January 16, 2025 • 16 mins
Do you ever get the feeling New Zealand just doesn’t know how to build houses properly?
We had the leaky homes crisis – where timber-framed homes built from 1988 to 2004 were not fully weather-tight.
And now, construction experts are warning that tens of thousands of Auckland families will suffer in overheating terraced houses unless designs change.
Terraced houses are being built at pace in Auckland, with even more expected after the Government mooted 55,000 new ones to be fast-tracked through the consent process.
Today on The Front Page, we’re joined by New Zealand Green Building Council business development manager Matthew Cutler-Welsh to dig into what’s gone wrong with these new houses.
Follow The Front Page on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can read more about this and other stories in the New Zealand Herald, online at nzherald.co.nz, or tune in to news bulletins across the NZME network.
Host: Chelsea Daniels
Sound Engineer/Producer: Richard Martin
Producer: Ethan Sills
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Kiota.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a
daily podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Presented by the New Zealand Herald.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
You ever get the feeling New Zealand just doesn't know
how to build houses properly. We had the leaky Homes crisis,
where timber framed homes built from nineteen eighty eight two
thousand and four were not fully weather tight, and now
construction experts are warning that tens of thousands of Auckland
families will suffer in overheating terraced houses until designs change.
(00:42):
Terraced houses are being built at pace in Auckland, with
even more expected after the government mooted fifty five thousand
new ones to be fast tracked through the consent process.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Today on the Front Page, we're.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Joined by New Zealand Green Building Council Business Development Manager
Matthew Cutler Welsh to dig into what's gone wrong with
these new homes. Matthew, I think a lot of people
listening will know someone who is suffering from these hot houses.
(01:17):
I can name five people in my office alone. But
what exactly is the issue here?
Speaker 3 (01:22):
Well, there are a couple of issues. One is the
input and the fact that our climate is warming up,
it's getting warmer, But fundamentally, the other issue is how
our houses are designed to respond to that, which is,
in short, not well. Because we've kind of optimized to
keep warm and we love getting lots of sunlight in
(01:43):
the winter, and that's good. We want that, we want
daylight and we want warmth, but we also don't want
to overheat, and we don't have anything in the building
code that prevents that.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
How widespread do you think this problem actually is.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
It's prolific.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
I mean, we've got we're coming off the peak of
fifty thousand building consent applications a.
Speaker 4 (02:03):
Couple of years ago.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
That has dropped off, but we're talking tens of thousands
of Kiwi families that are at risk of going into
homes that are not going to be fit for purpose.
They're going to be very hot and very uncomfortable. So
it's been happening for quite a while. We've known about it,
and there's not really anything in place to prevent it
(02:25):
from continuing to happen.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
What are some of.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
The design flaws that are causing these houses to overheat
or not easily cool down.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
The fundamental cause of the issue is that lack of
requirement to consider overheating in the building code, and how
that comes to reality is a lot of overglazing. As
I said, we've focused a lot on the view and
getting daylight into homes, and that is a good thing,
(02:55):
but we tend to overglaze a lot of our houses
and we don't have adequate shading. If you look at
a lot of older homes, homes from sort of fifty
to one hundred or more years ago, our sort of
colonial homes, a lot of those had quite small windows
and big verandahs, and we've gone to a much more.
Speaker 4 (03:15):
If you think of a modern house.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
It might not have any eve on the roof, it
might have a flat roof, and it might have a
huge amount of glazing. I've got lots of photos that
I've taken of houses that the entire front of the
house is almost all glass. So dramatically changed the way
we design and build our homes, and that's had a
(03:39):
big influence on overheating.
Speaker 5 (03:43):
So it was the start of twenty twenty two when
I moved into like one of these new built houses
that's just a row of flats, and the day we
were moving in, which was like the middle of summer,
it was getting up to forty five degrees upstairs in
the middle of the day, and then by time you're
trying to fall asleep in this new house, it was
still like thirty degrees.
Speaker 6 (04:05):
The house does have what was we were told was
like a temperature regulation sort of system, but essentially it's
just this fan that you have running twenty four to seven,
which does essentially nothing other than have a little led
screen on the wall so you can get an accurate
reading of what just how hot it is in the house.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
I've seen you describe this issue as being locked in.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
What do you mean by that?
Speaker 3 (04:30):
If you're going for that modern aesthetic. A lot of
these homes are going to be around for at least
fifty years, often longer, and it's very hard to retrofit.
