Transcript
“Landmark is in the business of building homes,” says Reza Nasseri the CEO of the Landmark Group of Builders.
“We build condominiums, duplexes, townhouses, high rises and single family homes from starter homes to luxury homes.”
Landmark Group’s mission is to minimize carbon emissions and bring affordability to its customers. For the past 15 years it’s been looking for ways to improve productivity in building houses. Currently, the construction process uses a tremendous amount of energy primarily in transportation and heating the house under construction in particular during the wintertime.
It takes between 450 to 500 transportation trips of about 40 kilometers to complete construction on an average house when it built on site. When we build our house in the factory we have cut that down to about to about 150 to 200 trips.
“In the winter we have to keep the houses warm so the tradespeople can work inside the house. When we build in the factory all of the walls are built there, the windows are installed and the insulation is installed,” says Nasseri.
“There is tremendous savings, often in wintertime a house has to be heated for two to two and a half months at a very high energy level, specifically the first four or five weeks of construction. The cost to heat that house is between $5000 to $7000 per house. You can cut that down to $1000 or $1,500 per house by cutting down that time you have to heat the house to five days instead of five weeks.”
“As human beings we tend to get caught in the big things like solar panels. Let’s put solar panels on the roof they’ll say. Well, while it may be easy to put solar panels on the roof of a house it isn’t going to do much good if the house leaks air like a sieve. You’re going to have to put $200,000 worth of solar panels on a house in order to make it worthwhile. But there is a much easier way, for just a few hundred or a few thousand dollars more you can build an airtight house and be very energy efficient so you can cut the cost of the solar panels down to $80,000. You spend another $5,000 on energy efficiency measures you can cut the solar panel cost to $30,000 and so on.”
“When you build an energy efficient home it has a long lasting effect. During construction you can save a lot of energy which means less greenhouse gases emitted. It also saves money which creates a more affordable home. It means an excellent high quality home which is healthier, warmer and more comfortable will be constructed. This house will save energy for the next 100 years that people live in it.”
Our goal is to build net-zero homes by 2015. That is to say that every single house we build we want it to be net-zero - no carbon footprint. Every house will produce the same amount of energy that it consumes or more. So our consumers don’t have to pay a cent for energy.”
