Healthy Home Design Guide takes aim at ‘crap quality’
“NZ’s building standards are over 20 years behind; and it’s making us sick.”
That comment by Damien McGill of the Superhome Movement, sums up the reasons behind the launch of the Healthy Home Guide on November 24, 2020.
“The problem is exacerbated due to the current New Zealand Building Code being used by over 95 per cent of the industry as the standard to target, rather than the legal minimum requirement,” McGill told Stuff in the weeks preceding the launch.
Check out the full Stuff article highlighting the Healthy Home Design Guide released 24 November 2020:
The project leader says producing the guide was expected to take 18 months, but the team went all out to finish it in seven months, despite Covid restrictions. With input from more than 70 professionals around the country, the guide looks to banish cold, damp and mouldy homes by improving design and construction standards.
“We also have to stop designing 300 square-metre homes with a fourth or fifth bedroom that we really don’t need. Instead, we just need quality; something warm, dry and resilient.
“Money spent on large houses that just meet minimum building standards, which require considerable heating, would be better spent on building smaller, sustainable houses, that are airtight, with thermally broken door and window joinery installed in the right place.”
The Superhome movement wants our houses to provide the best living environments possible, with houses that “stand strong, are resilient, durable, and efficient in size and cost”.
McGill says the guide provides recommendations for healthy, resilient, low-carbon homes that are simple to achieve, and don’t require an arduous and costly rating or certification.
A healthy home is described as one that has high IEQ (indoor environment quality). This is determined from four key metrics: thermal comfort (temperature), visual comfort, acoustic comfort (noise transfer) and indoor air quality.”
The Superhome movement wants our houses to provide the best living environments possible, with houses that “stand strong, are resilient, durable, and efficient in size and cost”.
McGill says the guide provides recommendations for healthy, resilient, low-carbon homes that are simple to achieve, and don’t require an arduous and costly rating or certification.
A healthy home is described as one that has high IEQ (indoor environment quality). This is determined from four key metrics: thermal comfort (temperature), visual comfort, acoustic comfort (noise transfer) and indoor air quality.”
McGill says our homes can significantly influence our health and wellbeing, sentiments supported by Asthma New Zealand CEO Katheren Leitner, who wrote the foreword for the guide and welcomes it as an encouraging development.
“We can’t keep running away from the inadequacies of the Building Code,”Leitner says. “It simply facilitates the ongoing practice of allowing the worst building you can build, to be done so legally, and this is making us sick.”
Asthma NZ’s mission is a 50 per cent reduction in asthma and COPD hospitalisation by 2029.
“With 87 per cent of our patients living in housing unfit for human habitation we are counting on you to help us achieve this mission,” Leitner says in the forward. “For every year that we achieve this mission we will enable the Ministry of Health to spend half a billion dollars of savings on improving our health system, so we all have access to the medications and treatments we need, when we need it. Nothing else matters when you can’t breathe.”