You're not going to people don't intend to take out
or reduce the size of the windows or add in
eves to a house. It's part of the esthetic of
the home, it's part of the overall design, and it's
(04:51):
very costly and it just wouldn't really work to retrofit
some of the changes that would really make the difference
to the performance. Now there are retrofrared options, but if
you're starting from a place that is really suboptimal, then
that can be really tricky to get a cost effective solution.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
Construction Minister Chris Pank told The Herald that he regularly
hears concern from the public about new homes overheating, and
that these concerns were a key reason why he's asked
officials to investigate the new H one energy efficiency settings.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
Earlier in the year or earlier this year. What does
this mean?
Speaker 3 (05:32):
Well, a bit of a mixed message there, and in
the consultation document in the most recent rounds, the Minister
did quite a good job of emphasizing that insulation does
not cause overheating, and we've used the example.
Speaker 4 (05:47):
Of a chili ban.
Speaker 3 (05:48):
Chiliban is very well insulated and it's used to keep
things cool. A well insulated container will keep things warm
just as well as it will keep things cool. There's
a bit of a confusion there potentially around H one
because H one at the moment is seen as an
insulation standard.
Speaker 4 (06:07):
It's actually not.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
It's an energy efficiency standard, but it doesn't have anything
in there at the moment that requires designers to consider
the cooling load in the summertime, and that's what we
really need to be added, and that's why we're advocating
for energy modeling as.
Speaker 4 (06:24):
Opposed to just a calculation or.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
Definitely getting rid of the schedule method, which is the
current proposal, because energy modeling does allow designers to essentially
forecast that risk of overheating.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
If you go back twenty odd years, there was a
period in New Zealand known as the Leaky Homes Crisis,
where thousands of houses and department buildings built over a
twenty six year period were not properly weather tie, causing
them to leak. Why do we keep having these issues
with our houses? Are we just really bad at building them?
Speaker 4 (06:57):
We've got some really good builders in New Zealand.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
Unfortunately, we have a bit of a piecemeal approach to
how we change and evolve our building code and that's
led to it being lagging when we look at other
comparable countries around the world. So even Australia now has
updated their building code to require consideration of cooling demand
(07:21):
during summer, so when they're doing their equivalent of our
age one, it's more involved and it requires a consideration
of how the house will perform during winter, but also
how we will perform during summer we've sort of laid behind,
and others have commented that a lot of our clauses
they don't interrelate very well because if you change one
(07:46):
thing like increase the amount of ventilation, and we have
also increased things like improved our windows, but we haven't
done some other things to cater for better ventilation. And
we haven't required anything around looking at overglazing or a
lack of external shading to reduce the sole hegate of
(08:09):
our windows. So it really comes down to our our
building code just not really getting updated.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
Auckland Council's monthly Housing Update data for November showed seventy
percent of building consents for dwellings were for townhouses, apartments, flats,
units or other attached properties. Right, those are the ones
I guess we're all seeing pop up, you know, the
ones about five townhouses on what used to be one
on one block. Do you think the rapid pace of
(08:50):
construction has meant there are people cutting corners?
Speaker 3 (08:53):
Well, I said before, I think there's some really good
builders out there. Certainly, if there are pressures and opportunity
for making profits, then that there is that risk of
people cutting quarters. I think as long as we have
quite a low standard, then there are going to be
a lot of people who just aim to build to
(09:13):
that low standard and maximize their short term profits. And
the only way we're going to fix that is to
bring up those minimum requirements in the code and how
the code is implemented, because when we talk about the code,
there's a lot of really good objectives and a good
aims of the building code, but it kind of falls
(09:35):
down when it comes to the implementation of the individual
clauses with how we allow things to comply.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
And could that be a problem with the fact that
all these homes are being built to a certain type.
I mean, I guess you walk through some neighborhoods around
Auckland these days and every new build home looks identical
to the twenty.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
On either side of it. Or is that just a
styling issue.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
It's partly a signing issue, but it's also figuring out
how to meet those minimum requirements and make a good
profit and move on to the next project within the
constraints that are there. And if those constraints don't require
any attention to overglazing and lack of shading, then that's
what's going to be produced. Because people maximizing their return
(10:21):
on what they can get for an investment in a
particular piece of land, So that's maximizing the floord area,
maximizing those things that most developers are very well attuned
to what's appealing in the real estate market, and unfortunately
the market doesn't necessarily appreciate or understand what's lacking in
the building code to know that some of those might
(10:43):
look great in the picture, but come the first middle
of the winter and the middle of the following summer
might actually be not comfortable or even not really fit
for the purpose.
