Australian Passive Solar Home

I think that Australian energy-efficient housing is in a huge mess.

At one end of the spectrum we have Passivhaus – expensive overkill for nearly all the Australian climate, niche and slightly weird.

At the other end of the spectrum we have ‘spec’ home builders – doing the absolute minimum to meet the legal star ratings, no preferred home orientation shown on plans, usually fundamentally poor design with band-aids.

Then we have energy-efficiency experts, architects and consultants pushing their own barrows, often it seems to me completely ignoring the storied history on energy-efficient home design… let alone real-world costs.

In the middle we have new home buyers, who typically know almost nothing about energy-efficient home design. As an expert said to me, they know far more about assessing the energy efficiency of the car they are buying than the house they are buying.

Australian governments – both State and Federal – have been doing their damnedest to improve the public’s understanding of energy-efficient home design for 50+ years, with excellent publications and other resources freely available. But they are routinely ignored – in part the reason for increasing regulation. Broad political understanding of the whole area is simply missing in action.

So we have the wealthy who employ professionals to design their expensive energy-efficient homes, and the typical home buyer who has no idea that comfort, liveability and running costs could all be much improved by some simple decisions, often at zero or very little cost.

The majority outcome? Energy inefficient homes that could so easily have been avoided.