Category: Podcasts
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197: Healthiness through Housing
“A lifetime of healthiness achieved through housing” is the mission statement of Phoenix Haus. I’ve interviewed other Passive House builders using prefabrication in the past, such as Collective Carpentry in episode 149. I’m excited by the possibilities of this approach to provide high quality houses and I’m wondering what it would take to get a…
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196: Why aren’t more houses being built using SIPs?
Phil Nevell has a background in commerce and management. He came across NZSIP as a solution to providing warm and dry social housing. If structural insulated panels (SIPs) can be used in this way, why aren’t more people using them? Barriers to SIPS Phil suggests that engineers and specifiers might be a significant barrier to…
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194: Ecokit – A DIY, Energy Efficient Home for Everyone
Ecokit, created by sisters Camilla and Pavla Novotna is a DIY prefabricated system of building energy efficient, healthy homes.
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193: High Quality Building Products, Made in China.
Judging by it’s scale, it’s hard to believe that China International Windoor City is a family company. Based in Gaobeidian, the organisation includes the largest window, door and curtain wall exhibition in Asia. Windoor City has a total construction area covering 50 hectares, with a focus on energy saving products. Windoor City facilities produce everything…
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192: Making Passive House Fun and Famous
After he won the Inaugural Passive House Slam during the Heidelberg Passive House Conference in March this year, I sat down with Marius Şoflete to talk about how he’s inspiring people to build better places to live. Marius has a contagious enthusiasm which he’s using to make Passive House fun. It also helps to have…
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191: New Zealand’s First Passive House Cohousing Project
The first New Zealand Passive House was completed in 2012. Since then, about 20 more individual private houses have been Certified using the internationally recognised standard. Now, New Zealand is about to get its first Certified Passive House Cohousing project and Tim Ross has been involved almost right from the start. Becoming an Architect Tim…
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190: What can learn from over thirty years of airtightness testing?
Paul Jennings needed a project for his dissertation on fuel poverty in the UK when he came across some charity work funded by the then ‘Greater London Council’. This was back in the 1980s. Not many people had heard of Blower Doors or airtightness testing. But a team from the suppliers in Canada were willing…
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189: How to Build Your Own Tiny House
Natural. Passive. Tiny. This is what Ever Homes is all about. Founder and builder Everett Norris created Ever Homes to build Tiny Homes and to help people learn how to build their own Tiny House. The Dream of Home Ownership Everett Norris always wanted to build his own house. As a boy, he also assumed…
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188: How to Have a Comfortable, Safe and Affordable Home
Paul Hennessey has an inspiring vision of a thriving community in which people live in their own warm, dry comfortable and affordable homes. He’s partnered with his wife, Pascale to create Park Homes in order to turn that vision into reality. But is it really possible to have an affordable and a comfortable home? Affordability…
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187: Building to Inspire and Nurture
Dolores Davis is part of a building legacy. It began in 1957 with Clarence and Stella Guerrero when Clarence started fixing up homes in Austin Texas. 60 years on, Dolores now leads a design-build company with thirty team members and a strong desire to inspire and nurture. Note: In the podcast episode, I mistakenly introduce…