoors, which can heat or cool your home in undesirable ways. Talk to your designer about how to reduce the size of your building envelope for better energy efficiency.
Install high-efficiency insulation
Many insulation options besides standard batt insulation exist on the market and these are being used in more homes in Vancouver recently. One such material is rockwool insulation. Rockwool yields higher R-values for a home, and is dense enough to even increase your home’s floor space ratio, which can result in a higher resale value. Another potentially more effective option to discuss with your designer is exterior insulation – refer to our comprehensive guide on exterior insulation. Finally, ICF, or insulating concrete form, is an excellent material commonly used to build foundations. It offers a much higher insulating value than traditional concrete foundations, is easy to install, and is cost-effective. It can also be used in exterior walls.
Use LED or CFL lighting and natural light indoors
Maximizing natural lighting in your home is a simple way to reduce your home’s electricity consumption. When the sun goes down, though, LED and CFL bulbs are a far more efficient lighting option for your Vancouver home. LED lights use up to 80% less energy and can last 25 times longer than traditional incandescent bulbs. Slightly less efficient are CFL bulbs, which use about a quarter the energy and last 10 times longer than a comparable incandescent bulb.
See also: Hidden areas where your home wastes energy