You wouldn’t buy a new car without taking it for a test drive. Yet, people regularly spend millions of dollars on new builds or major retrofits based purely on gut instinct. We’ve introduced the Performance Snapshot to change that. It’s an early-stage digital energy model that lets us test drive your home’s thermal comfort and running costs long before you break ground. The bottom line is that it gives you the understanding and confidence to make rational choices about where to actually invest your money.
The short answer to why you need this is that rules of thumb simply don’t work. Every site is unique and complex. We once modeled a Wellington building, and the performance model forced us to realize it needed Queenstown-levels of insulation just because it was heavily shadowed by a neighboring four-story block. By building a simplified 3D model of your building and local site shading, we replace unreliable guesswork with trusted data.
This is especially crucial for retrofits and highly glazed architectural homes. If you tighten up an older house and add insulation without planning for proper mechanical ventilation, you can inadvertently make the building damp and a lot worse than when you started. For architects designing the glass box that the client saw in a magazine, this quick, inexpensive snapshot reveals if you’ve accidentally designed a solar oven. It allows for early, cost-effective tweaks like adding wide verandas or adjusting the glazing ratio before the design is locked in and expensive mistakes are made.
The real value comes from the informed discussion with a building science expert that follows the modeling. Designed to be fast and affordable, the investment for a Performance Snapshot on a simple building starts at $1,800 NZD + GST. This is just one of three starting options we offer, sitting alongside our more detailed Performance Blueprint and our top-tier Premium Performance Report. You choose the entry point that best fits your project, and from there, we ideally move into the detailed energy analysis and Passive House certification required to ensure your home performs in the real world.