Home Style Green – Details, episodes & analysis

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Notes from RMBA's Constructive Industry Forum. 

This week I attended a BRANZ seminar titled 'Building for our changing climate'. Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland was the last stop on the BRANZ seminar tour of the country and it's encouraging to think that rooms of designers, builders, product suppliers, building officials and others, were interested enough in this topic to take four hours out of their week. 

A key takeaway is that we're not prepared. We're already handicapped by having insufficient standards in our building code to deal with our current climate. With the forecast being 'warmer and wetter', the situation is set to get worse.

https://homestylegreen.com/?p=5936

Camilla Novotna always knew she wanted to build her own timber house. It was just a question of when and where. Despite not having a formal architecture or building background, Camilla has now done a lot more than design her future home. Along with her sister Pavla, she has created Ecokit - a prefabricated building system offering energy homes that can be put together by anyone.

International attention on Gaobeidian is set to increase up to October 2019 when Windoor City along with Passive House Institute China will host the 23rd International Passive House Conference. I spoke to the Head of International Cooperation at Windoor City, Peter Lee recently. Among other topics, I asked Peter about the perception we have in the West of 'Made in China'. My discussion with Peter confirms my belief that Passive House coming to Asia is going to make an impact in Australia and New Zealand.

After he won the Inaugural Passive House Slam during the Heidelberg Passive House Conference in March this year, I sat down with Marius Şoflete to talk about how he's inspiring people to build better places to live. Marius has a contagious enthusiasm which he's using to make Passive House fun!

The first New Zealand Passive House was completed in 2012. Since then, about 20 more individual private houses have been Certified using the internationally recognised standard. Now, New Zealand is about to get its first Certified Passive House Cohousing project and Tim Ross has been involved almost right from the start.

Paul Jennings needed a project for his dissertation on fuel poverty in the UK when he came across some charity work funded by the then 'Greater London Council'. This was back in the 1980s. Not many people had heard of Blower Doors, but a team from the suppliers in Canada were willing to travel to the UK to train people on how Blower Doors could be used to help diagnose energy and health issues in buildings. At the 2019 Passive House Conference in Heidelberg, Paul shared some of his learning from over 30 years of airtightness testing. https://homestylegreen.com/190

Everett Norris always wanted to build his own house. As a boy, he also assumed that he’d own his own house. This sounds simple enough, but the reality is that home ownership is becoming more like Everett’s naive childhood dream for many New Zealanders. Everett now helps people achieve the dream of home ownership by teaching them how to build their own Tiny House.

Paul and Pascale have created Park Homes for people like themselves. They were first time home buyers in the New Zealand market and they wanted something that would be worthy of living in for several years. Houses built to the current code are not up to this standard and so they created the change they'd like to see.