Flatrock Passive House: A Passive House in Newfoundland

Attic hatches are notoriously leaky and are often under insulated.  The challenge here was to build a hatch with deep insulation (i.e. at least R-36) and has great air sealing details.  Luckily my plans came with details to build a hatch to meet the specifications. You may recall that in a previous post ( https://flatrockpassivehouse.blogspot.ca/2017/08/the-attic-hatchway-landing-and-catwalk.html ) I illustrated that because of the depth of insulation in the attic, the hatchway had to be built with deep sides much like that of a deep window buck.  Trying to push the hatch door straight upwards would just lead to the door binding so the back end of the hatchway was sloped to make getting into the attic and moving the hatchway door easier.   To plan the build I had to think a little about how the hatch would tie into the air tight barrier.  Initially, when the OSB on the ceiling was installed, 3M and acoustical sealant was used around the perimeter of the ...

Flooring material for the main level was an easy choice.  It was so easy that we installed it in May 2017 before the walls were even erected!  We decided early in the process that the concrete slab was a good use of material.  Since the concrete was already in place it could be used as the primary floor and there was no need wasting more resources on flooring and installation.  Luckily, there are now companies in Newfoundland that grind and polish concrete floors!  One such company, Sam Roberts Cement Finishing, located in St. John's, has been working concrete for 2-3 generations.  Grinding and polishing is a new venture for their long lived company but I have a feeling that it will take off once people see the real potential of a concrete floor.   My feeling from the beginning was that covering a major part of the thermal mass of the building wasn't the best idea.  It really seemed like covering it would be wasting materials.   Besides,...

The day to day operational costs of this building should be less than a code built home.   Lower energy use means lower energy bills.  In principle this should lead to simpler mechanical heating systems. This aspect of Passive House was always considered to be a way to tunnel through the cost barrier of all the extras ie triple glazed windows, high R-value walls, etc.  Often times the choice for a heat source is simple:  a mini split could provide all the heat required.  However, my choices were influenced by many factors: 1. Using PV panels provides a way to offset some of the source energy requirements of the building but since net metering wasn't allowed in the province at the time of my decision future installation of PV seemed like a pipe dream. 2. Rising cost of electricity.  Using a locally available, fuel source could offset some or most of the energy costs associated with being connected to the grid.  This could be made possible by ta...

Choosing insulation for the interior service wall was challenging.  I originally thought that I would do the work myself.  My plan was to fill the 2x4 space with batt insulation.  Intimidation set in once I realized how many wires, plumbing pipes, receptacles, and mechanical elements are integrated into the walls.  Reading this article at Energy Vanguard ( https://www.energyvanguard.com/blog/54275/How-to-Grade-the-Installation-Quality-of-Insulation ) made me wonder; Is it possible to get a Class I installation in walls with so many "complications"?....cutting and splitting batts, handling them and pushing them around to fill the cavity uniformly...seemed like an impossibility. Luckily, Bill Gifford ( Home Shield Insulation ), the insulator for my attic spaces, also knows a thing or two...or three, about dense packing fibreglass.  He uses the Owens Corning ProPink wall insulation system ( http://insulation.owenscorning.ca/builders/products/propink.aspx ) which ...

In the previous post I presented the results from two blower door tests.  The blower door results from the garage testing can be used to determing the heat load required by the building.  We can think of the heat loss as a sum of two components:  Heat lost through conduction and heat lost due to infiltration.  This is a highly simplified method and only partially describes the physical behaviour of heat loss.  For example it neglects to account for thermal mass effects, treats conduction as a one dimensional phenomena, ignores convection currents, ignores the thickness of the walls, etc.  However, this simplified method typically overestimates the size of the required heat source so its good enough for this purpose. Calculating yearly demand is a matter of breaking the structure up into individual components.  First I calculated the area of each component using my construction drawings.  The product of area, R-value, and 24 hours/day gives the h...

I probably mentioned before that I would cringe every time we had to drill out through the air barrier.  Every time I drill through it I would wonder if I could get back to the level of air tightness I achieved on the initial blower door test.  With almost 21 penetrations for electrical, plumbing, mechanicals including the HRV and wood stove, it seemed like it would be impossible to achieve the level of air tightness required to get the efficiency I wanted.  However, with good air sealing details, the task wasn't as hard as I originally thought it would be.  Custom gaskets, lots of acoustical sealant,  and 3M tape just crush any chances of air getting in! Previously installed conduits where wires were routed were filled with spray foam.  Plumbing sewer pipes that were vented to the outside were tape sealed.  The air vent for the wood stove and the chimney thimble were sealed with plastic and tape. The biggest problem area was routing wires through ...

 We had a plan of attack from the beginning.  That plan involved erecting all exterior service walls first and then framing the interior walls later.  The plans call for 24" o.c. studs for the service wall.  That's about the only details we had to go by except how to terminate around windows and doors.  The framers worked pretty quickly at framing the interior.  The service walls were almost completed after two days of work.  To strengthen the interior petitions and service walls, we install staggered blocking at half height help prevent the wall studs from bowing, warping and twisting (Picture 1).  Now its starting to look like a house!  Since we would be installing drywall returns around all windows I opted for adding the 1/2" drywall return slot to the window frames at the time they were made.  To make the lives of the drywall installers easier, the rough stud openings had to align with the drywall returns so shims wouldn't have to ...