Category: Passive House
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Passive House vs Homestar
What’s the difference between Passive House and Homestar? There are many different systems out there, all offering slightly different outcomes. Passive House vs Homestar If your main objective is warmth, health and low energy bills, this aligns well with the purpose of Passive House (Passivhaus). Energy, health and comfort are about half of Homestar. The…
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115: What’s the Difference between HRV and ERV?
What’s the difference between HRV and ERV? Grant Anderson is the National MVHR Manager at Fantech. (What’s MVHR? Listen in to find out!) More detailed shownotes to come. For now, please feel free to contact me if you’d any help with choosing a ventilation system. You can also find Grant and his team at Fantech.…
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105: What is a Blower Door?
What is a blower door and why would you want to use one? Thomas van Raamsdonk is a home performance expert. He’s also an expert educator and can often be found touring New Zealand and Australia talking with design professionals, builders and clients about the virtues and techniques of better building. During his career of…
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103: It’s All About Airtightness
Derek Ward’s strength is the science that connects good design with good performance. Clioma House specialises in ‘airtightness and effective insulation’. They help bridge the gap between the drawing board and the construction site. Call the Experts, Early The sooner you think about how much you want to do in relation to performance, the cheaper…
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Prefab, Passive House and Passion
As a founding member of PassivHaus Maine, I should have guessed that Chris Corson would be pretty passionate about why and how we should build better homes. A quick look at EcoCor’s website suggests they are a good place to start for achieving a practical solution to a sustainable home. I caught up with Chris to talk…
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How 475 can help you achieve a high performance home
So, you’ve decided you’d like a really good home. One that’s comfortable, healthy and energy efficient. That’s great, but unfortunately it’s not (yet) standard practice. Hopefully you can find a good designer to help (try this list if you like). But you’ll also need some good, non-standard products. This week I spoke with Ken Levenson…
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How to get a Passive House
In episode 30, I spoke with Elrond Burrell and asked if Passive House (or Passivhaus) was really relevant to some parts of the world. This sparked some great debate and I subsequently caught up with Jon Iliffe of eHaus to find out how to get a passive house in New Zealand. European Inspiration Jon’s training is in mechanical…
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Start with Why
If you’ve listened to more than a few episodes of the Home Style Green podcast, you’ll notice that I like to start with why? My favourite first question to designers and architects is ‘why do you what you do‘? Simon Sinek – Start with Why Glen Murdoch is a Passive House designer and innovator, based…
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Green Building Design with Jessica Eyers
Jessica Eyers is a passionate advocate for sustainable, green design. As I discovered during this interview, Jessica is also really interested in the science of green building and understanding what works and what doesn’t work. Architecture & Inspiration Jessica completed a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Sheffield in the U.K. But it was…
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Black Pine Architects
Duncan Sinclair is the founder of Black Pine Architects. His practice and his home are in Whanganui, but thanks to the internet, his work can be anywhere. It’s About People Construction and architecture is technical work, but for Duncan it’s ultimately about people. Good buildings should look after the people that occupy them. Good buildings…