Real Estate

Suzanne Anton wants to see a clothesline outside every new home in Vancouver. The Non-Partisan Association city councillor has one, and she said that she rarely uses her electric dryer, even in winter.

“I think laundry on a line is a beautiful sight,” Anton told the Georgia Straight.

Clothes end up not only cleaner but also last longer when dried in the open, according to Anton, a mother of three. She says solar drying is also more energy efficient, and this fits the City’s Green Building Strategy.

When city staff presented a report to council on proposed amendments to Vancouver’s building bylaw, Anton asked that the installation of clotheslines be studied as a requirement for the issuance of construction permits for single-family and two-family dwellings.

For now, this is on the back burner. In the meantime, the City is pushing ahead with new requirements for building permits on these types of dwellings, under its Green Homes Program.

The amendments will take effect on September 5. According to the staff report, which was approved unanimously by council on June 26, the changes will reduce the energy consumption of new homes by about 33 percent.

The changes to the building bylaw will increase the minimum insulation requirements to improve building-envelope performance of dwellings. Insulation under basement floors will also be mandatory to reduce the amount of heat lost to the ground.

To push homeowners to use more energy-efficient lighting technologies, like compact fluorescents and light-emitting diodes, new homes will be “hard-wired” so that 40 percent of their lighting fixtures will not accept incandescent or halogen bulbs.

To reduce hot-water-heating energy losses, insulation will be required around electric-powered hot-water tanks. Insulation will likewise be mandatory around a portion of the piping leading to and from the tank on both electric- and gas-powered systems.

In the amendments is a requirement that all natural-gas fireplaces be direct-vented, and use electronic ignition instead of pilot lights. The staff report cited a Terasen Gas statistic that pilot lights in fireplaces cost homeowners an average of $120 a year in natural-gas consumption.

Council approved the mandatory installation of dual-flush toilets that allow homeowners to choose between flushing a large or small volume of water. The current building bylaw mandates the installation of toilets that use a maximum of six litres of water for each flush, which staff noted is still a “substantial amount of potable water”.

New homes will also have to include a heat-recovery ventilator. The report explained that an HRV “continuously exchanges stale indoor air with fresh air while transferring the heat contained in the outgoing exhaust to the incoming ventilation”.

In-home energy-display meters will be required so that owners are “provided with a near real-time indication of how their actions impact resource consumption”. Energy audits will be conducted on all new dwellings to collect information on the performance of the Green Homes Program.

Features that allow for the future installation of solar panels and electric-vehicle charging systems will be compulsory. That means new homes will feature a vertical service shaft to ease the addition of solar panels, and a cable raceway extending from the electricity circuit panel to the garage or carport for electric vehicles.

Coauthored by David Ramslie, manager of the City’s sustainable-development program, the report stated that the amendments to the building bylaw would not add up to more than two percent of construction costs.

Citing figures from the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver, the report also stated these changes will result in a less than one percent increase in the listing price of a new home.

Ramslie told the Straight that once the amendments are implemented, Vancouver will have the highest energy-efficiency standards in the country for new homes.

This won’t stop Anton from pushing for clotheslines. In fact, she also wants staff to look into how strata corporations regulate the outdoor hanging of laundry, and find out if steps can be taken to allow condo residents to dry their clothes on balconies.