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team engaging faculty and graduate student architects, mechanical engineers, systems
engineers, material scientists, building technologists, software engineers and interactivity
designers from the University of Waterloo, Ryerson University, and Simon Fraser
University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology, working collaboratively with
professional and industry partners. It has recently been reinstalled at a permanent site in
Cambridge, Ontario and we anticipate commencing with performance and occupancy
testing in 2013.
Figure 7: North House prototype: (left) View from southwest with exterior shades down; (right)
Exploded axonometric of components.
As a minimally sized testbed home of 80m2, North House consists of a highly insulated
core service module to the north opening up to a large flexible living space bounded by
high performance DReSS panels to the South, East and West (Fig 7 right). On the roof
of the project, an 8.3 kWp building applied photovoltaic array (BAPV) captures the high
summer sun while also integrating solar thermal evacuated tube collectors (4 kWp) for
domestic hot water and supplementary space heating. Vertical exterior walls on the
northeast and northwest, as well as the southern facing fascia, are clad with a glass
encapsulated 5.3 kWp building integrated photovoltaic array (BIPV). The active vertical
BIPV facades extend the period of daytime electrical power generation, capturing low
incidence solar energy typical of early morning, late afternoon, and winter months. This
system is anticipated to annually produce up to 6600kWh more than the house
consumes (Thün and Velikov 2012). The North House prototype allowed for the
opportunity to undertake detailed development and testing of building system
components and component assembly logics. It also provided the testbed for the
development of two additional components essential to the long-term success of a Net-
Zero high performance home: the Central Home Automation Server (CHAS) and the
Adaptive Living Interface System (ALIS) (Fig. 8).
