Burkehill

Our renovations at Burkehill gave a dated old home a modern facelift—and brought it up to Built Green Platinum energy standards.

Location
West Vancouver, BC
Completion
2014
Sustainability
Built Green Canada – Platinum
EnerGuide 85

Updating Burkehill’s architectural character was a given; but we also wanted to ensure that practical considerations, like how a home is heated, were also reconsidered in the renovation.

Airtightness is key to a home’s performance and a KPI that we spent time optimizing. Measured in Air Changes per Hour (ACH), it represents the number of times new outside air enters and replaces the old air in a room. If your ACH is too high, you’re losing air you’re paying to heat or cool. If it’s too low, you’ll have stale air which leads to a buildup of toxins, viruses, pathogens, and other not-very-nice pollutants. For the perfect balance between performance and occupant comfort, you want a low ACH, but paired with a high-performing fresh air system—which we achieved here to reduce the home’s ACH from 14 to just 1.1.

Details

Large plastic bags sit under various recycling signs

We’re sticklers for minimizing construction waste and always measure how much of it gets recycled. This is especially important on reno projects when you’re removing so much old debris.

Our site’s have recycling centres for each waste category, clearly labeled so we can record how much we’re diverting from landfill. We then publish those results internally to keep everyone accountable. At Burkehill, we recycled 96% construction waste!