Cottage Life TV’s new documentary series, Todd Talbot Builds: The Passive House Project, follows the real estate expert and contractor—and former star of Love It or List It—as he and his wife, Rabecca, build a passive house overlooking B.C.’s Okanagan Lake.
Cottage Life: What is passive house construction and how is it different?
Todd Talbot: It’s an approach that applies building science—actual science, not anecdotes or Hail Mary guesses—to create the most energy-efficient homes and other buildings. Done well, you can reduce energy consumption by 80 to 90 per cent.
There are five main concepts used in most passive buildings. First, super-insulating does the heavy lifting to combat summer heat and winter cold. Second, high-performance windows and doors address the weakest points for energy efficiency in any building.
Third is my favourite: a continuous air barrier. Conventional barriers always have holes. In a passive house, we literally eliminate pinholes—so no air moves in or out, unless we control it. The fourth feature is an HRV (Heat Recovery Ventilator) or ERV (Energy Recovery Ventilator) that mechanically exchanges the air constantly, making the indoor air quality as good as it can be. We can even filter for allergens before they enter.
As well, we eliminate thermal bridging, so nothing conducts heat from outside to inside or vice versa. We attack that with continuous insulation, almost always on the outside of the building.
CL: Is this construction process more difficult than a conventional approach?
TT: The building industry resists change, and passive buildings are different than conventional ones. For instance, the old way of feeding wires inside was to bundle them together and drill one hole. It’s fast and easy, but there’s no way to air seal a bundle of wires. In a passive house, one wire has one hole—and each is sealed individually. That’s extra work, so builders accustomed to conventional homes are often skeptical. But once a tradesperson has done one passive house or high-performance build, they’re convinced.
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I started feeling motivated to build this way after seeing houses from the ’90s already being torn down. Some builders then were treating real estate as a game—to make a quick buck—as opposed to creating healthy, resilient homes. We have to build homes differently to perform better as safe, liveable spaces, especially since we’re all experiencing climate effects, in real time.
CL: In the TV series, the site looks beautiful, dramatic, and daunting. Did the site complicate construction?
TT: The building was cantilevered off the side of a cliff 100 feet in the air, with a very complicated triangular form. We had to come up with strategies to physically navigate the outside of the structure. It’s not easy to install air barrier on a 65-and-a-half degree pitch or lift a 600-lb triangular window where no scaffolding could go. I had to learn how to rappel down cliffs and the side of our building from Peter Chow, a pro rock climber who worked with us.
This show is really documentary style. I didn’t want to oversimplify the process or make up drama. A lot of the problems were only solved after some sleepless nights. It’s not a lifestyle show. For me, it’s the first time in television that I felt really authentic.
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CL: In the summer of 2023, the house burned down when Kelowna experienced a devastating wildfire. What’s next?
TT: That was very emotional for Rabecca and me. The house would have been fire resilient once it was completed, and maybe it would have withstood the fire. We will build again—we needed to take a breath and regroup first—but we won’t build in exactly the same way. We’ll work with a fire-prevention expert, and I’m also inspired by pre-fabrication. It’s more efficient and cost-effective to build in a controlled, factory environment, rather than on-site. You can dial in high-performance details more easily. That’s the model we’re looking at. We hope to start in the spring of 2025.
This article was originally published in the September/October issue of Cottage Life magazine.
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