Planning & Designing Sustainable Green Homes

Concept and design

Smart homes: efficiency, comfort & convenience at our fingertips

Intelligent home devices allow you to control your home remotely, and send you notices of problems. So what is a smart home? Smart homes take advantage of smart phone technologies to provide you with automated control of your homes systems such as heating and lighting. Using our phones to control our homes can make…

Healthy indoor air quality

DIY recipe for natural healthy paint

Natural paint is non-toxic, cheap and easy to make & provides a beautiful texture to walls. Ditch the VOC's & improve interior air quality for your family with these tips on making Eco-friendly natural paint at home. Making eco-friendly paint at home is easy when you know how If you want to decorate your home with…

Concept and design

How to stay on budget when building a home

Advice from a green building project manager: how to develop a construction budget and stick to it. The following is an interview with Patrick Ranger, General Manager at Belvedair , a construction company specializing in the design and construction of green homes. Patrick is trained in business administration and…

Recycled and Reclaimed Materials

Where to buy and sell used building materials

Get money for your old building material and Find used building materials on classified lists and through online brokers. When buildings are decommissioned there can be a lot of valuable materials that could be used again, but when buyers can’t find sellers, otherwise usable materials are being sent to a land fill…

Tiny house

Are tiny houses good in cold climates?

Are you wondering how to build a tiny house for living in cold climates? How much insulation does a tiny house need? See plans for the best tiny house on wheels that we've ever seen. How to heat and live in a tiny house in a cold climate? Are tiny houses a good investment? That depends on how you want to live and…

LEED Homes

LEED Platinum prefab kit home has superior air quality and performance

The owner of this beautiful prefab eco home, Roman Szumski, is a physician and pathologist & was deeply involved in the process of designing & constructing a healthy home for his family. Prefab LEED Platinum kit house in Montreal Ellen and Roman Szumski earned LEED® Platinum certification for their home in Labelle…

Wood and organic materials

Two new options of mass timber panels

Two new types of mass timber panels similar to cross-laminated timber are hitting the North American construction market. The commercial construction sector has warmly embraced cross-laminated timber (CLT) in recent years, taking advantage of it as the base structure, but also as a design feature. The assembly of…

Wood and organic materials

Which is better, OSB or plywood for roofs, walls & floors?

Both plywood & OSB have benefits & drawbacks, with much misinformation about permeability - Ecohome investigates the latest data for new code to help make the best choice. OSB v plywood - which is best? Odds are, that if you pass a housing development of wood-framed houses, it will have OSB (oriented strand board)…

Off-grid and Net-Zero Housing

Award winning Net Zero Energy house in Edmonton Alberta leads the way

The Windsor Park Net Zero House in Edmonton won 2017 Canadian Green Building Award in the technical category, proving that green building a home is both possible and beautiful. As owners of this net zero energy home construction project , we acted as both the designer and general contractor. The objective for the…

Architecture and plan design

Lockeport Beach House wins Canadian Green Building award

The Lockeport Beach house in Nova Scotia is the residential winner of the 2017 Canadian Green Building Awards. Originally published by our print affiliate SAB Magazine Jury comments: This house has a light environmental footprint that derives from the philosophical approach taken by both the client and the…

Off-grid and Net-Zero Housing

CaGBC's Zero Carbon Buildings Initiative explained

Mark Hutchinson, Vice President of Green Building Programs at the CaGBC, speaks about the new Zero Carbon Buildings Initiative. SAB: What does the CaGBC hope to achieve with the Zero Carbon Buildings Initiative? Mark Hutchinson: The CaGBC launched the zero carbon building initiative in 2016 to champion the move to…