This year’s eco-solar home tour may be cancelled due to the pandemic, but that doesn’t change the importance of its main message, says its organizer.
Eco-Solar Home Tour Society president Andrew Mills announced May 29 that the 2020 Eco-Solar Home Tour had been cancelled. The tour was scheduled to happen June 6 to 7 in Edmonton, June 14 to 15 in Calgary, and June 20 in Lethbridge.
This year’s tour featured about 40 homes in and around Edmonton, Calgary and, for the first time, Lethbridge, Mills said. The tour typically sees about 2,500 people visit super-efficient homes throughout Edmonton and Calgary on a June weekend to talk with homeowners about ways to reduce your home’s carbon footprint.
“We typically have 100 people or more in each home, and that’s just too much in this COVID social distancing era,” Mills said.
Mills said organizers considered a virtual tour, but couldn’t find anyone to shoot and edit the videos they needed. Instead, they decided to postpone this year’s tour until next summer.
While in-person visits are off the table, Mills said people can still read about the homes on the tour through profiles on the tour’s website.
One standout home was the Blatchford net-zero home. Part of Canada’s largest community with a carbon-neutral target, this Edmonton home is projected to use zero fossil-fuel energy on a net basis each year, and has super-insulated walls, solar panels, electric car charge ports and a district heating system.
Home designer and former St. Albert resident Godo Stoyke of Carbonbusters said the system uses geothermal power to provide carbon-neutral heating and cooling for the home at roughly 500 to 900 per cent efficiency, as it provides five to nine units of heating/cooling per unit of energy used to run it.
“You’re ‘stealing’ the energy from the environment,” he said – the heat in the ground is free energy from the Earth’s core and the sun’s rays.
Geothermal systems can be tough to add to an existing home – you have to dig up your backyard to lay all the pipes – but you can get similar results with an air-source heat pump and excellent insulation, Stoyke said. The solar panels and super-insulated walls and windows of the Blatchford home could easily be applied to other buildings to save people money.
Mills said several homes on the tour were retrofits, such as the Sundance project, which demonstrates how you can do a fast, cheap net-zero upgrade using laser scans and pre-built panels. Four homes had been on the tour before, and had returned so their owners could talk about what it’s like to live in a net-zero home.
Oil and gas might be cheap right now due to the coronavirus’s economic slump, but you still don’t want to waste them, Mills said. If you make your home less leaky and generate your own power, you’ll spend less on energy.
“This is one of those things homeowners can do on our own to make ourselves less dependent on the up-and-down prices of energy,” Mills said, adding he was working on a net-zero retrofit of his own home while isolated due to the pandemic.
Profiles of homes on the tour are available at www.ecosolar.ca.
