Building better products and systems.

Building better products and systems.

I often see substitutions made on projects by builders and what happens is that the client misses out on a better preforming building because they were convinced by someone that they should settle for status quo. If the way we were building was creating better preforming buildings easily, don’t you think we would already be creating healthy comfortable and energy efficient homes?

The is a lot of confusion and curiosity around building better. Buildings are a system made up of parts. Each of those parts needs preform as expected and also affect how other parts operate. It is no different to a car, all parts need to form the solution. If we view a building as a kit set of parts, let us talk about the parts that I use in combination with each other for better buildings.

Architectural Designer New Zealand

Formance SIPS Panels

There is a great story behind Formance Sips Panels. After the Chirstchurch earthquakes Nick Hubbard and his brother William googled earthquake proof buildings and they started their SIPS panel journey. New to the construction industry they have come a long way. And these panels are made in New Zealand, so it’s a NZ Business success story.

The great thing about SIPS is that they are off site construction so can add speed to a project, which can make a project more affordable. Of course, there needs to be smart on-site management of installation to capitalise on the offsite investment. They work as the insulation, structural, airtightness and weathertightness elements for floors, walls and roof construction. Insulation and airtightness are areas that better buildings address and are areas that convention construction assume. The insulation values the panels give far exceed the insulation values we can affordably achieve with conventional stick framing and insulation stuffed voids. The thermal bridging,  this is the thermal weak spots in the wall, floor and roof elements, are designed out. Traditional construction doesn’t address any thermal bridging, in fact our stick frames and trusses often contain far more timber than they need to, meaning we are often optimistic in how we believe they are preforming. We get a compromised building straight away.

Mammoth Insulation

This is another NZ success story. A NZ family-owned business, Mammoth is polyester insulation. The factory has a recycling programme taking off cuts from site and recycles waste polyester from production back into the factory.

There are a few reasons why I love Mammoth, I used it in my own home. Firstly, this product is the only insulation product in NZ to be independently tested in situ, rather than using calculations for generic product values. And its performance exceeds those generic values. And this is why

It is friction fitted. What this means is that it is structurally stable and doesn’t sump and there are no air gaps when installed that reduce its effectiveness. Air gaps around insulation affect its effectiveness and insulation that sumps creates air gaps. It also is very dense, this an art in insulation. If you squash glass fibre insulation like Pink Batts or Bradford Gold, you compromise the insulation performance. Mammoth cannot be compressed, its structurally stable.

While its more expensive than its competitors, its actually better preforming for the same R value. This is because it has been tested in insitu. It’s important to know that product R values are not used in building performance, Element R values are, so how that insulation preforms in the element impacts on building performance. Insulation is one of those elements that is cheaper to get right from the start, and very expensive to upgrade later. Don’t regret the cheaper option, invest in the right one.

Starke Joinery

This is another NZ company that is active in the building better space. Located in Auckland, the Starke Factory are big into LEAN manufacturing which a core value in Off Site Manufacturing.

Lean manufacturing is a methodology that focuses on minimizing waste within manufacturing systems while simultaneously maximizing productivity. Waste is seen as anything that customers do not believe adds value and are not willing to pay for.

The reason I like this uPVC joinery is that its thermal performance is superior to thermally broken aluminium. To explain this, the thermal co-efficient for Aluminium is 160. That a technical number that says, an element of 1m thick solid aluminium will conduct 160 Watts of heat per 1m of thickness per degree Celsius. I know that means little to the lay person. The reason I am telling you this is to give some tangibility to the performance difference of the materials.

The thermal co-efficient value for wall insulation is around 0.035 and the same value for uPVC is 0.18. Remember 160 to 0.18.

Now there is myth that uPVC won’t stand up to NZs climate. We remember those brittle downpipes and plastic spouting on old homes. Marley Spouting and Downpipes are made of the same material as Starkes windows (in fact the waste offcuts from Starke goes to Marley) and Marley spouting and downpipes are very popular today.

The uPVC full form is unplasticized polyvinyl chloride. In simpler terms, uPVC is PVC minus the plasticizers. PVC, or polyvinyl chloride, is a synthetic plastic polymer widely used across various industries. When you skip the plasticization process, you get uPVC—a rigid, robust material with many applications

Oh, and that powder coating finish you get on Aluminium windows, which is a plastic finish.

So, lets ditch the untrue stories about uPVC and use it to build better.

There are stories of uPVC being more expensive that aluminium. That is not always the case, it really does depend on the project and design. UPVC windows needs less preforming glass to match the performance of thermally broken aluminium, so there is cost savings often to be made when comparing the same level of performance because you aren’t compensating in Starkes Windows systems with better glass because of a poor performing frame. Recent changes to minimum window performance values in our building code now means that you have to at the very least used thermally broken aluminium with a higher performance glass that its uPVC equivalent. Our Aluminium joinery now needs a plastic break between the two aluminium components of the frame.

Smart Meters from Basis.

This company is one I only recently became aware of. Made in Auckland, Basis smart meters are a game-changing smart panel that makes old-school switchboards a thing of the past.

I have taken this off their website.

