PEER Presland

Ottawa Community Housing manages 15,000 homes throughout Ottawa. Two-thirds of the housing stock is more than 50 years old. The city’s Waiting List for affordable housing has more than 10,000 people.

We need to maintain our existing stock while building new affordable homes. This pilot is a deep energy retrofit, which is traditionally costly, slow and disruptive. At Presland, we were able to get funding for 50 percent of the cost of the project. The project also reduces the disruption for tenants by performing much of the work from outside the building while the building is occupied. This project has addressed many years of capital repairs while also improving the interior comfort of the unit and eliminating GHG emissions.  The tenants benefit from a repaired, more comfortable home with central air conditioning.

Work began in the spring of 2020 and is now complete.  The monitoring phase started in Sept 2021, and we are closely tracking the performance of the homes. We are working with our partners to report annually on the project’s performance.

The natural gas heating systems were replaced with electric heat pumps. The hot water tanks were replaced with a heat pump as well. Additionally, 35kW of solar panels were placed on the south-facing roof. The solar panels generate as much electricity as the building consumes each year, making the homes net-zero. New windows and doors were installed. Heat recovery ventilators were installed to keep as much heat inside the building as possible and reduce energy consumption. The new building envelope has 10 inches of insulation to keep the building warm and a new air and vapour barrier to make it airtight. This eliminates most of the building’s convective and conductive heat losses, maintaining the heat in the home and reducing energy requirements.

OCH has used the lessons learned from this project to create long term capital plan that aligns with the City of Ottawa’s Climate Change Master Plan, which aims to have all GHG emissions in Ottawa eliminated by 2050.