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How it works

Modelled estimates for representative buildings, grounded in your city.

Each city instance is powered by hundreds of thousands of building energy simulations, run on Canada's standard residential modelling software for the building types residents actually live in.

Methodology

Powered by real simulation data, grounded in your city.

The St. John's instance runs on more than 446,000 building energy simulations using HOT2000 — Canada's standard residential energy modelling software. The simulations cover nine representative St. John's building types and were conducted by Dr Energi Inc. for the City of St. John's Energy Advisory Working Group.

Building energy simulations
446,000+
Canada's standard modelling software
HOT2000
Local building archetypes
9
City of St. John's working group
EAWG
Scatter plot of every simulated design for the Medium Detached archetype, plotted as Incremental Cost ($) on the vertical axis versus Energy Savings (%) on the horizontal axis. Four colour-coded tiers — Standard Home, Some Improvement, High Performance, Top Performance — show the upgrade trajectory. The selected design lands at roughly 49% savings, $42k cost.

Local archetypes

Nine representative building types — for St. John's today, more cities to come.

Each city's archetypes are tuned to the buildings residents actually live in. For St. John's, that means three categories covering single-family detached, attached multi-unit, and apartment buildings.

Detached houses

  • Small Detached House

    ~1,000 sq ft · basement

  • Pre-fab Modular House

    ~1,000 sq ft · slab on grade

  • Medium Detached House

    ~1,500 sq ft · basement

  • Large Detached House

    ~2,000 sq ft · basement

Multi-unit houses

  • Tri- and Fourplex

    ~1,000 sq ft / unit · basement

  • Townhouse, End Unit

    ~1,400 sq ft · basement

  • Townhouse, Middle Unit

    ~1,400 sq ft · basement

Apartment buildings

  • Small Apartment Building

    ~1,400 sq ft / unit · basement

  • Medium Apartment Building

    ~1,000 sq ft / unit · basement

Read the results carefully

What the results do — and don't — tell you.

The Explorer is best used to compare options, understand trends in your climate, and support early-stage conversations. It is not a substitute for project-specific engineering work.

Use it to

  • Compare design choices side by side
  • Understand performance trends in your climate
  • Test envelope, heating, and water-heating trade-offs
  • Quantify the rough impact of common upgrades
  • Support early-stage planning conversations

Don't use it for

  • Permit submissions or code-compliance reports
  • Final engineering or construction specifications
  • Rebate applications without professional review
  • Predicting exact performance for a specific address
  • Decisions a qualified energy advisor should make
A reference-comparison panel from the visualizer showing six side-by-side red/green bar charts — Energy Consumption, Capital Cost, Energy Intensity (EUI / TEDI / MEUI), System Sizes, Emissions, and Energy Savings — comparing the user's selection against a Standard Home of the same archetype.

When to get professional advice

BuildEnergy.ca is for public education, early-stage planning, and design comparison. For project-specific recommendations, consult a qualified energy advisor, engineer, architect, contractor, or municipal building official.

For municipalities

Bring BuildEnergy.ca to your city

We build city-specific instances of the platform for Canadian municipalities. St. John's is live today — yours could be next.

Talk to Dr EnergiHow a city instance works