Here's something near and dear to the heart of anyone involved in the home performance industry: how to make energy efficiency sexy, appealing, and properly valued. When you're up to your eyebrows in insulation and you know that you are adding significant value to a house, it's sometimes hard to...
Blog » net zero energy houses
Valuing the role of the appraiser in home performance
Shawna HendersonJanuary 12, 20158 comments
So much to know...
Shawna HendersonNovember 18, 2014
It's hard to wrap your head around the amount of number crunching that goes into energy analysis, and how to prioritize your time and effort when working on a project. There are energy modelling tools that can be used that make it easier, but in a lot of cases, the easier the modelling tool is to use, and the less actual, real-world performance testing data you input, the more likely the result will be a ball-park figure that doesn't relate to actual energy usage, or actual heating or cooling loads.
Shawna Henderson is Home Energy Magazine's New Canadian Correspondent!
Shawna HendersonOctober 02, 2014
Hey hey -- you are in the virtual presence of the new Canadian correspondent for Home Energy Magazine. Tell me your big reno/new build/zero energy/innovative cold climate house stories, peeps!Will provide news on events and activities around the committees and teams we're involved with at the Net Zero Energy Coalition...
Building Science and HVAC stuff
Shawna HendersonSeptember 16, 2014
There is this disconnect in our industry. It's around building science and the ways that all the systems in the house work together or against each other. It looks like this: evaluators and raters know about house-as-a-system and can look at a house and see some solutions and fixes that...
Scaling the picture
Shawna HendersonApril 03, 2014
There is so much to focus on when working in energy efficient, low energy, high performance, green, sustainable houses: materials, assemblies, performance, HVAC, energy sources. Broad categories like these can be broken out into a dozen subcategories each, then another dozen sub-subcategories again. And there's two sets of the top-level...
Value Chain and Core Competencies
Shawna HendersonMarch 05, 20141 comment
Training in building science and energy efficiency is essential to moving the house building industry forward into Net Zero Energy, successfully. Many people in our industry do not see the entire value chain. It’s a complicated one – easy to see in this diagram how the home building industry is a hot, fragmented mess of experts and expertise, completely at odds with itself sometimes.
Survey @ Low Energy Housing Technology Costs
Shawna HendersonFebruary 24, 2014
I'm working with the Net-Zero Energy Home Coalition to deliver a survey for Natural Resources Canada. The aim of the survey is to get a better sense of cost-effective design and construction of Low Energy Houses (near NZE, NZE-ready, NZE, any program or standard that you are involved in). Survey...
Net Zero Energy (NZE) Housing Paper
Shawna HendersonOctober 31, 2013