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Well a drafty oil heated heritage home in Maple Ridge is now fully fossil free,

solar powered, all electric and producing green energy. It took years of planning,

major renovations and a lot of hands-on work to rethink our home is built and powered.

That effort has now earned James Rowley national recognition from Canadian Geographic.

History raises a bigger question though. As governments pushed towards net zero,

how realistic is it for the average home one? What do you want to be now to talk about the issue?

Is James Rowley, Maple Ridge resident and winner of the Canadian Geographic and One Earth

Living's live net zero to 2025 contest? James, thank you for your time today.

Thanks so much. Nice to be here.

Well congratulations first of all for the win the 2025 win you were recognized by Canadian Geographic

for having a net zero home. I guess the the first question is when you look at your home today

fully net zero, what's that actually mean in practical terms day to day for you?

Oh great yeah day to day I mean we set the net zero target when we first started this thing.

Didn't know if you can meet it but we're not quite there. I just looked at our bills for this

year so we're at our total energy bill was like $635 for the year so we're not quite there

but we keep adding things. What it means day to day is not much we run our household we drive

we my kids play video games and the house just we just live but when we get to look at our

electricity bill we have these beautiful sort of bell curves and we we just have more money in our

bank account is what's happening really. Now let's go right to the beginning of you bought the

host to my understanding in Maple Ridge in 2007 run on oil heat it was drafty and efficient

how old was the house when you bought it? It was built in 1923 by my wife's grandfather

Carl Whitehead. Yeah and this is one of the things we're very lucky to have the opportunity to own

this house not many people in my generation do so there was you know a lot of problems with the

house and a lot of people might have torn it down but we first of all we had an oil furnace

and we're environmentalists and we're like we can't keep buying fuel oil and putting it

in our basement and which would difference would come on every 20 minutes it was really feeling

crazy the walls had no insulation so when we really needed to renovate because there were

carpenter ants in the bathroom there were a number of other issues we said well let's go big

if we're going to do this let's aim for net zero I was inspired by a project that did multiple

homes at the same time in Ontario called the now house project and I've had let's try and get

the whole neighborhood involved and we have we're still working on that but we were able to do our

house big up front costs a lot of work a lot of stories about contractors that you can't

quite trust but in the end we are very happy now so it so you decided pretty quick that you were

going to go out on a sort of all-out transformation for the home well there were stages right and I

think these are all once we set the goal of reducing our energy and getting off fossil fuels

I guess getting off fossil fuels was the main goal at the beginning but immediately when we bought

the house in 2007 my my my parents my in-laws who sold us the house said look we'll help you

insulate it because there was no insulation in the walls we insulated the attic we did a number of

little retrofits but there was still this problem of heating with fuel oil and just a very

inefficient house so about five years later we lifted the house in 2016 so it is a number of years

that this takes you lifted the house we did we got nickel brothers in they lifted the house we dug

out underneath the house and put in a whole new foundation I learned from our energy advisor

how to do a very rudimentary insulation of the of the basement we put foam underneath the slab

when we poured the concrete we poured it on a foam foundation we separated the walls from

from the world we put Styrofoam on the outside Styrofoam on the inside thickened the walls

and I was doing all that work myself mostly because we found that we couldn't trust the contractor

which is a problem as well and so you lifted the house you rebuild parts of it and slated it from

the ground up and these are pretty ambitious it's an ambitious approach and not necessarily

incremental upgrades here if you're okay can we talk numbers roughly what did this transformation

cost over time well the the big renovation it's it's hard to put a number on it you know like

it's easier to talk about pieces like the solar panels that we put on once we once we started

going electric and then we started adding an electric car we start thinking well let's generate

some electricity to help us pay for this so solar panels were about 20,000 and we figured

they would pay themselves in about 20 years which is what the installer was saying at the time

but then we added the electric vehicles and we realized that we're offsetting gasoline so with gasoline

prices continuing to go up the solar panels are now paying themselves off by 2031 so we should be

and they're going to keep producing for for a long time so a lot of these retrofits on every house

and every house is different there's this upfront cost problem where you've got to pay something

