Hi everyone,

We're just about to start on building a new Passive House project on Wolfe Island in Ontario. The aim is to be potentially off-grid and self-supporting, Net Zero everything, and it will be a passive solar project as well as being certified by the Canadian Passive House Institute. But above all, it's just supposed to be a great little place for my family to live in.

We've got a blog here that we're going to be updating regularly from now. The blog not in any way commercial, it's purely informational and designed to help others. I hope those who are interested will keep an eye on what we are doing. I'll write more about the project in this thread too, if people are interested. We may also have questions as things progress, although we've been thinking about and planning this for so long now, there's very little we haven't already asked someone (and often many people) about...

Flying_Monkey.

Great post the floor plan and specs ASAP

I'm starting our passive home in the next few weeks

They will be coming over the next week or so...

IMO, depending on your usage patterns, lithium batteries are already cost effective (and readily available) for off-grid solar. Regarding heat, I'd use a large hydronic storage tank.

Sorry, I haven't updated this thread for a while...

In answer to the questions above:

Yes, we are going to be going gor lithium battery storage... eventually. And yes, we are installing a hydronic storage tank (connected to both solar thermal panels and a high efficiency hydronic woodstove from Walltherm).

The additional design and engineering for the house - after we decided to go with a CLT structure as opposed to a stick-frame house - took longer than we anticipated, but if you are going for factory-cut walls, ceiling and roof, you have to get everything precisely worked out in advance.

We will actually be starting the construction of the CLT structure on Thursday this week (December 3rd)... hopefully, shouldn't take more than 3 days. Then the Optiwin windows arrive next week, and the Schneiderholz wood cellulose insulation the week after.

Despite the delays, we still hope to have a weatherproof shell by Xmas.

Oh, yes, and my 5-year old son designed a logo for the project too!

https://wolfeislandpassivehouse.wordpress.com/

We managed the CLT construction in two-and-a-half days!

Pictures from each day and afterwards, are up now:

http://wolfeislandpassivehouse.wordpress.com/

This week we got all the windows and doors installed, and took delivery of the insulation and the wood stove, hot water tank and solar thermal panels. Some very heavy lifting was involved...

http://wolfeislandpassivehouse.wordpress.com/

Now, we are just going to waterproof the house as much as possible before shutting it up for the holiday break.

Roofing, insulation and siding in the New Year...

Looks great, what is your projected cost per sq?

We'll be posting about this in the near future*. It depends what you include, of course.

By standard measures (so excluding things like the septic system and water supply, which are not normal costs for most builds, as well as furniture etc, but including all flooring and tiling, kitchen and bathroom fitting and appliances etc.), and based on external square footage, current projections look like about $197 CAN / sq.ft. ($143 US). Original estimates were nearer to $186 CAN ($135 US). This also does not include the Solar PV system, which we are going to have to hold off on for a couple of years because we simply don't have the money: we didn't end up getting a mortgage or construction loan (the Ontario construction loan rules are ridiculous) and are relying almost entirely on a Line of Credit on our existing house and land, and all of our savings.

Based on usable internal square footage (excluding the attic, even though it is usable but not accessible by stairs), we are talking an eventual cost of $227 CAN / sq. ft. ($165 US).

The difference is largely due to the higher than projected costs of the Cross-Laminated Timber due to the weak Canadian dollar and the fact that we lost an argument with Canadian customs as to whether the shipment should be classified as 'timber' as opposed to 'glulam' and had to pay import duties...

*Actually, inspired by the question, I just posted a full blog post on this subject! https://wolfeislandpassivehouse.wordpress.com/

We've added an Index page to the blog to make it easier to find particular topics:

http://wolfeislandpassivehouse.word...ect-index/

Also more updates recently, and things will pick up again as we finish the place off in August and September. We hope to be moving in by October, and then we'll see how the place performs over our first winter in it.

Nice Project, congratulations. Too bad we were not part of it.

Just a quick post to tell everyone that our project has been chosen to be the basis of a series of guest blogs on Green Building Advisor. We’re working with Scott Gibson of GBA to combine and re-edit entries from our blog into more coherent single entries, which will appear every two weeks, starting pretty soon. I’ll post a link here when it does...

Oh, and more importantly, we may even be moving in, in October.