Imagine a house that can examine the outside temperature and weather forecast before deploying the window awnings or divert excess heat coming off the rooftop solar panels to run the clothes dryer.

That house, called EcoTerra, opened Friday in Quebec, the first of Canada's 12 net-zero energy demonstration homes the public can tour to get ideas for their own abodes.

And just north of Toronto, an entire subdivision of leading-edge sustainable homes built to LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) platinum standards -- the first in Canada -- will break ground Tuesday. The 34 bungalows and two-storeys, built by Rodeo Fine Homes, will use 50 per cent less municipal water (since rain water will help irrigate gardens and flush toilets), will have 67 per cent less water going down the drain and 60 per cent less construction waste, greenhouse-gas emissions and energy consumption compared to conventionally built homes.

Strong consumer and builder interest in advanced enviro-friendly homes has brought the industry to the edge of a figurative hill, and Shields said government help is needed now to give the ball a push to really get momentum going to make these homes a more widespread reality across the country.

In Alberta, the "perfect storm" of conditions exists -- high energy costs, water shortages, concerns over waste disposal and municipal incentives for green homes -- to induce home builders and buyers to seriously make the most sustainable homes a large-scale reality, said Alex Joseph, executive director of EnerVision, which administers a green building program.

"I think we're only a year or two away from when we're going to have some medium-size, perhaps large-size builders looking to do this, not just on one home but on hundreds of homes," said Joseph, also innovation co-ordinator at SAIT Polytechnic, a public technical school in Calgary.

The EcoTerra home, built by Alouette Homes just west of Sherbrooke, Que., has hundreds of monitoring devices throughout to help track water consumption, indoor air quality, electricity use at different times of the day, heat loss from the attic down to the basement, effects of passive solar heat in different rooms, outside and inside temperatures, wind velocity and more.

As with the 11 other demonstration homes, EcoTerra will be open for public viewing for six to nine months before being sold to a family and monitored for two years, to see how all the systems perform.

"It's exciting -- it's very much a living laboratory for the next two years," said Alouette president Bradley Berneche.