open plan living
 

Hi everyone, i'm brand new to the forum and hopefully moving to the Calgary area in the summer of 2009.

This may sound like a silly question (probably the first of many) but does anyone have any idea why all the houses are so open plan in such a cold climate, is it not nice to cosy up in front of the fire with the room door closed to keep the heat in?

Heating basements, bonus rooms and garages all sounds very expensive!

Re: open plan living
 

If you leave a space cold you will likely get condensation problems and your (wooden) house could well rot around you.

Who heats unoccupied basements and garages though? We close the vents in the spare "musicroom" most of the time and rely on ambient heating to prevent problems, and our garage has no heating at all.

Open plan is not necessarily the norm in older homes, so its a good question.

Re: open plan living
 

You don't heat garages or at least most people don't, if it is done it certainly isn't to the same level as the interior of the home.

Virtually all heating systems in Calgary homes are forced air so you get a more even flow of heat to the entire house, rather than hot and cold rooms.

Besides modern homes are well insulated even the basement and heat loss is minimised.

That being said there nothing stopping a person from having a fireplace and heating the room your in while turning the thermostat down temporarily for the rest of the house. Of course some of that heat will bleed to the rest of the house but that's not such a bad thing. ;)

Personally I would far rather have my whole house at a relatively even temperature than having hot and cold rooms through out.

Re: open plan living
 

Hi bielbs

Its cheaper/quicker to build open plan houses and gives you more space without halways etc. Generally the modern wooden houses in Canada are heated by hot air and not as controllable as gas fired hot water radiators. We lived in a modern house near Calgary 11 years ago. It was made of wood and which had 4 inches of glass fibre insulation, so it should have been easy to keep warm apart is was "boom time" built house so doors and some windows did not seal properly. Be careful of build quality of some houses in Canada.

My wife refered to it as the "Shed" as it felt like a large shed or wooden holiday Chalet.

When we moved to Ontario we purchased an old farmhouse and reinstated the doors and it seem much more cosy in the living room with wood burner in winter.

As for heating it will most likely cost you more than the UK, due to larger homes and very cold winters. If you read some more recent ex pats posts $300(£150)/mth for heating is what some members have posted they pay.

I would take this into account when you move to Calgary especially with high oil/gas prices at present and make sure you find out heating costs of the house you may want to purchase. Found heating/electric bills can be "scarey" especially in winter when we lived in Canada.

All the best with you move.

hudd

Re: open plan living
 

If you look closer at the locations of those who have the $300 per month heating bills they are mostly in eastern Canada not Alberta.

To have heating bills of $300 per month in Alberta lately you have to have a very large home and keep the temperature very high.

Currently our natural gas bills average $100 per month on an annual basis and our electricity is $55 that's not so scary is it. Both of those averages include all extra management and transmission costs.

That is in a home built in 1972 with the old 2x4 external wall construction not the modern mandated 2x6 construction with the associated 6" of insulation.

Edit: Oh and by the way we cook with natural gas and have a natural gas fireplace that is used nightly from late October through April.

Re: open plan living
 

Yep, its those of us with the choice between oil (expensive) and electric (very expensive) who pay through the nose. What I wouldnt give for a nice gas main running outside my house....if only.


Good point about open plan being cheaper to build and more sq ft. That makes sense.

Re: open plan living
 

Why not go and see Hank Hill?

Re: open plan living
 

I always thought it was just American sitcoms where the front door opened into the living room.;)

Re: open plan living
 

Agree totally with this post. Living in the 'peg I paid on average $300 a month to heat my house but this was due to the fact that my house was uninsulated and my furnace was almost 20 years old. (Which has now been changed).

Now i'm still paying $300/month due to the fact that they base there 'budget' plan on the previous year but so far my usage is $180/month down on what it was last year.

As long as you've got a newer furnace and a well insulated house you should not really get expensive heating bills.

Re: open plan living
 

I think its just as expensive as oil in practice, only the tanks are more expensive to replace. Its a moot point as I would have to invest in a new furnace and waterheater anyway, which would wipe out any savings.

Something a bit worrying about having a couple of potential bombs sitting in the backyard too.

Neighbours went from electric to propane to cut costs, and are frantically insulating before winter arrives, I'll have to ask them what its costing them.

Re: open plan living
 

Thanks for all the top tips,

any thoughts on ploughing your hard earned cash into a house made of chip board? Being from Blighty I'm used to bricks and cement (call me naive, but seems a bit more permanent!) Any reassurance appreciated.

Re: open plan living
 

I take it that question has been exhausted on other threads, anyway thanks for the previous comments

Re: open plan living
 

Very much so and I apologise for my previous post.:o

Brick is not a practical building material for most of Canada.

Re: open plan living
 

Primevil cave dwellings trump your brick built house / Victorian era slum hovel.

Now who's clever ?

R.

Re: open plan living
 

Steve P
We had a 1905 brick house in Ontario and the bricks were in excellent condition. Issue wir brick laying you need good frost freeze weather. Wooden houses can be built when its sub zero.

Steve you can buy wood frame houses in the UK. We looked a them a few years ago. You can clad the oustide with brick, stone, slate, wood etc. They are mainly self build kit homes. 2300 sqft was £80K, but then you need land to build it on, which is an issue in the South of England.

hudd

Re: open plan living
 

This will be our 3rd winter in Calgary... the first thing we noticed was that the house we were renting was incredibly warm, even in winter, and our heating wasn't turned up all that high.

They seem to be very well insulated, or at least ours was (no idea what the current house is like in the depths of winter - we only bought it 6 months ago).

The only downside I can see to very open plan houses is that you can't shut doors to hide away from the kids so easily!

Heating them isn't a problem though, and although I can't remember what our heating bills are off the top of my head, it isn't a huge sum

Re: open plan living
 

:rofl::rofl:Too true, I have to go and hide in the pantry when i'm on the phone!

