Eco-friendly homes going on display

By Dale Woodard on June 18, 2021.

Five Eco Friendly homes in Lethbridge will be on display for a virtual tour this weekend.
The Eco-Solar Home Tour will make Lethbridge one of its stops for the first time Saturday starting at noon.
With in-person visits still not possible due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the virtual visit will nonetheless throw the doors open to the local homes. 
Each home will be featured in a 40-minute presentation on their tour day with each Zoom session featuring a short video and pictures highlighting the home’s unique energy saving features, followed by a question-and-answer session with the homeowners.
“The Eco-Home Tours Society of Alberta is an organization that was put together just to put on tours of energy efficient homes,” said Andrew Mills, president of Eco Solar Home Tour of Alberta. “We started in Edmonton in 2000. So with a break in 2020 this is our 21st tour. We’ve been at this for a while. We got going in Calgary a couple of years ago on our 20th anniversary in 2019. We wanted to go to Lethbridge last year, but we got shut down. So this year, knowing there was a likelihood we would have to be online, we set out preparing to be both online and in-person and we’ve been able to put a complete online tour together for all 31 homes on the tour in three cities.”
In addition to five homes in Lethbridge, the Eco-Solar Home Tour also viewed 10 homes in Calgary and another 10 in Edmonton.
“When people say they want to improve their home and increase the energy efficiency in their home, you can go out and get a lot of sales literature and details from various companies,” said Mills. “But the best research is if you’re able to talk to another homeowner who has done something like that and can give you some tips and tricks of how to do that.”
“This isn’t a tour about the future, this is a tour about what is already being done and what can be done right now. This is not a pie in the sky discussion, this is reality and it’s way further ahead than most people really understand. It’s showing what you can do with a little bit of research and a little bit of careful planning. It shows how far you can get with energy efficiency.”
Of the four homes featured on the Lethbridge tour, four of them are net zero energy, said Mills.
A net zero energy home is a home that, on average, will generate as much energy as it consumes in a year.
“We have two-way metering in Alberta,” said Mills. “There’s a micro-generation rule in Alberta that allows people to generate their own solar energy. That agreement allows for two-way metering and in a net zero home at the end of the year your metre nets out to zero. That means you made as much energy as you purchased in a year.”
Obviously, solar energy doesn’t work at night and less solar energy is generated in the winter, said Mills.
“But we have such long, sunny summers that we’re actually able to over-generate in the summer to make up for our under-generation in the winter. So at the end of the year in a net zero home, the actual amount of power used will be close to zero or even less than zero.”
Three homes on the Lethbridge tour utilize a ground source heat pump – unique to Lethbridge – pumping heat right out of the ground, said Mills.
“It’s actually a very efficient way to use electricity to make heat.”
Two of the homes have electric baseboard heaters.
“They’re so well insulated,” said Mills. “A couple hair dryers worth of baseboard heaters is all they need. That’s only 3,000 watts of power to heat their house. Those are sites two and three in the Lethbridge (tour) this year.”
Mills said online numbers for the tours haven’t been strong.
“I think people are really tired of Zooms these days. So we have not been getting as many people. In our Edmonton tours after being here for 20 years we would get 1,500 (people) going to homes in an afternoon and right now we’re just getting a few dozen on Zooms. The turnout online hasn’t been what we wanted. However, we are recording the tour and we’ll have the recording of the tour available by next week once we have all the tours done. It’ll be on our website for the rest of the year.”
But those who want take part in Saturday’s live tour from noon to 4 p.m. can log onto http://www.ecosolar.ca.
“The link will only be on the website on the tour day,” said Mills. “Everything starts at noon. So they just need to be able to get there and click on the link at noon to join. They can join on Zoom and we’ll also have a live stream on YouTube.”
The online tour offers and in-depth look at each house.
“When people have been going to the houses before, typically they get to speak with the home owner for 10 or 15 minutes, tops,” said Mills. “The home owner pretty much answers the same five questions all day. In the online tour, we’re doing 40 minutes. We’re spending about 15 minutes presenting the home and showing all the features and because we’re online we can show things you normally wouldn’t see. We can show the pictures of the construction and back when they first dug the hole in the ground. Then we have another 20 minutes to ask questions and we have some very knowledgeable people on the line who know what questions to ask. We’re getting some really in-depth and interesting discussions going. So I’m glad we’re going to have these recordings available. It’s going to let people see a lot more of what’s there.”
More details of the 2021 Eco-Solar Virtual Home Tour can be found at http://www.ecosolar.ca. Online tour times for the homes are posted.

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