What is the best wall design for cold climates?
Hi there. I'm a sustainability student. I'm designing a wall for cold Canadian temperatures, but I'm unsure where to start. Do you have any design specs?
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To build a sustainable and energy efficient home in a cold climate you will need sufficient insulation and an airtight building envelope. There is not one perfect wall system we would point you towards, but rather give you some tips on how to determine that yourself. The building science basics video on this page is a good starting place to see how we came to settle on a wall design for a demo house we built in 2015 –
LEED Platinum Wall Design Building Science Video
This is not the only way or even the best way to build a wall, it is just what we settled on. That house is insulated with Rockwool Mineral wool insulation. Our latest demo house was insulated with dense packed cellulose insulation (recycled newsprint), you can read more about the LEED Platinum prefab kit house here. I would also suggest you go through our building guide as you will find a lot of pages on choosing the best insulation and how to make a house airtight. Things to consider for sustainable home design go beyond just the performance of a particular insulation, but to be considered sustainable it is important to consider the overall carbon footprint of building materials (as in embodied energy) that you choose to build with. I hope that helps, if you have more specific questions about anything in those pages don’t hesitate to ask.
Mike,
I am not sure there is a lot of logic behind many of EcoHome's preferences regarding building. For example, is it really irrelevant whether a material is 'sustainable'? For example, you might argue that concrete is not sustainable, but in many regions it is a better choice than wood because it will survive storms and flooding without serious damage. It can also double or triple the life span of a building and save quite a few trees. Plus the embodied CO2 emissions in concrete spread over the long lives of such buildings makes it trivial. Just as nuclear reactors are CO2 neutral despite the massive amounts of reinforced concrete used in their construction.
As an economist, the farther I dig down into the issues, the more it seems like the ecological movement has superficial intellectual foundations. A lot of assumptions that have never carefully analyzed.
Hi Roderick,
I am not sure what you read but I think you have misunderstood something. We do not think sustainable construction is irrelevant, it is quite the opposite. We exist for the purpose of advocating for and providing resources for building sustainably. Perhaps I've misunderstood your comment, but building sustainably is a goal or mindset, and yes, concrete is in many cases a better alternative than wood. Building 'resilient' homes that last longer would be a more sustainable aproach, and in cases where there is risk of water damage you will never hear any of us advocating for the use of wood over concrete.
Any and all materials have a carbon footprint, so it is a matter of building as sustainably as possible. And if you use low carbon or carbon capture concrete to reduce your carbon footprint, or recyled concrete, then all the better.