Reflections on Building a Net-Zero Duplex in Vancouver: Part One of a Few

I started to write a short blog post about our recent experience in building a net zero duplex in Vancouver with Lanefab and it turned it into a longer story. I’ll be sharing my reflections in a series of posts about this project. For now, enjoy part one and let me know if you have any questions you’d like answered in the next post. 

Why build a net-zero duplex? 

I’ve had the privilege of meeting amazing innovators through my career in sustainability, education and dialogue. As a graduate student at UBC in the late 1990’s I took part in hundreds of meetings with folks who were passionate about sustainable development. We met in person, in crowded rooms and mostly we listened to the male professors argue about how to fix the planet. These were folks who knew that we needed to turn things around, we needed to massively reduce consumption, change the pattern of building in cities, reconsider car- centred designs, re-imagine the way we trade goods and do this through shifts in policy, laws, culture and education. We needed to re-think western consumption patterns and change our development patterns at a global scale if humans were going to survive at the trajectory we were on. We needed to be reminded that we lived on a single planet.

My supervisor at the time William Rees published Our Ecological Footprint with his former graduate student Mathis Wackernagel and it was clear that we needed to learn more about how people change behaviour. We talked about global warming at the time but the focus of the conversations was on balancing ecological, economic and social sustainability.  I was deeply influenced by ecofeminist writing and believed in what we could do at the university to educate all students about our finite planet. It was an exciting time to be a hopeful grad student. I had started to teach at the university and was excited by creating new kinds of transdisciplinary classrooms with a focus on sustainability and community engagement. 

One of the folks I met during a post-doc at SFU was  Bryn Davidson (now Lanefab Design/Build) who was an architecture student focused on green buildings and urban infrastructure. Bryn was talking about a project for daylighting Still Creek which was the focus of his graduate research. The Creek was just up the street from the Great Northern Way Campus and we were both in workshops imagining how that campus would develop as land was gifted to the four local universities (UBC, SFU, BCIT and Emily Carr).  I was working with a group of folks  interested in designing transdisciplinary sustainability education programs called The Learning City . At the same time, Dr. John Robinson was leading the CIRS (Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability) project that was originally planned to be built at Great Northern Way and we were collectively thinking about the possibilities for that huge site in Vancouver. 

CIRS was envisioned to be ‘the most sustainable building in the world’ and it was exciting to be in those workshops with so many experts trying to get the project on the ground. One of the pilot Learning City courses focused on green building and the other on sustainable transportation and behaviour change with student projects focused on the Central Valley Greenway. It was the early 2000’s and green buildings were innovative projects and not yet part of the everyday builds. In those years we were schooled by a long list of professors who were lecturing about energy, sustainable communities and climate change- John Robinson, William Rees, Terre Satterfield, George Spiegelman, Alejandro Rojas, Patrick Condon, Mark Roseland, Pamela Courtenay-Hall, Mark Jaccard to name just a few of the leading thinkers in Vancouver at that time. 

I took a faculty job at SFU Centre for Dialogue to begin teaching the Semester in Dialogue and began a career in the new field of sustainability education. We were starting a family soon and spent time looking for a place to live in Vancouver when townhomes were $250k and single family houses were $350 - $500k. We had looked at hundreds of homes in East Vancouver when we received news that our offer was approved for this little white bungalow on Ontario Street. I had a premonition the night before on a full moon that this was going to be our house and I had seen our future kids running in the hallway. 

The 1926 Bungalow

We were able to purchase a 1926 bungalow near Main Street at a time when houses were overpriced compared to other cities in Canada. It was still somewhat manageable for two professional working incomes to afford the mortgage of a single family home. Our parents in Ontario couldn't believe how much we paid for a small house with 2 bedrooms that needed a ton of renovations. We had no idea what was to follow in the upcoming decades of the housing crisis in Vancouver and across the globe. We were able to purchase this 80 year old, tired bungalow with support for a down payment from our parents. The former owner had smoked so many cigarettes in the home that the walls were literally dripping yellow from nicotine. The bungalow was approximately 900 square feet on the main floor and the same on the lower level, although the basement had very low ceilings and mud floors in one of the rooms. We would learn later that the lot at one point had huge trees that canopied the home but all of them had been ‘topped’ and large stumps filled the yard. Chain link fences divided the property from the neighbours on both sides.

We were young and energetic and spent 8 weeks taking out walls and opening up the bungalow in order to move in. We would find out later that the sewer pipes to the main line were made of clay and were filled with tree roots, that the laundry machine was leaking directly into the water table (thank goodness we were on a slope) and that there was almost no insulation in the entire place. The windows were single pane and the only insulation we found was made of cardboard boxes and newspapers stuffed in between the floorboards. The prior owner had removed the oil tank a few years before we purchased the home and covered over the douglas fir floors with orange shag carpet. We were young and naive and had many fun days with our friends stripping out the carpets, pulling out the drop ceiling and finding windows that were covered over in the previous renovations.

