Many ways to comply — at very different costs.
This is the kind of artifact a Design Optimization engagement produces: every viable compliance path for a builder's plan, three concrete options pulled out, and a clear answer to “where can we save money without losing the tier?”
What the cloud is
Every dot is one way you could build this house — a different combination of insulation, windows, air sealing, heating equipment, and ventilation. We modelled 5,832 of them.
What the axes mean
Left–right: how much more (or less) this design would cost than your current spec. Up–down: how much more energy-efficient than the NBC Tier-1 reference house.
What the colours mean
Each dot is shaded by which performance tier it reaches. Dotted lines show where each tier begins.
How to read the panel
Click a featured dot in the cloud — or pick a tab below the chart — to feature one design. The panel breaks down what’s in it, what it costs, and how it complies.
Tap a featured dot in the chart — or a card to the right — to compare designs. Built from 5,832 simulated designs, lightly grouped for readability. Dotted lines mark the minimum efficiency needed to reach each performance tier.
A few terms used in this analysis
Tier (NBC energy tier)
A step up from code minimum. Tier 1 is code minimum. Each tier above is roughly 10% (T2), 20% (T3), 40% (T4), and 70% (T5) more energy-efficient than Tier 1.
Reference house
A code-built version of your same plan — same size, same orientation, same window area. It's the baseline every design on this page is compared against.
Prescriptive vs. performance path
Two ways to comply with the energy code. Prescriptive: pick upgrades from a menu until you accumulate enough points — 10 for Tier 2, 20 for Tier 3. Performance: prove with an energy model that your house hits an overall target. The performance path usually leaves more room to save money.
Envelope vs. whole-house
Envelope = the shell only (walls, roof, windows, air-sealing). Whole-house = the shell plus mechanicals (heating, cooling, hot water). A big gap between the two means the mechanicals are doing a lot of work.
This is the artifact behind a path-decision conversation.
Every compliance project starts with a question the builder usually can’t see clearly: given my plan, my cost data, and the tier I need to hit, what’s the best way through? The cloud above is how that question gets answered — for this real Bedford project, the answer was “your current spec is over-built by ~$19,000 and you can still hit Tier 4.”
In a Design Optimization engagement we’d refine this further with your real cost data, add architectural feasibility checks, and produce a written standard build with explicit decision rationale.
Have a plan you want run through this kind of analysis?
Email contact@baselineenergy.ca