Enclosure Renewal Project

The Belmont

Winner of a 2013 “Canadian Green Building Technical Achievement Award” and featured in SAB Magazine, The Belmont, originally constructed in 1986, is a 13-storey residential building on the west side of Vancouver. After weighing various options on how best to maintain and reinvest in its property, the Strata Corporation decided to proceed with a building enclosure renewal project in 2012.

Before the renewal, the existing exterior walls were exposed cladding with 2 inches (50 mm) of foam insulation at the inside, with an overall effective R-value of R-4. For the renewal project, the walls were over-clad with 3.5 inches (89 mm) of CAVITYROCK® stone wool insulation behind stucco and metal panel cladding. The cladding and insulation were held in place using fiberglass Cascadia

Clip®, which significantly reduce thermal bridging compared to a more traditional metal girt cladding systems. This assembly increased the overall effective R-value to a R-16 for the exterior walls.

Window replacement and air tightness improvements were also made to the enclosure. Energy savings as a result of the Enclosure Renewal Project were estimated through whole building energy modeling, and are predicted to

be be a 20% decrease in overall building energy usage, and 90% for in-suite space heating energy. This retrofit is expected to nearly eliminate the need for electric

baseboard heating and cut total building suite heating costs from approximately $18,000 to just $2,000 per annum.