The Guide to Energy Efficient Home Design will help you make better informed decisions on how your home should be designed and built for greater comfort and how your choices of materials will impact on your family’s health and wellbeing.
With this information you too can work towards decreasing global warming, greenhouse gasses and associated pollutions, helping to make this a cleaner, better environment for our children as well as the fragile ecosystem that sustains us all.
The Guide can be purchased in two ways:
- download from this website in PDF format – cost: AU$5.00(download service unavailable – back online soon)
- printed copy posted to you – cost: AU$5.00 + AU$1.00 postage
Below are two excerpts from the Guide, demonstrating both the depth of the technical research and the practical nature of the advice provided.
Comfort and energy efficiency are one and the same
An energy efficient home is a comfortable home and simply uses energy efficiently to achieve a level of comfort. Generally speaking, we Australians are most comfortable in a temperature range between 22 and 27 degrees Celsius.
A correctly designed and built house will predominantly stay within a temperature range that is beneficial to our comfort, therefore our demand on energy to power appliances to either heat or cool the home are significantly reduced.
Many years ago a scientist was intrigued at the variances in comfort / energy demand, his name is Holger Willrath B.Sc. (Hon), Dip.Ed., M.App. Sc., PhD. an environmentalist who devised a less cumbersome evaluation process to calculate energy usage of a dwelling by devising BERS – the Building Energy Rating System.
The BERS program is arguably the most accurate in evaluating a building’s energy rating prior to building, so that changes can be made to address weak points.
The BERS program takes into consideration temperature data, the sun’s path; it factors in wall areas facing East and West, window size and composition, the size of eaves, insulation in walls and roof cavity, composition of walls and roofing material, even the colour of the house contributes to the evaluation.
Australia is #1 Energy Consumer
Australians have a high dependence on coal generated electricity, made easier because we have our own coal reserves; however, the down side is greenhouse gasses contribute to global warming plus we also sell coal to other polluting countries.
By designing energy efficiency into your home, you can look forward to a reduction in electricity costs of a minimum of 35% a year.
Conventional electric hot water heater on a continuous tariff are responsible for about a third of greenhouse gas emissions, however, using solar hot water can result in up to a 73% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and cutting about 30% off your electricity bill.
Solar hot water systems have a choice of electric or gas back-up, however, before choosing gas, you should factor in pollution from transporting gas from the source to you, the end consumer, via a truck as it may well negate any savings of using gas.
Governments are largely ineffective due to vested interests; in 2006, the Federal Government slashed the CSIRO’s alternative energy research funding to focus on the already proven world polluter, coal power and there is no such thing as ‘clean coal’; it’s like saying smoking cigarettes with 7mg of nicotine & tar is better than 8mg.
The Guide can be purchased in two ways:
- download from this website in PDF format – cost: AU$5.00(download service unavailable – back online soon)
- printed copy posted to you – cost: AU$5.00 + AU$1.00 postage