Stockholm: glass over a house that was already there
Of everything in this series, the closest to what we build is a family home in the Stockholm archipelago. Marie Granmar and Charles Sacilotto — Sacilotto had Bengt Warne as a mentor — worked on the site of an old summer house and put a glass shell over it.
The numbers they live with
The glazing is a 4 mm pane, and by their own account the glass cost roughly USD $84,000 to install. In late January it can be around −2°C outside and 15 to 20°C upstairs. The greenhouse footprint is close to double the house's, so there's a wrap-around garden inside the glass — figs, tomatoes and cucumbers, in Sweden. Their wastewater never reaches a municipal sewer; it goes through a urine-separating toilet, cisterns, grow beds and ponds.
Why the retrofit version is the important one
Most greenhouse homes are new builds, and new builds are rare. There are around 20 million buildings already standing in Canada. A glazed shell added to a house that already exists keeps the embodied carbon you've already paid for and skips the demolition — which is exactly the case for wrapping a Sophab around the wall you've already got.
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