Heritage Retrofits - Preserve and Conserve
Resources
Windfall Centre has used a variety of resources to prepare for our retrofit. We are making all of these resources available for you to use on your retrofit, too.
Where it began
Literature
Conserve and Preserve Guidebook
Durability and Energy Efficiency
Heritage and Older Home Sector Profile
The 1921-house was donated to the Ontario Heritage Trust in 1972 and assessed for environmental upgrades in March 2008. While renovating to meet new environmental standards, the cultural heritage integrity of the home will be maintained.
According to 2001 census data 14% of Canadian homes were built before 1946 and fully 67 percent of Canadian homes are greater than 20 years old. Our approach to creating a culture of conservation must bring us to a mindset where renovation, rehabilitation and recycling are the norm. Architecture is long-term infrastructure that must be retained for centuries, not a commodity to be discarded within a generation.
There is a pervasive perception among heritage building owners and operators that heritage preservation and energy conservation are mutually exclusive objectives. This dichotomy of thought poses a major barrier to the establishment of a culture of energy conservation within the community of very old-home owners and operators.
This perception coupled with rising fossil energy costs due to increasingly scarce supply creates special challenges for cultural heritage building operators. We must find ways to use modern technology in harmony with heritage buildings or many of our prize heritage structures will be left neglected. They will be too expensive to operate and too carbon-intensive to justify habitation in this new era of carbon constraint.
The Conserve and Preserve project will demonstrate that dramatic reductions in energy use can be achieved while maintaining the cultural heritage integrity of a heritage structure. This will be accomplished through innovative project design and delivery mechanism, which incorporates an actual heritage renovation as part of the education workshop component.