a lot of insecurity in the market is that or are you going to keep your house long enough to to

pay these things off there's a lot of little projects that are trying to fix these problems

but if you are able to finance that first step then very quickly and much more quickly these days

because it's more incentive it becomes you're living in a much more efficient and happier and

healthier home and you're going to be saving money pretty soon um that sweat equity I mean it was

that part of your mindset that look I'm going to try to do as much of this as I possibly can I

know you talked about contractors you couldn't trust but was that something by accident that you

had to step in or is something you decided to do as well that look to really save money here

and if people are listening here part of what makes it successful is actually sweat equity

yeah I think so and I was fortunate we've got a lot of expertise in our family

and my in-laws who built their own house in here in Maple Ridge but no our intention was we

hire a contractor we got a very nice website and we get a quote and the quote was something

that we could afford we said we're going to do this work they're going to do this work for this

amount and that turned into more and more we got into that situation where the contractor was

asking for more and more money and then they started saying well we're not going to meet that target

and we say well we can't afford that so we had to end that relationship and suddenly we're

I guess fortunately the the work that I really couldn't do was done and then when I'm doing it

myself I get to follow the information that I got from an energy modeler sometimes there's a

difference in opinion between someone like me who who wants to push the envelope the building

envelope in this case and a contractor who's used to doing it a certain way so in some ways there was

an advantage for me doing it because I would do things further that even the building inspectors

were saying you know you don't have to do that and I would say well it gets better isn't it like

you know let's make this more efficient and go further than the BC building code requires

and I'm very happy that that happened that way. One of the things that you said James I was

reading about you is that you know you you talked about climate change and and having to do

something about that in the grand scheme of things for you how much of this came down to cost

savings versus climate responsibility what was the driving motivation the driving motivation right

from the beginning was always the future and and climate change right it but well I mean

what I really love is when things come together and there are multiple benefits that haven't

at the same time so I really wanted to get out fossil fuels from the beginning I didn't know if

that was possible and it feels a little crazy at first because heating with natural gas in a

conventional home is in the short term cheaper and they will hook you up to gas without you paying

anything so it's very easy to get kind of addicted. We didn't know how this was going to go but

we really needed to renovate the house there were other issues so it's kind of like well if we're

going to renovate the house we might as well do this and if we do this then we might as well do

that and it just ballooned right became more and more ambitious in the middle of it we did have

people looking at it's like we're including my mother who grew up in the house she's like you

don't have to do that that's her house and the family the family the your media family did they

jump in right away or did they also were they also bit skeptical as well well we're fortunate to

have environmental pioneers here in my family my in-laws started the recycling for part of the

movement to start recycling in Maple Ridge and as a result there's no municipal garbage pickup in

in Maple Ridge we've never got on that train and we're very fortunate to have that situation so

and they built their house as well so that was supportive my parents in Vancouver were a little bit

armed flank yeah I didn't hear too much from them yeah your name but we are in a position to

have bought this house and to do this work because of my parents and my wife's parents we couldn't

have bought this house without their help so it is a case where this work is difficult for a lot of

people to do which is why a lot of cities are looking into retrofit projects where the

city government just lends a hand there's a lot of information out there that's

where do you find the trust where the information can you trust the contractor when they say

that they know how to make your house energy efficient or install a heat pump

that piece is really important and I really love seeing municipalities

step in with sort of concierge programs where they'll give you advice they'll set you up with

an energy advisor they'll even have a list of contractors who have been trained in this work

makes a huge difference well congratulations to you it's a huge huge accomplishment

and I'm sure there are many frustrating days but certainly a national recognition from Canadian

geographic is a pretty big deal so congratulations to you James thank you so much for your time

thank you so much hello there Thursdays on global I'm Madeline Matlock

she's the lawyer with a legendary name don't underestimate this Matlock this one is a shark

you know it baby the one you can trust even if she has to bend the rules things are always

as black and white as they seem to crack a case this is how I get things done

any winning actress Kathy Bates is Madlock all new Thursdays at nine eastern on global stream on stack TV