Australia won't meet net zero goals without a national approach to home thermal efficiency: report
Australia won't meet net zero goals without a national approach to home thermal efficiency: report
Improving the thermal performance in Australian homes is an urgent priority to ease cost of living pressures, improve wellbeing and reduce energy consumption and emissions, experts say.
An RMIT University-led report, commissioned by RACE for 2030, assessed current challenges related to home thermal efficiency improvements.
The report recommends several priorities to help Australia reach its goal of net zero by 2050, such as improving how we build new homes and how households prioritise and undertake thermal upgrading of their homes.
While the introduction of the new seven-star energy efficiency building standards is a necessary step to improve new homes, Rajagopalan said more needs to be done during the design and construction stage of building to ensure each home is thermally efficient.
A potential solution was creating a "One-stop shop" on how to embark on retrofitting your home and the benefits of a thermally efficient home from verified sources.
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Bruh make rentals have mandatory insulation or something, we spend 100kwh a day in heating the house to 18C with a reverse cycle heat pump system
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this is absolutely needed. a minimum viable energy efficiency standard in order to lease to renters. if it doesn’t meet the minimum standards sell it to someone who will upgrade it or build a new property
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100% agree
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We need performance based standards not fluffy star rating systems. Or at least tie stars to a performance standard.
I.e. kW power required to keep building at habitable temperature in given conditions. +Blower door test to prove air tightness standards met.
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Isn't that sort of what NatHERS already does? It's measured in theoretical terms but it at least seems to estimate how much energy would be required for regulating temperature. Among many other things, it includes a section where it reports the "thermal performance" of both heating and cooling (separately) in terms of MJ/m^2.
As a side note, a 2015 Qld Govt report stated:
In 2009 it was anticipated that the move to 6-star housing would generally increase building costs by around 1.25 per cent on average depending on the home’s design, size and location
It also noted that this would result in cheaper ongoing energy costs, but I wonder if some sort of up-front rebate or stamp duty discount or something could help incentivise building at 6 or 7 stars NatHERS.
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They called them 'Thermal Assessors' in the article.
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We moved into a relatively new house in Jan, we didn't think anything needed doing. We've found out terribly thermally inefficient. Since moving in we've installed roof heat extractor, ceiling insulation, garage door insulation and we're thinking about getting the windows tinted before summer.
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I’m intrigued about insulating garage door, I didn’t know that was possible. Did it make the temperature more stable in winter & summer in the garage? Did it have an impact to temperature inside your house?
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We've done it to a double wide panel door facing west, the garage was sweltering in summer and lost a lot of heat in winter. The laundry was in there, so it got used a fair bit.
The insulation was styrofoam panels that wedged into each of the panels of the door. Seemed to help a bit in summer, but I also should've added brushes to the sides to close the gap on either side.
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Does the tint cut the heat coming through?
Our old place we put 5 extractors on with closable vents in each room because the roof was a skillion and couldn't clear it with 1 or 2. Made a big difference in Summer.
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would love to see a speedy rollout and approach to this but that feels like i’m asking too much
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Pink batts! The horror!
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Yeah this has been a bit of a passion of mine for a while.
We've got hydronic heating and I've always thought it would make a great way to move sustainable heat energy around the home.
A while ago I was looking into how to make wood powered but then I read about sand batteries and started doing the calculations on how much sand and heat energy we'd need to store a useable amount of heat to keep us warm in winter in Melbourne.
Turns out the answer is a fuckload. We've got a 6 star house that we built ourselves 9 years ago. we got double glazing and the high range r2.7 wall insulation and r5 or 6 in the ceiling. Its a two story house with approximately 223m2 of wall (including windows) and 106m2 of ceiling.
I calculated approximately (and didn't bother including windows so would actually be much higher) that we were in fact heating the whole neighborhood
At 7c ambient temperature, and if we want the house at 22c, we were bleeding about 27670 BTUs, another way of putting it is we'd need about 8kw of energy per hour to maintain the temperature.
In America and Europe they are building walls with an R value of 13 or 14. Here a 90mm stud wall with cement sheet weather boards, R2.7 insulation and 10mm plaster comes in at about r2.92
We'll never be able to generate enough renewable heat if we just let it all go so easily.
Unfortunately, there is no easy retrofit fix. The best I've been able to come up with is building a second stud wall around the perimeter of the house to create some airgap but that has it's own issues.
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But reaching that goal would hurt profits...