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Yes, you CAN: Northernmost Passive Home with $47 power bills
A young, ambitious sustainability and planning team with a vision. A city that routinely sees minus 40 degree winters. Toss in local developers that said ‘it can’t be done’, and what have you got? A recipe for the first certified Passive House in Canada’s North.
With a moniker of ‘The Energetic City’, city planners in Fort St. John have a vision for a certain parcel of city-owned land right in town. Once complete, ‘GreenRidge Heights’ will be a sustainable neighbourhood, facing south, a truly walkable community with corner stores, bike lanes and homes that conserve energy. And to show exactly how it can be done, they built a certified Passive House.
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Passive Homes: Built to Conserve Energy
A passive house is a house that is almost airtight. Utilizing the natural heating source of the sun, it retains heat by a cleverly designed and specially insulated building envelope. This way, it only requires a bit of energy to heat and cool. The Fort St. John Passive House surpassed all standards of airtightness with a rating of .33, going above and beyond the rigorous (and difficult to achieve) Passivhaus standard of 0.6.
Long Term Savings
To prove that sustainable building practices are available to anyone building a home, the Passive House came in at a cost of $276 per square foot. This fits perfectly with the average regional conventional home building range of $250 – 350. The real savings, though, are in the big picture: a house that saves you hundreds of dollars per month in the years to come? That adds up.
Joy Wood
Joy grew up in the natural beauty of the North Okanagan, nestled near the foot of the Monashee Mountains. Hailing from a family of home builders, both the environment and home construction became closely intertwined in her youth. Today, she and her builder hubby are raising their family in Vancouver, where she avidly follows the current sustainable construction trends as the city aims for the title of ‘Greenest City’ by 2020.
