Home Style Green

Wally is a wireless water leak detector, and temperature and humidity sensor for your home. As CEO of  SNUPI Technologies , Jeremy Jaech told me, this isn't particularly sexy, but it could be really valuable.

What is a blower door and why would you want to use one? We've discussed the benefits of airtightness previously. In this episode, we're jumping straight in to look at the blower door and airtightness testing.

Net zero homes, tiny Houses, 'Cargotecture', pocket neighbourhoods and straw bale homes. Matthew Swett likes to experiment with design. He's also an incredibly thoughtful and award winning architect.  Matthew Swett co-founded Taproot Architects, LLC in 2001 with his wife and business partner Sarah Birger. Together they operate an integrated architecture and landscape design firm on Whidbey Island....

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.

Matthew Vande and partner Amy Musser created Vandemussser Design to help with 'the technical side of building green'. They found a great problem when they moved to North Carolina - builders who wanted to do right thing, but didn't know what the right thing was. Matt, Amy and their team now help builders and their clients to find the most cost effective and easiest way to make energy efficient buil...

Paul Testa lives in beautiful Sheffield in the UK. He introduced me to the concept of 'vernacular construction' - designing and building to the local conditions.  Is the Home Style Green Podcast turning into the Passive House Podcast?  http://paultestaarchitecture.co.uk/ Thanks to NUDURA for supporting Home Style Green: http://energyefficientbuilding.co.nz/

It's episode 100! In this week's special show, I turned the microphone around to hear from past (and future) guests, listeners answering the question "What would you do to make a better place to live?"

As a founding member of PassivHaus Main, 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 about prefab, Passive House and Passion!

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 about how 475  can help you achieve a high performance home.

Three years ago, John Donovan built a demonstration log house on his property in Waitakere. The images in a recent newspaper  article  caught my attention, as did the mention of 'eco' and 'efficient'. So I tracked John down to get his thoughts on sustainable building with logs. And we talked about pyramids...

Phase change materials and how to add thermal mass to light weight buildings. After learning to build cob houses, Chris Brookman now supplies some very cool, modern clay and timber material products to building industry. 

The Homestar Mandatory minimums are a series of benchmarks that have to be achieved in order to progress up the Homestar scale. They're important because if they are are not achieved, your score will be held back. So what are the Homestar mandatory minimums, and how can you achieve them?

There are eco labelled paints, and then there are eco paints. What's the difference?

So, you know you want a sustainable (healthy, efficient, affordable and desirable) home, but where do you start? I've covered the  fundamentals   of what makes a good energy efficient home, but these are details. What's the big picture? Where do you start a sustainable house? http://homestylegreen.com/93

Group or volume builders get a bad rap sometimes for perpetuating bad building practise. But it is possible to get a good home from a group builder. This week I talk with someone who's doing just that and her explains how.

Glenn Murdoch was a regular house designer until he watched Simon Sinek's TED talk. Then Glenn asked 'why'? In this week's show we talk Passive House and how to architecture can create a better society.

Duncan Firth feels 'compelled' to do what he does - designing environmentally functional homes. How can architecture truly respond to the environment?

Homestar is New Zealand's comprehensive environmental rating tool for homes. It's Green Star for the residential sector and is not some crazy Kiwi start up idea. It's very closely related to successful international precedents such as LEED and Code for Sustainable Homes. But how much does it add to the cost of building a home?  There are some inaccuracies out there that I think need addressing. 

Something a little different this week. I’ve had some excellent questions sitting in my inbox for a while and I thought that many could benefit from them. In this Q&A session I cover Homestar, thermal mass, heating and cooling options and small, affordable home design. 

Do you need a professional project manager for either the design stage or the construction stage of your building project? I discuss the basics of good project management with podcaster, engineer, business owner and soon-to-be author, Cesar Abeid. 

Eaves are the classic case of form following function. In this podcast I lay out my three key reasons for having them, but a key question is, 'how big should eaves be?'

Resilience and sustainability are different. Sustainability feels more long term to me. It's about using resources wisely with future generations in mind. Resilience is more about weathering the storm. There is an overlap and so both are important. If being resilient encourages people to invest in rainwater harvesting and solar panels with battery backup, thereby also being more sustainable, then...

Over the last few years, I've developed this model for good home design: Map, wrap, gaps, taps and apps.  Find out more at: http://homestylegreen.com/84

Most of us are familiar with leaky buildings - the perfect storm of poor design, poor cladding systems and poor workmanship, culminating in allowing rain to get in. Now we've moved on and have cavities, more stringent weather-tightness checks and hopefully we like eaves again. So what's leaky buildings 2.0? If we've dealt to the risk of moisture coming in from the outside, where else can moisture...

Natalie Cutler-Welsh spends some of her time helping small business owners who are just getting started with social media. This can be a daunting task yet important step for your business. I wanted to get some tips for building professionals on the 'why' and 'how to' of basic social media.  This week, we look at Facebook and LinkedIn http://homestylegreen.com/82 http://gotogirl.co.nz