This bill is about tax treatments; to encourage property owners with low cost rentals to invest in energy efficiency – especially the building fabric. But from my perspective the point from this article is how horrible split incentives are. We have this same split incentive issue in NZ. The split where landlords pay for the building and capital upgrades but …
I see mouldy houses quite a bit in my work but this Spinoff article still shocks me with the impacts on occupants. Most of the bad buildings in this article are in Wellington, because that’s where the writer is located, but I’ve seen even worse examples in Auckland and Christchurch. The statistics are pretty grim with over 40,000 children hospitalized …
Sustainable Engineering is putting together a page on all of the New Zealand Certified Passive House Projects. We will start with projects we have certified ourselves and then add in all of the remaining ones certified by others. The intent is to put up the sort of data that we ourselves tend to want to know about projects; like floor …
This past March at the Passive House Conference in Munich, Germany, I had the opportunity to meet with Dieter Herz of Herz and Lang. One of the founding members of a very experienced & prestigious passive house design consulting firm in Europe. During our discussion and later in his presentation, I was a bit surprised at the level of emphasis he …
“Heat deaths are preventable. No more excuses: we need better regulation and guidance to stop unsafe housing being built” If you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail. If you do not model and understand how a building is going to perform. To predict overheating, to understand it, and fix it before it is built. Then don’t be surprised …
This article from the Otago Daily Times is pretty shocking. It’s amazing to feel the scale of the problem when you think about one-third of all the hospital missions due to poor quality housing. If it is even close to accurate that’s an outrageous amount of money. Think how much we save on health care and misery as a society …
“It is feasible for people in government to ensure the next generation of children has more choice.Building standards need an overhaul. We are lagging behind other similar countries.Mr Twyford should be informed by open source energy-efficient housing systems like the passive house standard.It is a system that lends itself to prefabrication on a large scale, and has been used in …
In this article, Clare Parry from the Australian Passive House Association points out how it’s really a simplicity introduced by Passive House that allows these homes to easily meet zero-energy by focusing on the basics of the envelope. “The Passive House standard is a proven methodology for achieving homes that have minimal operational energy requirements and provide a high standard …
I think the epic quote from this article could be paraphrased as “Your brand new home might still be cold, damp, and bad for your health”. I think that’s a pretty epic statement – and unfortunately accurate. You just bought a brand new home and a few months later there is mould and the power bill is actually a bit …
