Innovative, Energy Efficient Housing Needed Urgently


I currently organize Green Drinks for Invercargill, this is an apolitical social group that meets monthly in a local cafe. This was originally started by Invercargill Transition Towns as a way of connecting all those who share similar green ideals, aspirations and lifestyles. We often invite people with expertise in a given area or have a particular theme, but mostly we just enjoy talking to like minded people about topical issues or life in general.

I have decided to have energy saving houses as a theme this week as many people I know are building new homes and trying to make them as energy efficient as possible. My youngest sister and her husband have relocated and refurbished a house onto a few hectares of land and will be off the grid and largely self sufficient. They wanted to install a composting toilet and recycle all their grey water but the costs of local body compliance has been huge and they have had to compromise on many of their ideas that would have worked had they not been so expensive to progress.

I have tried to make my own early 30s bungalow more energy efficient and we have installed solar water heating and have underfloor and above ceiling insulation. I found the paperwork and compliance costs for the water heating excessive and can understand why solar heating hasn't got much support for those wishing to retrofit. I also felt rather discouraged when I completed a Homestar energy efficiency survey of our house only to discover that, after all that we had done, we still only scored a 2 out of 10. If we only got a 2 then many homes in Invercargill must be 1 or 0, we have a long way to go to bring our housing up to anything like a reasonable standard.

The government has no commitment to improving the quality of New Zealand housing and we have a huge shortfall of low cost, quality homes in Auckland and Christchurch especially. I'm sure, given the quality of our architects and designers we could come up with some great housing solutions, our students even got a third placing in a eco home design competition in the US recently. Our housing is generally overpriced, inefficient and poorly designed and I thought the links and images below may help to show what we could be doing:




Comments

Draco TB said…
What needs to be done is to make Passive House standards mandatory for new buildings. Throw in mandatory minimums for solar water heating and power generation and we'd go a long way to getting sustainable housing.
Dave Kennedy said…
Agree, Draco, we also need to just get on with building heaps of houses built to those standards around the size of the old state houses. Most of the new houses being built to day are inefficient because they are just too big and unaffordable.
I'm sorry to hear that the government has little to no interaction with real estate and home security assurance and efficiency, but the homes do look a little cozy, even if that is found offensive. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to live in a tiny cottage in Australia, away from the American life.

-Sharone Tal
energyces said…
Nice effort to make energy efficient homes. I liked this blog so much. If you are interested to know about best
energy saving solutions
then you can also consult energy efficiency consultancy of energy CES for most effective results.

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