Author: Matthew Cutler-Welsh
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152: How to Select the Best LED Light
Remember when the main choice you had for light bulbs was 60 Watts or 100 Watts? Things have progressed a long way since then, and mostly for the better, especially when you consider that the average incandescent light bulb is only about 10% efficient. Most of the energy ends up as heat rather than light. Now we’ve…
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151: Passive House is Here
There’s so much that could be said about two days of great Passive House presentations in Melbourne, but I’ve challenged myself to boil it down to one point per presentation. If there was one takeaway from the second South Pacific Passive House Conference, it was that Passive House has arrived in the Southern Hemisphere…
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150: Energy Efficient Homes in Canterbury
Glenn Harley is a builder of energy efficient homes in Canterbury. After being attracted to the natural, healthy feel of strawbale construction, Glenn now produces high performance homes with lots of insulation and airtight envelopes. Among his recent achievements is building Christchurch’s first Passive House. The Cost of Building Glenn points to the cost of…
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149 Collective Carpentry
In the town of Invermere, about 3 hours west of Calgary in British Columbia, there’s a workshop where high performance, energy efficient homes are constructed all year round, regardless of the weather. The workshop is home to Collective Carpentry, a small but inspiring building company doing great things. Collective Carpentry When first got in touch,…
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148 Designing for your climate
Graham Hunt goes into a lot of detail when researching the local climate that will impact the comfort of a home. Designing for your climate includes an analysis of both the macro – the temperature, rainfall and humidity of the region, but also the micro – the local wind, shading and exposure of a particular site.…
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147 Living Homes
Who’s the most influential person in a real estate development? The architect, the owner, the builder…? What about the developer? Real estate developers are often seen as the bad guys, out to make a bunch of money without really caring about the quality of homes or lifestyles resulting from their work. Steve Glenn’s philosophy…
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146 Can you afford an architect?
Angus Crowe of True North Architects believes that you definitely can afford an architect. In fact, you can’t afford not to have one. Learning from the Tropics The tropics might seem a world away from very cold climates, but these regions do share one trait – they both required good design in order to achieve…
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145: How to build a passive energy home
Dennis Dowling produces finely crafted, passive energy homes in Queenstown. What’s a passive energy home? Basically, it’s a good quality one. If you’re looking to build a healthy, energy efficient home, then you want to find a building company like DCD. Part of my mission here at Home Style Green is to find these builders…
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144: A System for High Performance Homes
Beattie Passive is a complete system for high performance homes. I love the concept of ‘a house as a system’. I also love the idea of making it simple and easy to get right, and that’s exactly what Ron Beattie has done. As explained in their technical information, “The Beattie Passive system achieves superior levels of…
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143: Why is foam such a good building material?
Many people have concerns about using foam (polystyrene) because of the chemicals used to make the stuff. In fact some of those chemicals are on the Living Building Challenge Red List. So why is foam such a good building material? Foam is a Great Insulator It’s all about R-value. Foam is an incredible thermal insulator. For…