Former Flamborough Councillor Dave Braden says building an outer wall allowed him to provide a tight seal on his Valens Road home and live without a heater.

Dave Braden acknowledges his home’s “gadgetry” is the wow factor that usually catches a visitor’s eye.

The gadgets in question include two free-standing solar panels and a towering wind turbine in his side yard, able to generate up to 3,000 watts of electricity, enough to allow the ex-Flamborough councillor and his wife to enjoy all life’s usual amenities at their rustic Valens Road abode.

But Mr. Braden is quick to concede the novel power setup doesn’t pay for itself and isn’t the source of his local claim to fame –that his home is so energy efficient it could be heated with a blow dryer.

The real key, he says, is in a simple, low-tech design modification.

During construction, he added a second outer wall lined with an uninterrupted polyethylene vapour barrier to prevent the air leakage that typically occurs when holes are cut for light sockets, plumbing, wiring and other fixtures.

The thin plastic sheeting – not the $42,000 power grid – allows the Bradens to live without a heater, although they do have one to preserve their grand piano during winter getaways.

Just how much they are saving on their utility bills is difficult to gauge because they don’t have any –they intentionally built off the grid using a design that maximizes natural heating in the winter and cooling in the summer.

A fireplace helps keep the home warm in cold weather, extended roof overhangs shade the place in the summer, and all their plumbing needs are provided by their severed farm property’s well and a septic system.

“The performance of this house, most engineers and architects would say, ‘That’s not possible,’ and I’m just frustrated with that response,” says Mr. Braden, who is a home builder, hobby farmer and a driving force behind efforts to build an electric car in Canada.

“This is the stuff that if something’s going to change the world, this is.”

He says the biggest problem with most homes is heat loss, likening the traditional design to a leaky pool that loses all of its water at least every two hours –the equivalent of leaving a 12-by-12-foot window open all winter long.

“In rough numbers, that means you heat the air in your house in the neighbourhood of 4,000 times a year,” Mr. Braden says. “You’ve basically got the tap on full-time. What you want to do is reduce that air leakage, or draft.”

The additional outer wall was his solution to a goal of having a maximum air leakage of one-tenth of an average home.

It not only allowed him to install a completely sealed vapour barrier with no holes for electrical and plumbing fixtures, but provided the room to blanket all wall areas with insulation, including behind electrical boxes.

Mr. Braden chose an R-46 mineral wool batt insulation that is more compact than fiberglass and about the same cost as R-16 rigid foam. Because he wasn’t constrained by wall studs, he was able to lay it horizontally like bricks.

As a bonus, the airtight seal also improved the insulation’s performance because it is most effective in still air.

For the roof, he took a more traditional approach, but opted for a higher insulation value, R-60.

“The greenest energy is the energy you never have to spend. This house doesn’t have to expend 75 per cent of its energy,” Mr. Braden says.

“Compared to other alternatives, this is what I call low tech. There’s not one moving part in this, nothing that is going to need to be repaired. This is structurally sound forever,” he says. “This is a long-term solution. It doesn’t matter what the price of energy does.”

The tighter air seal does bring one complication. The average person exhales and sweats about six litres of water per day and, unlike in an average home, that moisture doesn’t leak out, creating humid, stale air.

While this eliminates the need for a humidifier, the Bradens do have to release the moisture and have again chosen an energy- efficient route: a heat recovery ventilator transfers most of the heat from released air to the incoming air.

“I call it a fresh air mechanism,” Mr. Braden says. “When you open a window, you lose all the heat and all the moisture. You want to lose the moisture, but you lose all the heat. You use this thing, you capture a tremendous amount of the heat.”

As with any home, doors and windows are also crucial to preventing heat loss, and Mr. Braden opted for the best he could find, spending nearly double the typical amount. On the home’s south side, Mr. Braden chose double-pane, R-4.5 windows that allow sunlight in, opting for more reflective ones on the east and west side –triple paned, with argon gas and an R-value of nearly nine.