HEALTHY HOME COOPERATION

A HEALTHY HOME FOR CHRISTMAS

DAMIEN MCGILL Director of the Healthy Home Cooperation

FROM SHARING HIS KNOWLEDGE ON BUILDING COMPONENTS AND SYSTEMS, DAMIEN MCGILL FROM THE HEALTHY HOME COOPERATION NOW SHINES A LIGHT ON AN EXPERT BUSINESS THAT FOLLOWS THESE PRINCIPLES TO CREATE A HEALTHY HOME. Over the last 18 months, I've been working with eHaus. The company is an expert in building healthy homes, and I provide specialist structural and geotechnical services to them. We both rely on my knowledge of high-performance housing to ensure that the structural elements in the build don't compromise the thermal envelope through thermal bridging, for example. eHaus is based in Whanganui, with local licensees throughout New Zealand. The company’s point of difference is that every home is energy-modelled to create lowenergy, high-performing homes. They offer a Euro series, designed to meet Passive House standards and a more flexible Pacific series, for those wanting high performance on a tighter budget.

Ensuring that every home is energy modelled while it’s still on the designer's drawing table means changes can be made to ensure maximum performance. I’m fairly confident that no other design and build business in New Zealand does this, at least not to the volume that eHaus builds, and certainly not in-house.

“It is incredible to us, that a fourbedroom house can be heated in a Southern Hemisphere August to September for $20!!” Helena

By using software to assess the combined characteristics of the building components and systems that go into every eHaus, informed, educated price benefit decisions can be made around items like increasing insulation levels or upgrading to triple-glazed windows.

Voluntary building standards such as Passive House have strict energy targets and criteria that must be met. These targets can only be confirmed as met by software modelling. The government’s Building for Climate Change legislation also has targets for energy use to reduce carbon emissions. Energy modelling will be the most costeffective way of meeting these targets when they become law.

What is not measured cannot be quantified, so energy modelling should be a fundamental part of every healthy home design.

The extra care and detail put into the design and construction of every eHaus means that I’ll be writing to Santa this year to ask if he’ll please put one in my Christmas stocking.