One Year in a SuperGreen Home

We've now got a whole year's worth of energy usage data from the SuperGreen duplex.  And the results confirm what the earlier trends showed - this home is using even less energy than predicted, about 30% less!
Results are shown for 38 Nijmegan below (special thanks to the owners for sharing the energy usage data).  We also have almost a full year from 40 Nijmegan, the other half of the duplex.  And it shows the same trends - about 30% less energy usage.  So this tells us it is not just a fluke or entirely occupant behaviour--in fact the buildings are performing consistently better and anticipated.  

The graphs below shows predicted energy usage (shown as bars) versus the actual total energy usage in the duplex (shown as a green line) for the months for a whole year.  The red line show is the energy usage of a similarly sized conventional new home in Whitehorse.  Actually energy usage has been "normalized" to take of the fact that much of this year's winter was pretty warm.  So this is adjusted to average weather conditions.

SuperGreen Energy Usage Versus a Conventional Home
For comparison purposes (and to help illustrated the predicted versus actual energy performance of the building) the energy usage of a similarly sized, new home in Whitehorse is shown on the graph as the red line.  This represents an electrically heated new home built in compliance with the City of Whitehorse’s energy efficiency bylaw.  By way of comparison, over the year, total energy costs for the conventional, electrically  home would have been $3,920.  The actual energy costs over the same period for the SuperGreen duplex have only been $1,390.  That is less than half the energy cost – a savings of $2,530 in just one year!

Yukon's Reservoir Levels - April Update

I've been skipping a bit of winter and haven't done an energy battery update in sometime - but this is the time we really draw down our stored renewable energy, and things get lean in the spring.  

Marsh Lake is looking quite low, about 2/3 of what we normally have at this time of year, but Mayo and Aishihik lakes are fuller than average; overall we aren't too far below how much water we normally have at this time of year.  Right now the overall energy stored is down to 33%, about 2% lower than average for this time of year.  Probably the warm February and March this year kept demand down even though we're a growing community. 

Let's hope for a quick, warm spring!