Sustainability Focus
All people have various abilities to turn around and avoid the further destruction of our planet. The housing industry is responsible for around 20% of Greenhouse Gas emissions and as such needs to take a good hard look at itself.
Passive Design
Our most common question is ‘what is it’. Passive design is quite simply the heating and cooling of a dwelling through natural or non mechanical means. Unfortunately a very low percentage of Australian dwellings are passively designed and hence there is an excessive reliance upon such reactive solutions as air conditioning, with large environmental impacts. Passive design is a proactive approach to make the dwelling comfortable to inhabit all year round, with supplementary systems only required in small doses and on extreme weather occurrences. Correct siting, orientation, shading, glazing technology, thermal mass and insulation are all key ingredients in the Passive design recipe. Enviroarch focuses on a total solution as opposed to a solution which simply ticks the regulatory boxes.
Water conservation and Re-use
A water storage and re-use volume of between 5,000 & 10,000 litres is largely inadequate for a house to avoid reliance upon mains usage. In recent years, extensive periods of drought provide a key need to ‘upsize’ our water storage and maximise our catch during rainy periods. Furthermore we have seen escalating water costs in recent times, providing additional pressure to already stretched family budgets. Enviroarch provides large volume water storage solutions with connections to internal fitments and external areas alike. Grey water is diverted for external usage to provide unlimited sustainable water supply to vegetation.
Energy Conservation
The average person associates any dwelling with rooftop solar panels as being Energy responsible. We certainly won’t speak against the usage of photovoltaics, however there we focus on a series of key moves put in place which minimise energy consumption well before any panels are placed on the rooftop. Space heating & cooling combined with water heating accounts for around 2/3 of the energy usage of a home. Our passively designed dwellings provide natural heating and cooling and little reliance on mechanical energy usage. All Enviroarch homes have Solar Hot Water as standard. Evacuated tube systems are combined with gas boost for maximum efficiency. LED, Compact Fluorescent, Halide and Fluorescent lighting is used throughout, replacing energy inefficient lighting options such as Incandescent and Halogen. Gas is used for both space heating and cooking purposes with both LPG and natural gas options available.
Materials
There is no simplistic recipe for the optimum usage of materials in a sustainable dwelling. All materials have pros and cons with no individual material ticking all of the boxes including sustainability, maintenance, structural requirements and cost to name a few. We aim to provide a combination which arrives at the best overall building solution, with key considerations as follows: Australian Made Low Embodied Energy (Energy used in manufacture) Insulation values Thermal mass ability Low VOC content (Volatile Organic compounds – Human health and environmentally damaging agents). Re-useable or recyclable? Recycled material implementation. Materials from sustainably managed sources.