The Building Enclosure and the Four Control Layers Understanding of the building enclosure and the four control layers that make up the building enclosure is vital to understanding how the building enclosure will perform Enclosure The building enclosure is what separates the inside environment from the outside ‘natural’ environment. This includes everything from the paint on the outside of …
Passive House social housing at no extra cost – that’s the plan for Melbourne project
Recently came across the great article on Passive House social housing planned at no extra cost in Melbourne, Australia from early last year. I’m looking forward to hearing about this project and some of the large commercial projects in Australia at the next South Pacific Passive House Conference in February 2019 in Wellington. We’ve two multi-family projects in NZ that …
SE Certification Platform Checklist
Sustainable Engineering Ltd. provides client certification resources to help them with their certification process. The attached link to the PDF is a list of all the different entries of the Passive House Certification Platform to enable you to go through and just check off and make sure you’ve made each of these entries to make the certification process easier and …
Calling All Passive House Builders
I’m helping to set up a session of hands on builders to each speak for 5 minutes at the next Passive House Conference in Wellington (9th and 10th of February). The concept is to have some real hands on discussion from folks actually building Certified Passive Houses rather than all the talks being from design folks. You would all be speaking together …
20 September 2018 Passivhaus is affordable and effective, why isn’t it legislated?
This well written article reminds us that buildings in Australia (and NZ as well) are a large contribution to our CO2 emissions and we have the skills needed to significantly reduce that and at the same time save occupants on their energy bills with increased comfort. So if we have the skills and everyone benefits when we build Passive House …
14 June 2018 BRANZ Transition to Low Carbon Built Environment by 2050
I was a bit disappointed reading this brief workshop report as the conclusions are very cautious. It started strong by reviewed some epic keynote points like ice free summers at the North Pole by 2030 (12 years away by my math) and the need for negative carbon emissions to stay below 2 degrees increase. Then went on to how industry …
06 September 2018 David Hargreaves argues that what is missing from the Government’s Healthy Homes initiative is a long-term plan to modernise all of New Zealand’s housing stock
This article is great. The author actually gets the obvious limitations built into this government act. Even if NZ chose the top option of all those offered we wouldn’t have guaranteed warm healthy homes. They would be better but not much better … unless someone pays the tenants (large) heating bill. One issue I think is missing is that new …
04 September 2018 SunLive: Healthy Homes Proposals Made Public
I’m glad to see that this is finally out for public comment. Although this article focuses on Rental Housing I see these issues with owner occupied and brand new housing as well; And yes these are new homes built to meet NZ Building Code. The high performance building industry needs to comment as a whole on what will actually fix …
04 September 2018 Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment: Healthy Homes Standards Consultation
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 …