This is an update to Jon Booren's February 2008 article on The Now House™.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Now House™ Project, it was undertaken as part of the CMHC's net-zero housing design challenge. However, rather than building a new house, the partners involved in the Now House™ Project decided to renovate and update a wartime house. This approach was taken in order to create open source solutions that could be rolled out to the many hundreds of thousands of similar wartime homes that had been built across Canada.
A few days ago CBC News wrote that the Now House Project has successfully started toward its goal of becoming a net-zero retrofitted home. The original Now House has been quite successful. Its owner, John Van Dusen, has begun receiving credits for the amount of energy his wartime house is producing.
The Now House Project has also expanded their efforts beyond the first home. Using in-kind sponsorship for the building materials, they are working on ten homes within the Topham Park neighbourhood where their first house was located. They are also working with the Windsor Essex Community Housing Corporation to update five of the 125 homes in their portfolio.
See Jon's original article on The Now House, as reprinted last month in our second anniversary retrospective:
The Now House™ Project: The Return of a Canadian Icon
By Jon Booren
