Sustainability

Although we still have about 2,000 m2 of landscaping to do the outside is about ready.

More diggers have been on site to fill the water tank and parking bay area, level the driveway, dig trenches for waste and storm water pipes which has all been completed now. They also created some walking paths on the

With the scaffolding gone finally some better pictures of the exterior of the home and our cladding. Choosing a cladding has been more difficult than I imagined and choices and materials different from what I had envisioned. I loved the look of vertical timber cladding and it is also the option with the best environmental

Although we still have some time as we haven’t been able to secure a builder yet we are progressing with the wall and roof panel ordering. As our SIP’s (Structural Insulated Panels) for the wall and roof are all pre-fabricated and cut to the exact dimensions Panel Layout Drawings are created by Formance to determine

As there is no sewage system in Pahi we need an onsite waste water treatment system for both grey (all household wastewater from showers, baths, laundry, washing basins) and black water (kitchen sink, dishwasher and toilets). Options are a sceptic tank or more advanced multi chamber oxygen based (aerobic) sy

While we don’t have other options than to collect rainwater and dispose of our waste water on-site there is an electricity connection to our site. So the question is to be or not to be grid connected? Decisions to go on or off-grid seem to revolve around costs, resilience and independence and use of renewable

Meet Gnarler, Rosie, Powerranger and Heihei our new chickens. Previously I wrote about the carbon footprint of the average Kiwi household. One third of the footprint is food related mostly caused by emissions of eating red meat. Another little step in our journey is getting chickens to provide more local and low carbon food.

The embodied energy of a home is the energy consumed by all of the processes associated with the production of a building, from the mining and processing of natural resources to manufacturing, transport and product delivery. Different studies [1.2] show that the embodied energy takes up a maximum of 10% of lifetime energy use for a home.

When we are talking about sustainable homes a lot of times it is about reducing energy and carbon emissions. While I like to know more about the carbon footprint of building a home (the "embodied energy") and the footprint of operational use later on, I think it is also good to look at those numbers relative to other emissions we

In other blogs I wrote about our sustainability goals and different concepts and definitions of sustainability in the built environment. Over the years different frameworks have been developed to assess sustainability of homes. The best known rating tools for homes are BREEAM (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method) in the UK, LEED (Leadership in Energy

After looking at different rating systems for sustainable houses, learning about sustainability of homes and our own beliefs in what a sustainable house is we came up with 10 sustainability goals for our home. We could have gone for one goal like a passive house