Speaker 7 (11:03):
If you build a normal house to the building code,
a building code basically stipidates that you must design it
so that life is protected. And in order to protect life,
basically what you're talking about is making sure that the
roof and the walls don't fall down on top of
someone during an earthquake. That doesn't mean that your house
(11:23):
is livable after the event. It just means that during
the event, it's not going to kill you. It's a
fairly short sighted design criteria.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
So best case scenario, the building code gets changed and
builders are forced to think about how these houses operate
not only in winter, but in summer. As well, what
happens in retrospect with all these thousands and thousands of
homes already having been built. I'm using an insulation as
an example. It's easy to get that into the walls
and into the roof. But what happens if the code changes?
(11:59):
Will people before to change the design of their homes?
Speaker 3 (12:03):
No, but even before that happens. I mean, one of
the things that we offer now is the ability for
the relatively cost effective modeling, and that's why home Star
has included energy modeling for all new homes. So we
would encourage people to do that regardless and in the
intervening time, because it's going to take a while for
these changes to eventually come through to the building code.
(12:25):
Once that does and we improve our building code, that's
going to be great in terms of retrofitting all of
the existing housing stock. That's a really good point because
we have over a million homes that exist in New
Zealand and they are a problem. There is no easy fix.
It's going to be a bit of a case by case.
There are some general things that can be done to
(12:46):
help improve the comfort of those existing homes, and that's
going to be things like looking at external shading. We
don't really do much in the way of external shading
here and that is becoming more popular in places like Australia.
We are seeing a prolific We've seen a proliferation of
heat pumps for a long period of time in New Zealand.
People are realizing that those are equally useful in summer
(13:07):
time as well as winter, and that has potential issues
around energy use.
Speaker 4 (13:12):
But there are going.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
To be lots of people wanting to figure out how
to make their existing homes more comfortable and.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
What are some other ways where we can make homes
more comfortable.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Because I've got a mate who is being forced to
sleep in their downstairs lound room because upstairs is just unbearable.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
In the house that he's living in, So what are
some ways.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
So external shading is a lot more effective than internal blinds. Unfortunately,
it's a little bit trickier to do, particularly.
Speaker 4 (13:43):
If you're a renter.
Speaker 3 (13:46):
It's harder to get things done to the house that's
on the outside of the house. But if you can
stop the heat getting in, that's way way more effective.
If that's not an option, then there are some blockout
blinds and things that can that help with that comfort.
Once the heat's in the home, it's very very hard
to get rid of. So fans do help, and if
(14:09):
they can be used to move air around.
Speaker 4 (14:12):
Particularly if you are able to.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
Get some crossflow into the home, that can often help
as well. But like I said, we are seeing people
rely more and more on heat pumps because once a
home heats up and you're just moving warm air around,
then you really need to get some mechanical calling in
there unfortunately as well.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
Right, and that's the problem.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
Hey, if you are renting, you can't ask your landlord
to do anything about it because it is minimum standard.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
They're meeting the minimum standard.
Speaker 4 (14:37):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (14:38):
And I guess that's another downfall of the Healthy Home standards,
which a lot of people will be familiar with. Those
are geared towards moisture and ventilation and heating, but there's
nothing in there that requires a landlord to address any
concerns around overheating and keeping the place cool, the ability
(15:00):
to keep the place cool in summertime.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
Is this just a sign of the times now.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
I don't mean to bring up climate change, but I
guess we've never really, we've always been concerned about keeping
our houses warm This is kind of the first tranch
of conversations I've seen about keeping our houses cool in
New Zealand.
Speaker 4 (15:20):
I think it's completely appropriate to bring up climate change.
This reality.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
We're seeing record years of higher temperatures.
Speaker 4 (15:28):
We've heard just this week.
Speaker 3 (15:29):
That the number of days that we're going to experience
very hot temperatures is set to quadruple in New Zealand
over the next sixty years. Added to that different urban
environment we're getting with more intensification, we're getting more of
that urban heat island effect as well. And combine that
with those things that we've talked about, with the changes
of the esthetic of homes and not having eves and
(15:53):
larger glazing areas.
Speaker 4 (15:54):
It's all sort of cumminating.
Speaker 3 (15:55):
We've got this perfect storm of increased energy coming into
our homes, our homes not preventing that heat from getting
in as much as they would have done perhaps in
the past when we had a different style of windows.
