New Zealand window manufacturers took out two of the window awards at the PHI conference in China last year. Several years ago PH1NZ nearly won first place in the residential architecture awards. Time for a New Zealand architecture firm to step up and win first place. I can think of several certified homes in NZ that I’d pick. Certified Passive House …
Why am I sounding overjoyed at this simple text from BRANZ? The backstory goes a long way back. In its <December 2019 Guideline https://www.branz.co.nz/guideline>, the front story is about smart vapour retarders (SVR) and how they lower the risk of mould in New Zealand wall assemblies. (There’s a story about that too, but that’s for another time.) The big …
Jason Quinn reported back from the 23rd International Passive House Conference: “Technical PH people used to talk about saving energy—but at the conference, I kept hearing about saving carbon. That’s a big shift. The conference was as technically awesome as ever but everything in China scaled up. There was the conference dinner (2000 people and a full orchestra) and the …
“A house with leaking and damaged gutters, rotting window frames, illegal stairs, a sagging and mouldy ceiling, rotting weatherboards, a rotten toilet floor and exposed electrical board have earned a stiff penalty for the landlords who rented it out.” “Landlords Ross and Sally Craigie must pay tenant Bjana Thompson $13,020.44 for breaching the Residential Tenancies Act by failing to maintain …
And putting batts between light steel framing is not a good option as discussed below. https://www.mbie.govt.nz/have-your-say/building-code-update-consultation-november-2019 The Oak Ridge National Laboratory has found that thermal bridging in a wood-framed wall lowers the effectiveness of cavity insulation by 10%, but performance drops a whopping 55% in a wall framed with steel. https://www.buildingscience.com/documents/insights/bsi-005-a-bridge-too-far “But from a hygrothermal standpoint, I can only add …
Congratulations to Joe Mercieca of Blue Eco Homes for Sapphire Passive House in the Blue Mountains and Andy Marlow of Envirotecture for the Thornleigh house. The article states that “The certification of these two buildings brings the total number of Passive House Certified buildings in Australia to 18. ” with a “a pipeline of hundreds of Passive House buildings in various …
Damp mouldy housing and early childhood hospital admissions for acute respiratory infection: a case control study Bottom line for the Wellington Region alone 1710 hospitalizations per year for children under 2 years old would be prevented if all housing were free from damp and mould!! “This paper presents the largest ever case–control study of the association between housing quality and hospital …
Yes sometimes even sick folks living in cold homes don’t realize how it impacts their health. “Two weeks ago, the temperature dropped to zero or one degrees inland where a woman with cancer was living. Her nights were a struggle, her breathing was laboured and each day she woke up exhausted. Healthy Homes chatted with her about the importance of …
1600 extra death per year 20% of serious respiratory infections prevented. Seems like warm dry healthy homes would cheaper than what we do now. Content by News Hub.