We took the main floor back to the studs in order to put insulation in the home and replaced some of the old lathe and plaster with drywall. We lived for 20 years with shaky windows that didn’t open and icy cold bathroom floors. On a windy night the house whistled from the holes in the walls and doors. It was a far cry from energy efficient but it was a lovely home that we slowly updated over the years. We gave the house a nice paint job and it did a great job of housing our small family until our son grew a few more inches and could no longer fit in the basement. 

Climate Change Impacts in Vancouver

During these years we also experienced some direct impacts from a changing climate. I remember clearly the summer that I signed the kids up for a track and field running camp at UBC and the entire week was spent playing games inside as the smoke was so thick in Vancouver from the wildfires in the Interior that it was suggested the kids not play outside. 

A few years after that my husband and son were driving home from a hockey tournament in the Interior during the atmospheric river of 2021 and all of the highways were wiped out. They spent 3 nights in Hope sleeping in a car and getting food at the temporary shelter set up at the high school. The climate was changing and our 1926 bungalow was having trouble cooling down in the increasingly hot summer nights. We eventually moved all of our bedrooms to the basement in another small renovation as sleeping upstairs in the summer when the house reached 35 degrees C was difficult. 

By this time climate change was more than a concept discussed in my classroom - it was now an ongoing reality.  What could we do as a project to mitigate climate impacts and increase the density in our neighbourhood? Could we build a project that would inspire others to do the same? 

Hatching the Duplex Plan 

We were starting to outgrow our home and as an innovator and planner I was thinking about what other options existed. The laneway homes were popping up all over the neighbourhood. But that didn’t make financial sense for us as renting a laneway would take us 25 years to pay for the build. We wanted to do something with the property that would allow us to have a more livable home and be a legacy project for the kids. I started talking to more folks about the possibility of building two homes on our lot as a way to afford the build costs of a new home. If we were to tear down and build a new house we would be in debt for a long time.

Would it be possible to build a new home and not be tied down with debt?

The duplex conversations filled our back deck musings with neighbours for many years and eventually the City of Vancouver changed the zoning to allow duplexes on regular lots. It was time to get a design and budget - it was 2021 and we were all in the middle of the COVID pandemic. 

We had talked about developing our property for a few years as we had a wider lot size than typical lots in Vancouver (almost 50 feet). We also had an easement on the back lane of 10 feet that shortened the lot significantly making a laneway house not an ideal option.  We talked to our friends and family quite often and my father in law who was an architect sketched up some initial plans for a 3 bedroom, 3 floor side by side duplex. Grampy is an architect and his family lived in a semi detached that is an extremely common building form in Toronto. It is strange that we have different names for the same thing across the country and that it took so long for the zoning to change in Vancouver. The zoning changed and at the same time it allowed for some extra square footage with passive and net-zero designs. 

Lanefab Design

We met up with Bryn and the Lanefab team and talked about our options and decided we trusted his vision, guidance and company to do an amazing job. We visited a few of the passiv houses his team was building and we got started on ideas and drawings. Our first design was a passiv duplex design. It was beautifully designed but unfortunately did not meet our budget realities at the bank so we had to start over and build for Net Zero.  According to the Passive House Association, “Passive House (Passivhaus) is considered to be the most rigorous voluntary energy-based standard in the design and construction industry. These homes use 90% less energy than typical buildings and have superior air quality  The difference between passiv and net zero is about 5 inches in walls that led to more floor area in the Net Zero projects. When it came time to sell the other half of the duplex we were trying to maximize square footage. We decided on a net zero design and landed on a side by side duplex. The first image is an early rendering of the project. In Part 2 of this post I’ll share more about how the design and build process went.

Stay tuned!

Net Zero Homes produce as much clean energy as they consume. They are up to 80% more energy efficient than typical new homes and use renewable energy systems to produce the remaining energy they need. Every part of the house works together to provide consistent temperatures throughout, prevent drafts, and filter indoor air to reduce dust and allergens. 

Benefits of a Net Zero labeled home include: 

• Reduced energy bills 

• Increased interior temperature comfort 

• Superior air quality 

• Minimizing ecological/carbon footprint on our environment 

How does it work? The home has solar panels that put energy back into the grid through a BC Hydro Net Metering system. A heat pump draws energy from the grid to power the home. The house is built to be super efficient so that at the end of the year the amount of solar energy put into the system equals the amount of energy used - ie. net zero.