136 Isabella St.—ETFO

  • 2014

  • Bird Construction

  • 84

  • 450 ft

  • 80,000 sqft

  • Drilled under new construction

The Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario (ETFO) headquarters, located at 136 Isabella St. in Toronto, was the cities first purpose-built LEED Platinum building in the City. Despite zoning hurdles, and a very tight construction timeline, the Owner wanted to exceed the highest environmental standards at the time. This objective required innovation in the buildings energy systems, opening a path for a geo-exchange system that wouldn’t impact the critical construction path of the build. By drilling the underground boreholes beneath the building allowed other trades to continue their work concurrently with the installation of the geo-exchange infrastructure.

ETFO aerial
EFTO rendering

New ETFO office sets bar for sustainability

Ontario teachers earn top marks with Toronto’s first purpose-built LEED Platinum building

March 4, 2014
By Michelle Ervin

A first in geothermal heating and cooling

ETFO first vice-president Susan Swackhammer explains that the project was on a tight deadline, as they had to ensure that the new building was ready for occupancy by the time the ETFO’s then lease at the corner of Dundas Street West and University Avenue expired. This prompted a novel approach to the building’s geothermal heating and cooling.

Sosio Porretta, project director at Bird Construction, says that normally, drilling the 84, 450-metre-deep holes for the geo-exchange installation would require 30 to 40 feet of shaft. This would have added anywhere from two to four months to the front end of construction.

Instead, using new technology, the holes at the ETFO building were drilled from the underground parking structure after much of the building had been constructed. This enabled other trades to work concurrently with the installation of the geo-exchange.

The implications of the successful application of this new technology, which was developed by Vancouver’s Fenix Energy, may be significant.

“It opens up (geothermal installations) to existing buildings, if they’re able to somehow get into low areas, whether existing office buildings or residential buildings, they can drill these things just like we did, even though the building was up and other work was going on,” Porretta says.

In fact, Fenix Energy developed and designed its low-head room drilling solution to be able to retrofit high-rise commercial real estate with geothermal installations, says Adrian Ryan, the company’s co-founder and vice-president of engineering.

“It’s a closed-loop system that enables us to get down into the building and keep it reasonably clean — it’s not white-lab-coat clean, but we’re not creating a mud pool in the basement,” he says.

The ETFO’s new office aims to reduce energy usage by at least 60 per cent over the Model National Energy Code for Buildings. But if KPMB’s previous work at the LEED Platinum-certified Manitoba Hydro Place is any precedent, the ETFO office can expect to exceed that target.

Excerpt from a REMI Network article by Michelle Ervin.
Michelle Ervin is the editor of Canadian Facility Management & Design.