So yeah, it is set to get worse if we
don't use approaches like energy modeling that we have available
(16:16):
through from the Green Building Council.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Thanks for joining us, Matthew Coda.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
That's it for this episode of The Front Page You
can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage
at enzadhrald dot co dot MZ. The Front Page is
produced by Ethan Sills and Richard Martin, who is also
our sound engineer.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
I'm Chelsea Daniels.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
Subscribe to the Front Page on iHeartRadio or whereck you
get your podcasts, and tune in on Monday for another
look behind the headlines.
Kiota.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a
daily podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Presented by the New Zealand Herald.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
You ever get the feeling New Zealand just doesn't know
how to build houses properly. We had the leaky Homes crisis,
where timber framed homes built from nineteen eighty eight two
thousand and four were not fully weather tight, and now
construction experts are warning that tens of thousands of Auckland
families will suffer in overheating terraced houses until designs change.
(00:42):
Terraced houses are being built at pace in Auckland, with
even more expected after the government mooted fifty five thousand
new ones to be fast tracked through the consent process.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Today on the Front Page, we're.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Joined by New Zealand Green Building Council Business Development Manager
Matthew Cutler Welsh to dig into what's gone wrong with
these new homes. Matthew, I think a lot of people
listening will know someone who is suffering from these hot houses.
(01:17):
I can name five people in my office alone. But
what exactly is the issue here?
Speaker 3 (01:22):
Well, there are a couple of issues. One is the
input and the fact that our climate is warming up,
it's getting warmer, But fundamentally, the other issue is how
our houses are designed to respond to that, which is,
in short, not well. Because we've kind of optimized to
keep warm and we love getting lots of sunlight in
(01:43):
the winter, and that's good. We want that, we want
daylight and we want warmth, but we also don't want
to overheat, and we don't have anything in the building
code that prevents that.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
How widespread do you think this problem actually is.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
It's prolific.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
I mean, we've got we're coming off the peak of
fifty thousand building consent applications a.
Speaker 4 (02:03):
Couple of years ago.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
That has dropped off, but we're talking tens of thousands
of Kiwi families that are at risk of going into
homes that are not going to be fit for purpose.
They're going to be very hot and very uncomfortable. So
it's been happening for quite a while. We've known about it,
and there's not really anything in place to prevent it
(02:25):
from continuing to happen.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
What are some of.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
The design flaws that are causing these houses to overheat
or not easily cool down.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
The fundamental cause of the issue is that lack of
requirement to consider overheating in the building code, and how
that comes to reality is a lot of overglazing. As
I said, we've focused a lot on the view and
getting daylight into homes, and that is a good thing,
(02:55):
but we tend to overglaze a lot of our houses
and we don't have adequate shading. If you look at
a lot of older homes, homes from sort of fifty
to one hundred or more years ago, our sort of
colonial homes, a lot of those had quite small windows
and big verandahs, and we've gone to a much more.
Speaker 4 (03:15):
If you think of a modern house.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
It might not have any eve on the roof, it
might have a flat roof, and it might have a
huge amount of glazing. I've got lots of photos that
I've taken of houses that the entire front of the
house is almost all glass. So dramatically changed the way
we design and build our homes, and that's had a
(03:39):
big influence on overheating.
Speaker 5 (03:43):
So it was the start of twenty twenty two when
I moved into like one of these new built houses
that's just a row of flats, and the day we
were moving in, which was like the middle of summer,
it was getting up to forty five degrees upstairs in
the middle of the day, and then by time you're
trying to fall asleep in this new house, it was
still like thirty degrees.
Speaker 6 (04:05):
The house does have what was we were told was
like a temperature regulation sort of system, but essentially it's
just this fan that you have running twenty four to seven,
which does essentially nothing other than have a little led
screen on the wall so you can get an accurate
reading of what just how hot it is in the house.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
I've seen you describe this issue as being locked in.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
What do you mean by that?
Speaker 3 (04:30):
If you're going for that modern aesthetic. A lot of
these homes are going to be around for at least
fifty years, often longer, and it's very hard to retrofit.
You're not going to people don't intend to take out
or reduce the size of the windows or add in
eves to a house. It's part of the esthetic of
the home, it's part of the overall design, and it's
(04:51):
very costly and it just wouldn't really work to retrofit
some of the changes that would really make the difference
to the performance. Now there are retrofrared options, but if
you're starting from a place that is really suboptimal, then
that can be really tricky to get a cost effective solution.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
Construction Minister Chris Pank told The Herald that he regularly
hears concern from the public about new homes overheating, and
that these concerns were a key reason why he's asked
officials to investigate the new H one energy efficiency settings.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
Earlier in the year or earlier this year. What does
this mean?
