The Now House™
Location
1291 Rankin Street
Windsor, Ontario
Canada
Certifications & Awards
Project Team
Green Building Audio
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Summary
The Now House™ is a 60-year-old wartime house in an established neighbourhood in Windsor, Ontario. The house was retrofitted with the latest healthy, energy-efficient and sustainable features and technologies.
The goal of the Now House™ project is as simple as it is profound: to demonstrate how home owners and contractors can dramatically improve the energy efficiency of existing homes with a few relatively simple modifications.
Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation was founded in 1946 in large part to help create affordable housing for returning second world war veterans. Now House™ evolves this uniquely Canadian brand of “hearth and home” by updating a CMHC designed postwar house in accordance with today’s EQuilibrium™ principles of healthy indoor environments, energy- and resource- efficiency, and low environmental impact.
Improvements made to this modest 60-year-old home include upgrades to the insulation, new windows, the installation of solar hot water panels, a photovoltaic array, Energy Star® -certified appliances, and a waste water heat recovery system.
The result will be a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and a healthier, more energy-efficient home. In addition, because wartime houses were often built in clusters, the Now House™ model could easily be scaled up from a single demonstration house to hundreds of thousands of similar homes across the country.
By setting out a blueprint for the environmental retrofits of Canada’s wartime homes, Now House™ is the start of a truly ambitious project.
Key Design Features:
- Upgraded insulation, windows and Energy Star® appliances
- Solar hot water system
- Wastewater heat recovery
- Renewable solar PV power
- Focus on reuse and conservation of existing resources
