BUILT GREEN® programs align with, support, and extend beyond energy code (9.36) and Energy Tier Code. These programs support builders in achieving code—and provide a competitive advantage beyond energy. The differentiator originally associated with energy alone is gone (beyond cases of exceptionally high performance).
Building Code: Standardized Energy Performance
By 2024, National Energy Tier Code adoption is planned for most jurisdictions across the country, and builders need to be ready. Tier Code has five energy improvement tiers affecting overall space and DHW energy performance as well as envelope performance. Compliance is achieved through a performance or a prescriptive route, but minimum energy efficiency is required: a base level that all builders must achieve. All of this towards Canada’s goal of achieving Net Zero Energy Ready (NZER) buildings by 2030.
Built Green provides performance-based pathways to enable improvements—in energy and across seven other critical aspects of sustainability, addressing carbon, air quality, water, waste, wellness, durability, and more. Moreover, the programs consider disaster preparedness: another way to future-proof homes.
Guiding You through Building Code Requirements: We Can Help
Our program checklists provide practical pathways to achieve increased energy efficiency—and go beyond base-level code for a more holistic approach to sustainable building practices. This includes numerous choices and the flexibility to choose the direction that suits your budget and customer, while meeting code requirements.
Built Green’s programs include builder support—from free webinars focused on each section of our programs, to program guides, on-demand training options, access to industry professionals, and more. We can work with you, alongside your Energy Advisor / Engineer, to ensure you meet requirements.
Meanwhile, we offer affordable membership and certification. And we work to keep our programs straightforward and support our community in building better.
Energy Code: One Piece of Our Programs + Your Pathway to a Competitive Advantage
Our third-party certification programs take a holistic approach to green building, with eight pillars of sustainability: Energy & Envelope, Materials & Methods, Indoor Air Quality, Ventilation, Waste Management, Water Conservation, Occupant Wellness, and Business Practices. Building code fits into just one of these sections, and it refers to the minimum requirement that everyone must do. We can help you reach targets and address sustainability beyond energy—beyond status quo.
Built Green’s approach recognizes the house as a system: an interconnected sum of its parts, which affect each other and contribute to the occupant’s quality of life and environmental impact. It’s within this holistic approach and third-party verification, that you can find that important differentiator: your competitive advantage.
Why Built Green?
Participation is about having support in meeting your code requirements and going past these requirements. It’s about you being a progressive builder who’s building more sustainably, with a label to verify these gains. It’s about being a builder who stays ahead of building code and does more than what’s required—a builder who goes beyond status quo.
BUILT GREEN® programs are affordable, straightforward, and third-party certified—designed to be achievable, rigorous and flexible, with choices on how to reach your sustainability goals. They’re accessible to builders looking for a credible method to improve upon and verify their builds’ green features and performance.
Informed by industry professionals—builders, renovators, developers, restorers, engineers, Energy Advisors, sustainability consultants, and more—the programs are built to enable achievable pathways to incremental improvement; this is represented in our certification levels: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and Net Zero Energy+, each requiring improvement in energy performance alongside the other seven sustainability sections.
Learn more about how to participate.