The world’s first Smart Panel & App that provides unparalleled insight, control and safety for your home.

Instead of a mysterious box of wires on the wall, the Basis smart panel is a digitally connected device that provides real time insight and control over energy use in your home.

Unlike traditional electric panels, Basis Core sheds light on your energy usage, revealing power suckers, finding savings opportunities and supercharging your home’s electrical health. It's a power revolution in your pocket.

Basis Future doesn’t just save you money, it makes you money. It includes every feature from Basis Core and Basis Control, plus the ability to export power to the grid and advanced overload protection.

Check these guys out, this technology is going to be game changer for lower power bills and better energy use in our homes. It has huge potential to capitalise on power use of an energy efficient designed home and power generation of PV panels. We need to reduce the demand needed for our homes and also smartly manage the production to meet that demand.

Steibel Eltron

This is German engineering at its best. Steibel Eltron manufacturers both Mechanical Heat Recovery Ventilation Units (mHRV) and also Heat Pump Hot Water systems.

When these two systems are designed together, we get efficiencies in operation. Heat Pump HWC are far more efficient that conventional electrical HWCS. With the unsustainable resource of gas these units are an environmental friendlier solution. As we move to more homes investing in PV panels, it makes sense to use more electrical savvy appliances, so we maximise our investment in PV panels.

The mHRV side is important as this unit recycles heat in the cooler days to reduce our heating load, saving us power. It also brings in fresh air. Our windows only ventilation our spaces to minimum legal standards about 10% of the time, and part of building better is creating health homes. Our NZBC only relies on opening windows for ventilation, so need to do better than the legal minimum standard. Because this unit brings in fresh air, it means that humid internal air that has been saturated with water vapour from cooking, showering and our own breath, is removed (we breathe out 3Litres of water vapour in a day). Dry air is not only easier and cheaper to heat, but also healthier for us to breath. Humidity is a key issue with respiratory illnesses like asthma and mold growth.

The mHRV helps with fresh air ventilation, condensation control and heat recovery. And in summer we can boost the fan so that we extract any hot air that may have become trapped in our homes quickly, so it helps reduce overheating too.

Thermally Treated Pine, Lunawood from JSC and Abodo Cladding.

Traditionally we have used Pinus radiata as framing and cladding. Pine is a fast-growing softwood, but the heartwood and sapwoods parts of the tree are hard to tell apart and the structural quality of this fast grown timber is compromised as it is not a dense timber. Prone to quick rot and decay due to bora and other insects, this timber is treated with chemicals such as Boron and CCA (Copper Chrome Arsenic) to make it more durable. This doesn’t create healthy buildings as these chemicals are toxic and using other timber types is problematic due to cost, availability (the market is geared for pine) but also due to the fact that our timber codes are geared towards treated pine.

What is exciting about thermally treated pine is that we get a far more stable product that doesn’t rely on coating like paint or oil to keep it durable. Cladding needs to last a minimum of 15 years, and Lunawoods cladding is warrantied for this period without a paint or oil coating.  

These companies are taking a poor preforming product and using new technology creating something better. We still can use sustainably grown timber; we don’t need to mill old rain forests for hardwood species, and we can use a durable low carbon material.

Louvretec Shading solutions.

A big key to building better means reducing the heat loads on buildings from weather conditions. Our building envelope serves as the barrier between an interior environment that we want to keep constant and the external variable conditions of weather.

The parts of our buildings that create overheating is actually our windows, as we get all those solar gains, which is wonderful free heat in winter, but unwanted heat in summer.

Solar gains are affected by two conditions of the sun. Firstly, the suns altitude in the sky, its higher in summer than in winter. Secondly the suns Azimuth, which is its angle of its path relative to North in plan. In summer we have a wider path with the sun rising more southeast rather than northeast. And setting in the Southwest more than the Northwest.

What this means is the suns angle and altitude is different on the North face to the East and West. The sun being higher due North.

So, we need horizontal shading to the north to be effective against the sun’s height, and we can have vertical shading to the east and west, as the suns direction doesn’t swing so much in plan.

We not only need a combination of horizontal and vertical shading solutions for summer and winter, which Louvretec provides. We also need adjustable shading. This is because we need shading in autumn where the temperatures are still warm, and we want free solar gains and also in spring when the temperatures are cooler. The suns altitude and azimuth are the same for both seasons.

Even better, we can install sensors onto these louvres so our house can shade itself or allow us to get free heat gains even when we aren’t home, getting out homes to work smarter.

So here is the core reason for this blog, its so easy to view a choice of material, a specified system in the design or some shading feature on the building to be viewed as aesthetic or expensive, unnecessary or having a conventional alternative. But when we design better preforming buildings, we are often designing with specific intention and knowledge about what we are using and how we are putting it all together. A house is a machine for living in and these components work together to make or break performance in a design.

If you are wanting to build a better preforming home, come have a chat, There are key considerations early on with regards to systems, materials and specifications that if we get right at the start and get the right people on board, we can make these better solutions work smartly for not only your design, but also for the build process. Building or renovating a home is a big investment in time, energy and money. You want it to be worthwhile. And homes have a big impact on our monthly bills and our health.