Assessing Thermal Resilience in Canadian Housing: A Comparative Study of a Housing Archetype Across Three Climate Zones

The surge in climate change induced extreme weather events, including heat waves, winter storms, floods, and extreme cold, poses a critical challenge to the habitability of buildings. Such events may result in power outages and physical damages to the built environment. Therefore, the building research community is actively investigating ways to bolster buildings’ resilience in the face of these extremes. Despite this, thermal resilience, a crucial aspect of building design, often remains overlooked. Thermal resilience refers to a building’s ability to remain thermally habitable during extreme weather events. Hence, this study evaluates the thermal resilience of a Canadian housing archetype, designed by Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) for prescriptive code requirements, across distinct climate zones: Zone 4 in Vancouver, Zone 6 in Ottawa, and Zone 7A in Edmonton. Building performance simulation (BPS) EnergyPlus was used for simulating the housing archetype in each climate zone. The simulation considered the absence of active cooling and heating systems. Subsequently, the analysis focused on operative indoor air temperature ranges to calculate the thermal autonomy (TA) of the housing archetype. Based on the simulation results the TA was reported to be 0.76 in Vancouver, 0.6 in Ottawa, and 0.77 in Edmonton which demonstrates a decent level of thermal resilience under typical meteorological weather data (TMY). However, to capture the actual thermal behaviour of these housing archetypes, future studies must consider the use of projected weather data that accounts for the climate change induced extreme weather events.