My main bugbear with open plan was when my son was toddling and he would be all over the kitchen. He would invariably turn up right behind me when i was taking a large pan out of the oven.:eek: My kitchen in the UK was blocked off and very child friendly.
All 3 of them still run around the kitchen island when they get excited and it's usually when i'm busy in the kitchen, drives me nuts.
Open plan kitchens and kids don't go very well together.

Heating wise, it's all very toasty and cosy in the Winter, we have the sun on the back all day and even when it's -25 outside we could be roasting inside with no heating on.

Re: open plan living
 

Thats good news about the insulation, good point about open plan as I will be moving with a toddler, oh well, it will keep me fit trying to keep him out of the kitchen area!

Re: open plan living
 

At out last house we installed a barn type half door (I bought a door and sawed it in half) that was enough to block off the kitchen without it being visually a separate room. Depends on the layout, of course, it wouldn't work where we are now.

Our current house, or cabin, is very much open plan. A snag with it is that you can't isolate smells or sounds, chuck pine needles in the fire and the whole house smells like a detergent commercial. Very nice. Fail to leave the litter box and the whole, well I guess you see the problem. Living with an Abba fan is a problem as there's no where for her to be closeted.

Re: open plan living
 

Our house is largely open plan on the ground floor. We are all-electric and our bill is about $150/month.

We heat the basement, keep the thermostats on the ground floor at 21 and do not heat the upstairs, other than my office, because there is no need.

The windows and exterior doors are all double glazed and the seals are as tight as a nun's chuff.

Re: open plan living
 

Souv,

What temp to you heat the basement to?

Ours is finished and I set the manual slidey thermostat at 15ish when we're not down there and 20 when we are. I suspect it would be better left at a constant 18 or so?

My project to rip of window trim and fill in the chuffing great gaps around the window frames that I believe exist is rising up the priority list as the temperature drops!

Re: open plan living
 

Good question. Our basement is basically split into two main rooms, a TV room and a bedroom, both of which have heaters. When he still lived here, the Boy never turned on the heater in his bedroom so we had to jack up the other one. Now he is gone, will be able to leave the door open and run both heaters, probably at 21. We won't really know until winter sets in.

Re: open plan living
 

For a moment I thought you were paying $150 x 12 for equalised billing. Then I read the later post about winter.

We're all electric (heat pump/aircon, baseboards if needed). Bills in summer are around $150-$170 but they hit $400 in winter. Equalised is around $265.

Re: open plan living
 

We are on equalised billing.

Re: open plan living
 

I live in a new, but open plan house, and my heating bills are no where near what some have quoted. We are on mains tho, I appreciate that makes somewhat of a difference perhaps, but even so, those numbers seem high. The forced air heating means if you have rooms not in use, you can close the vents (for instance, in one of our spare bedrooms). The advantage to heating most / all of the space is that pipes etc don't freeze, and I have been told by someone who knows more about such things, that it takes less energy to keep a room moderately warm, than let it cool right down and heat it back up. For that reason we keep the heating on a digital thermostat, set to go down in temp (or up, as the case may be in summer) and come on an hour before we get home. We have it at a reasonable temp in the evening when we are about, and then turn it down a bit lower overnight when we are under our duvets. It took some working out initally to get temperatures we liked but we seem to have it sorted now! We can even program it to be different (e.g. later kick in time) on weekends! Our furnace / boiler is in the basement, so we don't need to heat the basement per se, the furnace seems to keep it reasonable down there (we use ours as a laundry room, storage etc). Another tip I was told when I moved here was in winter, keep your curtains open during the day to let the sunlight heat the home, in summer, close them during the day to stop that happening - it does seem to make a difference!

Re: open plan living
 

Not a good idea to close them at night when it's very cold. It isolates the windows from the warmth of the house and moisture in the air will freeze on the glass. Then melt.

Re: open plan living
 

We have flimsy Canadian curtains (Laura Ahsley where art tho!) so no danger of them totally insulating our windows!

On the window note too, we have low-e coated, argon filled windows, which also helps heat control.

Re: open plan living
 

On the other hand Sears do sell really thick insulated curtains too. There is no rule says you cant double up and have pretty curtains on the inside and thick insulating ones behind them.

Re: open plan living
 

At some point I shall get around to getting some decent curtains, will probably have them made to order, but right now we make do with some Home Outfitter's ones!

Re: open plan living
 

Sorry, I thought from your comment about seeing what happened in winter that your $150 monthly hadn't taken account of winter.

So let's see if I have this right...you are all electric and your total bills for heating, lighting, cooking and hot water for a year are $1800.

Re: open plan living
 

According the my tax spreadsheet for 2007, we paid a total hydro bill of $1,733.18.

There are some advantages to living in this province.

I won't publish my provincial tax return, though. Not before 9pm. It contains scenes of nudity and violence (a man being stripped naked and ****** up the ****).

Re: open plan living
 

I'm sure more than some.;)

That 9.00pm watershed sounds interesting.:rofl:

Re: open plan living
 

Hi, haven't posted on the Canadian forum for some time. We sold our open plan in Niagara Falls and moved to New Zealand. Open plan houses are much nicer than having the house cut up into rooms. Our house had a front hall off of which was a formal living. Then through the hall you entered the middle of the house, kitchen, dining and family.

It is a common set up in new homes to have the kitchen dining and family all connected. It is a nice way to live. We have only been gone two years, but at the time never found paying $300 per month to be expensive. We paid less than $200 for natural gas for the month and about $80 for electricity.

Houses are well built, and despite what was posted above, there is no issue with condensation in houses through heating rooms differently. It is possible to close the register in rooms not in use so the warm air flows to those rooms you use only.