Speaker 3 (05:32):
Well, a bit of a mixed message there, and in
the consultation document in the most recent rounds, the Minister
did quite a good job of emphasizing that insulation does
not cause overheating, and we've used the example.
Speaker 4 (05:47):
Of a chili ban.
Speaker 3 (05:48):
Chiliban is very well insulated and it's used to keep
things cool. A well insulated container will keep things warm
just as well as it will keep things cool. There's
a bit of a confusion there potentially around H one
because H one at the moment is seen as an
insulation standard.
Speaker 4 (06:07):
It's actually not.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
It's an energy efficiency standard, but it doesn't have anything
in there at the moment that requires designers to consider
the cooling load in the summertime, and that's what we
really need to be added, and that's why we're advocating
for energy modeling as.
Speaker 4 (06:24):
Opposed to just a calculation or.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
Definitely getting rid of the schedule method, which is the
current proposal, because energy modeling does allow designers to essentially
forecast that risk of overheating.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
If you go back twenty odd years, there was a
period in New Zealand known as the Leaky Homes Crisis,
where thousands of houses and department buildings built over a
twenty six year period were not properly weather tie, causing
them to leak. Why do we keep having these issues
with our houses? Are we just really bad at building them?
Speaker 4 (06:57):
We've got some really good builders in New Zealand.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
Unfortunately, we have a bit of a piecemeal approach to
how we change and evolve our building code and that's
led to it being lagging when we look at other
comparable countries around the world. So even Australia now has
updated their building code to require consideration of cooling demand
(07:21):
during summer, so when they're doing their equivalent of our
age one, it's more involved and it requires a consideration
of how the house will perform during winter, but also
how we will perform during summer we've sort of laid behind,
and others have commented that a lot of our clauses
they don't interrelate very well because if you change one
(07:46):
thing like increase the amount of ventilation, and we have
also increased things like improved our windows, but we haven't
done some other things to cater for better ventilation. And
we haven't required anything around looking at overglazing or a
lack of external shading to reduce the sole hegate of
(08:09):
our windows. So it really comes down to our our
building code just not really getting updated.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
Auckland Council's monthly Housing Update data for November showed seventy
percent of building consents for dwellings were for townhouses, apartments, flats,
units or other attached properties. Right, those are the ones
I guess we're all seeing pop up, you know, the
ones about five townhouses on what used to be one
on one block. Do you think the rapid pace of
(08:50):
construction has meant there are people cutting corners?
Speaker 3 (08:53):
Well, I said before, I think there's some really good
builders out there. Certainly, if there are pressures and opportunity
for making profits, then that there is that risk of
people cutting quarters. I think as long as we have
quite a low standard, then there are going to be
a lot of people who just aim to build to
(09:13):
that low standard and maximize their short term profits. And
the only way we're going to fix that is to
bring up those minimum requirements in the code and how
the code is implemented, because when we talk about the code,
there's a lot of really good objectives and a good
aims of the building code, but it kind of falls
(09:35):
down when it comes to the implementation of the individual
clauses with how we allow things to comply.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
And could that be a problem with the fact that
all these homes are being built to a certain type.
I mean, I guess you walk through some neighborhoods around
Auckland these days and every new build home looks identical
to the twenty.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
On either side of it. Or is that just a
styling issue.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
It's partly a signing issue, but it's also figuring out
how to meet those minimum requirements and make a good
profit and move on to the next project within the
constraints that are there. And if those constraints don't require
any attention to overglazing and lack of shading, then that's
what's going to be produced. Because people maximizing their return
(10:21):
on what they can get for an investment in a
particular piece of land, So that's maximizing the floord area,
maximizing those things that most developers are very well attuned
to what's appealing in the real estate market, and unfortunately
the market doesn't necessarily appreciate or understand what's lacking in
the building code to know that some of those might
(10:43):
look great in the picture, but come the first middle
of the winter and the middle of the following summer
might actually be not comfortable or even not really fit
for the purpose.
Speaker 7 (11:03):
If you build a normal house to the building code,
a building code basically stipidates that you must design it
so that life is protected. And in order to protect life,
basically what you're talking about is making sure that the
roof and the walls don't fall down on top of
someone during an earthquake. That doesn't mean that your house
(11:23):
is livable after the event. It just means that during
the event, it's not going to kill you. It's a
fairly short sighted design criteria.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
So best case scenario, the building code gets changed and
builders are forced to think about how these houses operate
not only in winter, but in summer. As well, what
happens in retrospect with all these thousands and thousands of
homes already having been built. I'm using an insulation as
an example. It's easy to get that into the walls
and into the roof. But what happens if the code changes?
