One Full Year – was the project a success?

It has been over one year now since I moved in to a mostly finished house. Yes, I had issues with the water supply and my earth tube but, for the most part these issues have now been dealt with.

Spring is now on its way, and the river ice is disappearing.

The question I had was would the house perform the way I hoped it would in terms of comfort and energy use. My conclusion is that it is exceeding expectations.

Comfort is something subjective but in terms of the air quality, temperature, sound, maintainability, ease of cleaning I am quite pleased. Joop has one complaint – the wood makes a cracking noise on those cold dry nights in the winter and it wakes her up.

The indoor temperature is constant varying be less than a fraction of a degree from the target and indoor humidity is always between 40-50% RH. There are no drafts. My little wood stove is nice to add a little warmth on the cold days and it does not need much wood. I use less than a face cord of wood in the winter.

The biggest question was whether my energy consumption would be indeed net zero. I recorded my power consumption monthly and once I got my solar panels at the end of November last year, I had to record energy production too. Below you will find my power consumption for the year.

Interestingly, the summer and winter consumption is not that different. Spring and fall are about half of the summer and winter months. My yearly consumption is 6946 kWh.

My solar panels are producing although I had a month from mid-Jan to mid-Feb where the snow cover was constant. I estimate I will get 10 000 kWh over the year making me significantly net positive. My hope is that when I get an EV, I will be about net zero again as you get about 5000 km per 1000 kWh of electricity giving me about 15 000 km of driving per year. I have to account also that I will charge on the road sometimes as well.

In the EnerGuide model, my home was estimated to consume 60 GJ of electricity or about 16 666 KWh – as you can see from my actual value of 6946 kWh, that is over estimated by 140%. I think the earth tube (which they don’t modelled) helped a lot as well as the shading I have in the summer to reduce the heat in the house. This reduced my energy consumption.

In terms of my goals of building a passive house I have also met those requirements:

Passive House Criteria	Target	Actual
Air tightness	less than 0.6 ACH	0.47 ACH
Heating Consumption	less than 15 kWh/m2/year	4 kWh/m2/year
Total Energy Consumption	less than 60 KWh/m2/year	41 kWh/m2/year

Passive House Criteria

So I think I can say that despite some moments of despair during the building process, the project was an engineering success and I hope to enjoy the house for years to come.

I have begun my training to become a Registered Energy Auditor (REA) here in Canada with the EnviroCentre and hope to be finished this spring. I hope to help others improve the energy efficiency and comfort in their homes as well as help people design better homes from the beginning.