“House supply is pretty complicated” “The housing market is designed to maximise profit, not to maximise the number of houses built.” This was a really fun interview and folks continue to be surprised that the physics of moisture and thermal modeling or hygrothermal modeling is more complicated that rocket propulsion systems. Trust me it is. Mostly because every building is …
14 February 2019 The Fifth Estate’s Nick Lane: The case for passive homes as a national standard
“The energy policies and building standards that govern our homes need to keep us comfortable and limit global warming. Passive house, a rigorous building standard for ultra-low energy buildings, ticks these boxes.” “Did you know that more people die in their homes from heat stress than from any other natural disaster in Australia?” “Accounting for 36 per cent of global …
07 February 2019 RNZ: Passive houses: warm, dry and sustainable, so why not more?
“If you just take Passive House technologies and just smack (them) into a building without doing modeling and knowing how it’s going to work you can actually cause some problems” “You don’t waste the energy by throwing it out the windows but just opening windows or exhaust fans you actually can recover it by moving it through the heat exchanger.” …
04 Feb 2019 Pure Design’s Grant Watson: The Minimum Standard
“For those who don’t know, the New Zealand Building Code is the minimum standard for a new building in New Zealand. Just read that again slowly….”the…..min…i…mum…standard”!” “The true answer is stick to the basic fundamentals and buy the best basic fundamentals you can to build your new house. Use well-conceived and constructed design and detail, get the building built by …
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31 January 2019 Consumer’s James le Page: Fixing the New Zealand Building Code
“Each newly built house that that only just meets our meagre Building Code potentially leaves the new and successive owners living in uncomfortable, unhealthy conditions. “ “Having proper ventilation is essential to creating a healthy home. Removing moisture-laden air improves air quality, making the home healthier and easier to heat. Our older pre-1990s homes are full of gaps and are …
30 January 2019 Wellington. Scoop: Overheating in your new home – yes you should check
High performance homes are designed to use the least amount of energy possible to keep the occupants comfortable and healthy. We carefully select the windows their shading and details of how they are installed down to the specific coatings on the glass. This produces homes that use almost no heating but in the summer time do not overheat excessively. Unfortunately, …
29 January 2019 Scoop: Insulation boost means more warm dry homes
Good to see after all the research that has been done about poor quality of housing impacts on health that the government is up to speed. Now we need to: 1. at least build the new stock so it is healthy as well and, 2. change the building code so new homes are designed and proven to be warm healthy …
29 January 2019 Boston Green Ribbon Commission’s Miriam Wasser: Boston aims to be carbon-free by 2050. Here are 5 takeaways from a new report

NZ is in the lucky position to already have a significant ~80% of our energy from renewables. Given that and lacking a full engineering analysis city-by-city report we can tell our NZ cities to focus on these three things: 1. Maximum energy efficiency in buildings – we don’t have to call it Passive House (or Passivhaus) but it will look …