A home built by Red Deer College (RDC) trades and technology students has been relocated to Sylvan Lake from the college’s main campus in Red Deer.
The home, built with a number of ecofriendly features that aim to reduce environmental impact and ensure longevity, is located on 44th Street, and is the result of a partnership comprising RDC, Landmark Group and Avalon Central Alberta.
Evolve, as the partnership is known, built the home at Red Deer College using Landmark’s ‘panelization’ process, through which the house’s major components were built in a plant in Edmonton before being delivered to Red Deer.
Students then put the house together, before it was transported to its permanent site in Sylvan Lake.
“We reversed the process on campus, so we took it off in pieces, put it on trucks and trailers and hauled it our here,” said RDC construction research liaison Gary Halvorson. “It took us about six or seven hours to dismantle, and it was about eight hours to reassemble. We started at nine in the morning and we were done before supper.”
The project has been three years in the making, and began when discussions between Avalon and RDC took place. With E1, the single family home, now underway, Halvorson is hoping it will be the first of many.
“We’ll see where this one goes,” he said. “It’s almost like a pilot project.”
Several styles of home were considered for the project, but the one chosen was most in line with its environmentally-friendly mandate.
Referred to by Halvorson as a “state-of-the-art” building, the house features a number of design elements that offer enhanced sustainability and eco-friendliness.
“We focused on the building envelope, because that’s really key to how a house performs,” said Halvorson. “It doesn’t matter what you put in for mechanics, if you don’t have a proper building envelope, you’re wasting some of that.”
Materials used in the construction of the house allow for higher temperature consistency while large windows allowing in natural light and lessen the need for electrical lighting.
The exterior is built to withstand potential weather damage.
Lorne Erickson, general manager of Landmark in Red Deer, said the project benefits all of those involved with it.
“It’s a great opportunity for us to work with the college, which obviously is interested in innovation,” he said. “Avalon are similar to Landmark in their mindset that they want to benefit the environment and use different techniques, so we’ve combined some of what they like to do and some of what we like to do, and it’s been a really good partnership