Just over a month ago, the spot where Tom Grimmer is standing was little more than an empty lot.
Construction crews had cleared the land, built the foundation and laid the groundwork for what was to come, but for the most part, it was empty; he explained this as he went up the stairs onto the second floor. The landing opens into a study, which itself looks out over the open-concept living room below. The house, since there is indeed most of a house there now, was dropped off in six containers in late April and has been subsequently assembled into what it is now.
"The first panels landed a month ago," he said. "It'll be done pretty soon."
However, the truly remarkable thing is that this isn't just some modular home that was trucked in and assembled on site. This, according to Grimmer, is the only mass timber passive house on Vancouver Island. Grimmer isn't new to passive homes. He lives in another elsewhere in the Comox Valley (this house is being built for a family member). Passive home construction essentially creates an impermeable envelope that prevents the transfer of heat from either outside the house in summer or inside the house in winter. That heat trapping makes it very efficient when it comes to heating costs, which has a massive benefit on the environment.
"This is what passive is all about. It doesn't have to do anything," Grimmer said, standing at the wall of south-facing triple-pane windows. "It's just its design keeps it warm or cool, right? It performs just sitting there."
Passive homes are relatively rare, since they have more strict building standards than conventional homes in North America. There is an international database of passive homes and a certification regime for them. The construction methodology is a lot more popular in Europe than in Canada. In Canada, there are only 109 buildings listed on the database, and there are more than 6,000 in the database. This home will be the third in the Comox Valley, with one of the others owned by Grimmer himself. However, Grimmer believes that this is the first passive home made with mass timber material.
Mass timber is essentially an all-wood construction where multiple smaller pieces of wood are combined into a larger, structural piece. In Gimmer's project, all of the exterior walls are made from mass timber, which is coated with a thick layer of wood-composite insulation for maximum heat retention. This style of construction is also much more popular in Europe, and has recently gotten the attention of both the provincial and federal governments as a way to shore up Canada's forestry industry. The province has updated building codes to allow for mass timber buildings up to 18 storeys high.
"Mass timber buildings are made from wood and can store carbon for generations, keeping it out of the atmosphere," the province's webpage on its mass timber action plan says. "Mass timber buildings also replace more carbon-intensive materials, such as concrete and steel, and help to reduce construction waste."
While there are mass timber facilities in Canada and B.C., they are more geared towards institutional and commercial buildings. Grimmer's mass timber walls were constructed in Europe and shipped over to the site for assembly. The panels have been milled for sockets, and all of the wiring goes through the insulation panels on the outside of the home. There are a few places where the envelope has holes, but those are kept to a minimum. The home is also oriented with a south-facing main wall, with no windows on the opposite side of the building. All airflow is handled by a heat exchanger, and the plumbing is stacked to minimize the number of air ingresses. All of the windows are triple-pane to keep more heat inside.
"Educating the tradespeople is very important because when you need to install something, guys usually get a big auger and put a hole through the wall. You can't do that here, you're going to completely defeat the purpose," he said.
All of this is done to reduce the home's environmental impact. To meet the standard set out by the Passive House Institute, the building needs to pass certain efficiency tests, including a blower door test to determine how airtight the building is. At the end of the process, you end up with a very green and environmentally friendly home.
"It's a very green way to build. Like people come in here and they say, 'Look at how much wood is in this place.' Well, yes, there is a lot of wood. But the thing is, the more wood you have, the less concrete you have," he said. "On a life cycle basis, there's no way any building competes with this in terms of energy efficiency. Even if you factor in the transportation for the containers, even if you factor in the amount of wood that's in here, all that sort of thing, it's still far exceeds any other building style."
The first impression many would have is that a home like this would be expensive. The panels are shipped from thousands of kilometres away, where they were manufactured by specialists. However, Grimmer said that "to get this place to lock up is actually not more expensive than a stick-framed house. The finishings are the thing that will determine that."
"There are slight differences there, but I think no more than 10 or 15 per cent," he said, referring to the triple plane windows as an example. "But once again, you're going to get that back in energy."
If that is combined with solar power, which Grimmer's own passive home has, there are significant cost savings in the long run.
"I have 11 kilowatts on my house and that's more than enough. for the heating and cooling demand. And the domestic hot water and all that, so that's included in that. But I also have a sauna and I have an electric car that I charge. But even with all of that, my annual electricity cost is around $1,000," he said. "I don't do any supplemental cooling and everything is electrical ... There's no wood, there's no gas ... I mean the one of the reasons I do this is to get away from fossil fuels."
During the election campaign, then-Liberal Party leader and candidate Mark Carney unveiled a national housing strategy that relies on mass timber 鈥� a modular form of home construction 鈥� speaking about the material at a mass timber factory in Delta, B.C.
"We will build homes Canadians can afford and, in the process, create a new industry that can take on the world," Carney said in a press release about the Liberal housing plan in April. "We will not only unleash the private sector by reducing costs and red tape, we will also get the government back into the business of affordable housing 鈥� partnering with workers and industry and using Canadian solutions, such as softwood lumber and mass timber, to build a stronger Canada.鈥�
The newly elected Liberal government began its work in Parliament last week, and King Charles III spoke about "an entirely new housing industry" during the speech from the Throne.
"The government will introduce measures to deliver affordable homes by creating Build Canada Homes," the King said. "This mission-driven organization will act to accelerate the development of new affordable housing. It will invest in the growth of the prefabricated and modular housing industry."
Grimmer hopes that this is the case. To show the potential of this technology, Grimmer compared it to Moore's Law from computer science. That law states that the number of components on a single computer chip doubles every two years at minimal cost.
"The computing power went up exponentially as the cost went down exponentially. The more they did, the cheaper it got," he said. "I firmly believe that this is exactly what we could do with this sort of stuff. If you wanted to turn out a thousand of these and you had a factory, and it was all the same plan ... You can imagine, you know, how well this would work."
And with only a few months of construction time, including finishing, Grimmer thinks the style of house makes sense. It has only taken about a month for the house to get to this point, and he expects to be at lockup by the time summer arrives.
"And we don't have to build in the rain!" he added.