(11:59):
Will people before to change the design of their homes?
Speaker 3 (12:03):
No, but even before that happens. I mean, one of
the things that we offer now is the ability for
the relatively cost effective modeling, and that's why home Star
has included energy modeling for all new homes. So we
would encourage people to do that regardless and in the
intervening time, because it's going to take a while for
these changes to eventually come through to the building code.
(12:25):
Once that does and we improve our building code, that's
going to be great in terms of retrofitting all of
the existing housing stock. That's a really good point because
we have over a million homes that exist in New
Zealand and they are a problem. There is no easy fix.
It's going to be a bit of a case by case.
There are some general things that can be done to
(12:46):
help improve the comfort of those existing homes, and that's
going to be things like looking at external shading. We
don't really do much in the way of external shading
here and that is becoming more popular in places like Australia.
We are seeing a prolific We've seen a proliferation of
heat pumps for a long period of time in New Zealand.
People are realizing that those are equally useful in summer
(13:07):
time as well as winter, and that has potential issues
around energy use.
Speaker 4 (13:12):
But there are going.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
To be lots of people wanting to figure out how
to make their existing homes more comfortable and.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
What are some other ways where we can make homes
more comfortable.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Because I've got a mate who is being forced to
sleep in their downstairs lound room because upstairs is just unbearable.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
In the house that he's living in, So what are
some ways.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
So external shading is a lot more effective than internal blinds. Unfortunately,
it's a little bit trickier to do, particularly.
Speaker 4 (13:43):
If you're a renter.
Speaker 3 (13:46):
It's harder to get things done to the house that's
on the outside of the house. But if you can
stop the heat getting in, that's way way more effective.
If that's not an option, then there are some blockout
blinds and things that can that help with that comfort.
Once the heat's in the home, it's very very hard
to get rid of. So fans do help, and if
(14:09):
they can be used to move air around.
Speaker 4 (14:12):
Particularly if you are able to.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
Get some crossflow into the home, that can often help
as well. But like I said, we are seeing people
rely more and more on heat pumps because once a
home heats up and you're just moving warm air around,
then you really need to get some mechanical calling in
there unfortunately as well.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
Right, and that's the problem.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
Hey, if you are renting, you can't ask your landlord
to do anything about it because it is minimum standard.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
They're meeting the minimum standard.
Speaker 4 (14:37):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (14:38):
And I guess that's another downfall of the Healthy Home standards,
which a lot of people will be familiar with. Those
are geared towards moisture and ventilation and heating, but there's
nothing in there that requires a landlord to address any
concerns around overheating and keeping the place cool, the ability
(15:00):
to keep the place cool in summertime.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
Is this just a sign of the times now.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
I don't mean to bring up climate change, but I
guess we've never really, we've always been concerned about keeping
our houses warm This is kind of the first tranch
of conversations I've seen about keeping our houses cool in
New Zealand.
Speaker 4 (15:20):
I think it's completely appropriate to bring up climate change.
This reality.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
We're seeing record years of higher temperatures.
Speaker 4 (15:28):
We've heard just this week.
Speaker 3 (15:29):
That the number of days that we're going to experience
very hot temperatures is set to quadruple in New Zealand
over the next sixty years. Added to that different urban
environment we're getting with more intensification, we're getting more of
that urban heat island effect as well. And combine that
with those things that we've talked about, with the changes
of the esthetic of homes and not having eves and
(15:53):
larger glazing areas.
Speaker 4 (15:54):
It's all sort of cumminating.
Speaker 3 (15:55):
We've got this perfect storm of increased energy coming into
our homes, our homes not preventing that heat from getting
in as much as they would have done perhaps in
the past when we had a different style of windows.
So yeah, it is set to get worse if we
don't use approaches like energy modeling that we have available
(16:16):
through from the Green Building Council.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Thanks for joining us, Matthew Coda.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
That's it for this episode of The Front Page You
can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage
at enzadhrald dot co dot MZ. The Front Page is
produced by Ethan Sills and Richard Martin, who is also
our sound engineer.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
I'm Chelsea Daniels.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
Subscribe to the Front Page on iHeartRadio or whereck you
get your podcasts, and tune in on Monday for another
look behind the headlines.
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