A 92-unit co-operative's
fully funded deep retrofit.
Maurice Coulter Housing Co-operative — an eight-storey tower and eighteen attached townhomes. Quwa carried the project from ASHRAE Level 3 audit through secured grant funding, engineering design, contract administration and on-site construction management to a completed, occupied ten-measure retrofit. Then did the controls project the audit had flagged, on its own funding stream.
- Client
- Maurice Coulter Housing Co‑operative
- Location
- 170–176 John Garland Blvd, Etobicoke
- Building
- 8-storey, 92-unit tower + 18 townhomes
- Sector
- Multi-residential, co-operative
- Funding
- CMHC Greener Affordable Housing · IESO Save on Energy · Enbridge
- CMHC project
- 28115434
- Measures
- 10 of 10 delivered
Nine service lines on one building, delivered by one team. The engineer who found the make-up air units running around the clock is the engineer who specified their replacement controls and stood in the mechanical room when they were commissioned.
Original-era
systems, no
central control.
Gas-fired heating and hot water, incandescent lighting, dated windows, and no centralised way to control any of it. An ASHRAE Level 3 audit, energy model, building condition assessment and environmental site assessment confirmed what the utility bills only hinted at.
| System | Condition found |
|---|---|
| Controls | No central building automation system anywhere on site. Rooftop make-up air units MUA-1 and MUA-2 ran 24/7, with no identified thermostat or schedule control, regardless of occupancy or outdoor conditions. |
| Domestic hot water | Two gas-fired water heaters at roughly 80% efficiency, at the end of practical service life. |
| Space heating | Ageing gas furnaces rated around 78% efficiency and prone to breakdown. |
| Envelope | Single and double-glazed windows at U-0.65, with air infiltration measured at 0.3 ACH. |
| Lighting | Incandescent throughout — 45–60 W interior fixtures and 100 W exterior wall sconces. |
| Roof | Approximately 3,800 ft² of unused roof area, suitable for a 56 kW solar PV array. |
Two findings here became separate projects. The controls gap was severe enough to warrant its own funding stream and delivery track, described further down this page. The roof area became one of the ten measures.
The audit was
the application.
Those findings became the technical case behind the co-operative's Canada Greener Affordable Housing submission to CMHC. Our part was translating the audit findings and the energy model's projected savings into the format CMHC's programme scores, and then standing behind the numbers through CMHC's own review.
CMHC approved $2.0M in Greener Affordable Housing grant funding in 2025, covering the ten-measure programme.
LED, banked
before the
grant landed.
Rather than wait on the funding decision, we delivered a standalone complex-wide LED retrofit in 2024, supported by IESO Save on Energy incentives. A two-year payback the co-operative was already collecting before CMHC had ruled on the main application.
Sequencing matters on funded work. A measure that pays for itself does not need to wait for a grant that might not arrive, and a co-op that has already seen one project delivered is a different client in the second conversation.
Ten measures,
sized against
the model.
Full drawings, specifications and equipment schedules a contractor could bid and build from, with every measure sized and sequenced against the energy model rather than against a rule of thumb. All ten were costed against an independent Class B estimate before the funding application went in.
| Measure | Est. annual electricity saving |
|---|---|
| Triple-glazed windows | 18,000 kWh |
| Heat pump retrofit | 25,000 kWh |
| Electric furnaces | 15,000 kWh |
| 56 kW solar PV array | 20,000 kWh |
| Electric water heaters | 9,200 kWh |
| Air infiltration sealing | 12,000 kWh |
| Low-flow plumbing | 3,000 kWh |
| Appliance upgrades | 7,500 kWh |
| LED lighting | 30,353 kWh |
| Plug load management | 2,246 kWh |
On simple payback alone a retrofit at this depth does not happen, and no honest analysis would say otherwise — the utility savings are real but they are nowhere near the capital. What makes it work is that the grant covers the capital, and what the co-operative buys with it is thirty additional years of economic life on a building that was heading toward a reserve-fund problem, a 91.6% cut in emissions, a 72% cut in energy, and units that are comfortable.
Deep retrofits in affordable housing are grant economics, not payback economics. Presenting them any other way is how a co-op board ends up disappointed by a project that did exactly what it was supposed to.
Which is why the work that wins the grant is the work that matters: the audit, the model and the application are what turn a building that cannot afford a retrofit into one that has already had it.
The figures above are the design package's estimated annual electricity saving per measure. They do not capture the gas displaced by the electrification measures, which is where most of the 91.6% GHG reduction comes from. Post-occupancy verified savings will be reported under IPMVP against a weather-adjusted baseline. Project costs are commercially confidential and are not published.
Ten measures,
occupied
building.
Construction ran under our contract administration — the layer that keeps a CMHC-funded retrofit both buildable and auditable, since every dollar of the grant has to trace to a completed, verified scope of work.
On site the role shifts from author of the design to steward of its execution: sequencing ten distinct measures across an occupied 92-unit tower and eighteen townhomes without displacing residents, resolving field conditions against the design package in real time, and closing out each measure against the shop drawing log and deficiency list.
One screen,
shared with
the co-op.
The programme runs on Q-PM, our own platform, rather than on a patchwork of spreadsheets and site notes. The co-operative's board and our project team read the same field-reconciled view: scope completion unit by unit, a shop drawing register routing submittals through review, a live deficiency log, the schedule, and a finance module reconciling the construction contract against invoices, certificates and what remains.
A building automation
system, from
nothing.
The controls gap flagged in the 2024 audit was too significant to leave as a line item in a future study. We initiated a dedicated BAS retrofit directly from that finding, brought in our controls partner from day one, and carried it through design, Enbridge funding approval, installation and commissioning as one continuous effort. The building had never had a BAS.
- No central BAS serving the mechanical systems — the building had never had one
- Everything run manually on site, with no remote visibility into the HVAC plant
- MUA-1 and MUA-2 operating 24/7, with no thermostat control
- No centralised trending or alarm interface: a problem surfaced only when somebody walked the mechanical room and noticed it
- Central interface with live system-level graphics, viewable remotely from off site
- Scheduled variable-speed control on both make-up air units, removing the energy that fixed 24/7 operation wasted
- Remote monitoring putting real control of the plant in the operator's hands
- Trend, alarm and audit history across heating, DHW and both MUAs, with notifications that flag drift before it becomes failure
Readings taken at commissioning. Before this project none of these numbers existed anywhere except on a gauge somebody had to walk to.
Two projects,
two funders,
one building.
The mechanical and envelope retrofit went to CMHC because that is the programme that funds deep retrofits in affordable housing. The controls project went to Enbridge because that is the programme that funds gas-side controls work. Splitting them was not administrative convenience — it was the only way both got funded.
Knowing which programme scores which measure is a large part of what an audit is actually for.
Case study prepared September 2026. Figures reflect project data as reported at the time of writing; energy and GHG reductions are modelled design-stage projections. Post-occupancy savings will be verified under IPMVP.
Thirty minutes, with the engineer who would run the work.
No cost and no obligation. Bring twelve months of utility bills if you have them — that alone is usually enough to say whether a building has a capital problem or a controls problem.