Sustainable Building Showcased at Auckland Home Show 2010

The Auckland Home Show is a highlight of the year for homeowners and DIY builders, with thousands of home improvement products and services on display.

The event takes over the entire showgrounds complex at Greenlane for five very busy days – something most New Zealand expos aspire to.

As Australasia’s largest show for home building, Sustainable building showcased at Auckland Home Show 2010 By Lynne Richardson renovating and landscaping products and services, the Auckland Home Show is an important barometer of market confidence in New Zealand, and this year’s event attracted over 500 exhibitors and 44,000 visitors – a 10% increase on the previous year.

Key attractions included a huge array of kitchens, bathrooms and appliances; the Floradell Street of Houses, a fully landscaped street of pre-built houses; the Fisher&Paykel World Cooking Theatre, with 35 of New Zealand’s top chefs; and the Designer Living Pavilion, with a mind-boggling array of designer products. The Auckland Landscape Supplies Walk of Gardens covered the important landscaping area. But it was the Green Urban Living pavilion that attracted me. Keen to find out about the latest products and services that make green living a reality, I spoke to many of the exhibitors who were on hand to explain how our homes and commercial properties can incorporate eco-friendly and sustainable building features.

HVAC a good starting point

Many of the exhibitors came under the HVAC category – heating, ventilation and airconditioning – and this would seem an ideal place to start if you wish to begin greening your home or commercial premises. Products such as EArchitecture’s solar-powered hot-water and photovoltaic power-generation systems (www.earchitecture.co.nz), Aquafire’s heat pumps that use the latent heat from the air outside the house to heat the home’s water system (www.aquafire.co.nz), and Sayr’s climate-responsive home-ventilation systems (www.sayr.co.nz) can all be retrofitted to an existing building, and offer a great return on investment.

For new home builders looking for an alternative to solar-powered systems, DSHH, an under-floor system offered by Energy Efficient Homes (EEH), would be an ideal solution (www.eeh. co.nz). DSHH is a hydronic heating system that keeps the entire house at a constant temperature by using radiant heat emitted from a thermal energy store (TES) embedded in the concrete floor at the time of construction.

EEH’S Gary Palmer says it’s an entirely viable solution to solar-powered heating: “The solar industry in New Zealand has concentrated almost exclusively on heating hot water which has a constant demand throughout the year. However, there’s a problem of oversupply during the summer months and the disposal of that surplus. The TES core is able to store all that surplus solar energy during the summer, which can then be recalled by the electronic controller during the long winter evenings when there is no solar energy available.” The DSHH can also be retro-fitted to some underfloor heating systems, making it attractive to those with existing systems that are too expensive to run.

Insulation and waste treatment

Greener options for insulation were also on display, including my personal favourite, the Ecofleece from Eco Insulation (www.ecoinsultation.co.nz), a company that offers a wide range of natural insulation products that are ecologically sound, environmentally safe and toxic free. Made from either virgin sheep’s wool or recycled wool sourced from wool-product manufacturers and then blended with polyester to make it softer on the hands, Ecofleece must be one of the most sustainable products available for insulating New Zealand homes.

Another interesting option on display was insulating concrete forms (ICFs) – hollow blocks or panels made of EPS (expanded polystyrene) plastic foam that can be stacked to form an exterior wall. Workers then add reinforcing steel and fill the gap between the two layers of foam (typically 100–200 mm) with concrete, which cures and hardens into a monolithic core (the foam panel stays in place). This combination of concrete, steel and foam creates an incredibly strong and energyefficient structure. Paul Jones from ICF Solutions (www. ecoicf.co.nz) says a home built with ICFs will cost the same as a comparable woodframe home, but savings are made through significantly lower utility and energy bills and downsizing of heating and cooling equipment.

Even the treatment of wastewater can now be done commercially in an environmentally friendly manner. Innoflow (www. innoflowtechnologies.com) is an Australasian company that offers customised wastewater solutions for residential, community and commercial applications. The company’s AdvanTex system incorporates a recirculating filtration process for the organic treatment of wastewater. Jack’s Point, the 420 ha resort-style development near Queenstown, has recently been fitted with its own such system.

So many ways to go green

I spent a whole day at the Auckland Home Show just visiting the displays of the green living exhibitors. From organic waste bin collections to greywater storage and reticulation systems; from energy-efficient lighting to intelligent switches that turn appliances on and off; from uPVC double-glazed window joinery to decking systems made from 100% recycled plastic and wood-fibre materials; they were all here at the show. There’s no excuse for homeowners and property developers not to incorporate products that are kinder to the environment or built using sustainable practices. They make good business sense too, as most of them offer savings in the long term.