The discussion document is great and offers several options but in my brief look thus far, none of the options considered would make 99% of rentals warm healthy homes. The options are focused on small low cost interventions that will improve the situation. That makes sense for MBIE and the politics of the situation but without examining what would actually fix the problem – as in solved – some lock-in is inevitable.
An example of lock-in is when NZ landlords as a whole have improved the roof insulation part way to the final level required for a warm healthy home but not all the way. They have likely achieved much of the savings and health benefits of additional roof insulation but there is still opportunity left. However as most of the cost savings and health improvements have already been realized there is less available to ‘pay for’ the final upgrades to achieve optimal cost savings and health benefits.
We’ll post our comments here once we’ve run through the document and spent some time on it. At the moment I’ll only say I think the ventilation section is VERY much inadequate and can be made adequate for nearly the same costs simply by changing how the extract fans are selected and wired.
To help organize your thinking we’ve created the following table summarizing most of the questions/options explored.
Table summary of options considered by MBIE Healthy Homes Standards discussion document. Table by Sustainable Engineering Ltd. we’re engineers not typists so check for typos.
Read more on this link.
You can request a hard copy of the Discussion Document by sending your name and postal address to: Healthyhomes@mbie.govt.nz