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9 Sustainable Home Myths Exposed: Busting common misconceptions to help you build smarter, greener, and truly sustainable homes with confidence!
This is probably the biggest falsity we see. Come on, we’re not building Earthships guys!
Although I am open to building Earthships, unfortunately there’s no market for them in inner-city Melbourne.
The rundown, old homes we transform into comfortable, energy-efficient sustainable homes look just like most homes in Melbourne, just a little more aesthetically pleasing than most!
Some things you may see emphasised are the use of timber, low maintenance and raw materials.
Timber means carbon is stored.
Low maintenance means, just that low maintenance, less cleaning and more enjoying the home.
Raw materials mean more low maintenance, no need for painting and enjoying a material in its raw state.
The fundamental difference is that a sustainable home is designed and built with the environment in mind.
Other than that you won’t see a different look to a sustainable home but you’ll definitely get a different feel and most certainly a different energy bill at the end of the month!
This is a cracker and probably comes back to the earthship or cabin in the woods fantasy.
Just to reiterate, we’re yet to find someone that wants to build an earthship or a cabin in the inner city.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but that’s not what we build guys!
I assure you we’ve thought about running off to a cabin in the woods ourselves. But, that’s not going to solve the problem the world faces, only remove our personal contribution.
As much as we love hippies and treehuggers we don’t just build homes for them. We’ve built homes for Doctors, Lawyer’s, Engineer’s, Scientists, Psychologists, you name it. Fair to say each of them may have had a little secret hippie in them, don’t we all?
As humans we’re all a part of nature and at SHM our goal is to help society merge with nature and reduce our impact on the environment at large.
Sure, you can do this but it might not make your home all that sustainable. We consider solar panels and other sustainable add ons 'bells & whistles'. They serve a purpose but if your home isn't designed with the environment in mind to operate passively, adding batteries won't make it a sustainable home.
Having said that these are features you can add on at a later stage when your budget may permit but it's so important to get the fundamentals right. To reiterate, the first point of call for sustainability is how the home operates with its environment passively.
The Passive House certification has spread across the world, and for good reason. The standard produces an incredibly healthy and well performing home. I’ve been a big supporter of Passive House and was even on the Australian Passive House committee in the early days.
There are many principles of Passive House that must be incorporated into every home which all come back to Solar Passive Design. - It’s easy to see how the two can be confused.
However, I can’t agree that passive house construction is a viable option for one off residential homes. The Passive House approach is a fabric first approach with the intention of sealing the building to allow little to no air movement. This results in the external wall fabric of a home being as much as 400mm thick.
The argument is that the operation of the home is carbon neutral, however this neglects that fact that the amount of embodied energy of the home is exponential. It’s been found that over an 80 year period a Passive House can use more energy than a standard house.
In saying all that I think Passive House has great benefits for commercial and apartment building’s. With the ability to dramatically decrease the energy use of families and businesses on a much larger scale. This is where the passive house is best implemented. But, not for residential homes.
Solar passive principles must be incorporated in all homes but the comprehensive standard of Passive House is much too carbon heavy to be a sustainable solution to the residential home market.
Quite frankly, the answer is no. The bigger the home the more embodied energy (carbon) it took to build the home and the more energy (carbon) it takes to operate the home.
McMansion is a term adopted from the urban sprawl and volume home market. Many of these new estates see large homes built boundary to boundary with little to no shade or consideration for the environment the home has been built in. Resulting in massive energy demand in the depths of winter and peaks of summer. These are NOT sustainable homes.
There’s no doubt there are many large homes built well with a tightly sealed fabric, correct orientation and incorporating solar passive principals (these McMansions are few and far between but for the exercise let’s presume a reasonable number exist). As efficient as these large, efficient homes may be, the embodied energy to build these homes is often far greater than could ever be saved from their energy efficiency.
Note; There are some exceptions, particularly with large families living in large energy efficient homes.
Get outta here!
This couldn’t be more wrong. I mean who in their right mind would have any desire to buy an inefficient, leaky home opposed to an efficient, healthy home? Pretty simple answer if you ask me.
More and more people are seeing the benefits in building a more efficient, healthy sustainable home. That’s not only good for the planet but good for the families lucky enough to live in them, also good for the hip pocket because a sustainable home can cost so little to operate. Time and again we see people making money by giving so much power back to the grid.
There’s been many studies to back up the fact of sustainable homes selling faster and at higher prices than their unsustainable counterparts.
A 10 year study by Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in association with a German University found that homes with ‘documented sustainability features’ were on the market 13 days less and sold for on average 10% more.
That’s a pretty handy return on investment. Think about it, if the median house price is $500K that’s adding another $50K to the bottom line. Quite an impressive result that makes it pretty clear building a sustainable home isn’t just good for our planet and our family, but it also makes financial sense.
No, sorry, couldn’t be further from the truth.
We call these add-ons ‘bells & whistles’. They serve a purpose but don't make a home a sustainable home.
To be clear, I’m not talking about retro-fitting here. If you’re retro-fitting, that’s great add solar, add batteries and anything else that can reduce your impact on the environment.
But, if your objective is to transform your rundown old home with a comprehensive renovation, don’t rely on these ‘bells & whistles’ to make your home a sustainable home.
It’s important you approach your renovation from a holistic point of view from the outset. The critical thing when building a sustainable home is designing it that way. There’s an old saying ‘good design costs just the same as bad design’ (maybe I made that up, but it’s still true). Good design just takes a little extra consideration.
Sustainable construction and materials is an immensely growing market. Having started SHM in 2014 there have been more and more products to choose from each year. It feels like a new product is landing on my desk daily.
Sure, not all of them are worth their salt but there is now a plethora of great products out there and it is ever growing. Everything from cladding, roofing and windows to kitchen benches, bathroom linings and paint has been continuously improved upon year on year. The problem now is that there may be too many options for people to choose from.
If you lived through the 80’s and 90’s you’ll recall some horrendous fads, you may have even owned a waterbed or heaven forbid had a furry cover on your toilet seat (it did make it feel warmer in winter).
There are always trends to be found in design and architecture and the homes we live in, But, let me assure you building a home to have less of an impact on our planet is NOT one of them.
If you think there are builders like us out there trying with all their might to build better homes and not harm the planet for a fad you're barking up the wrong tree.
Building a home that’s more comfortable to live in, less expensive to run and treads lightly on our planet is not a fad, it’s a much needed improvement in one of humankind's oldest technologies, home construction.
Unfortunately for future generations and our environment the construction industry is one of the slowest to adopt technology and simple improvements.
However that is changing and billions of dollars are being spent every year by companies to improve the homes we live in.
Sustainable home construction, to build better homes isn’t going anywhere!
