(Content created for a New Zealand HVAC company)
Energy efficiency is an important aspect of home design but it shouldn’t come at the expense of liveability.
These days, sustainability and energy efficiency are the main factors that come into play when designing a new home or renovating an existing one. Ensuring that the building has a low carbon footprint, its materials are procured from sustainable sources, and that the structure is as energy efficient as possible are the predominant goals of architects and designers. Indeed, New Zealand’s Building Code sets out stringent rules regarding these aspects of design and construction.
But as well as being energy efficient and sustainably-constructed, your house also has to be a home. We spend a lot of our time indoors, so your home has to be comfortable. It has to be easy to maintain. It has to have all of the features that you need. It has to be liveable.
So when you are designing your new home or planning the renovation of your existing home, it is vital to consider how liveable it will be. And the key to efficient liveability is fresh air.
A Giant Chemistry Set.
Your house is a big box full of chemical reactions. Whenever you exhale, cook an egg, turn on a light, or spray air freshener in the smallest room, you are creating chemical reactions.
The air coming into your house is laden with chemical compounds (some good and some not so good); the dust on your shoes contains all sorts of stuff; the product you use to clean the kitchen bench is a concoction of some sort.
These are just a few of the components that make up the chemistry of your home:
- Breathing: Respiration produces carbon dioxide and water vapour: lots of water vapour. And it’s not just you. Your pets produce water vapour. Your indoor plants produce it. Your kettle produces it when you make a cuppa. Even the air in your house contains water vapour that condenses as the temperature changes.
- Cooking: When you turn on an element, fire up the gas, or even spin some leftovers in the microwave, you are creating chemical reactions and gaseous emissions that propagate into the air of your house. In addition to the chemistry, your cooking also creates clouds of water vapour.
- Washing: In the shower, you use soap and shampoo…and you create a whole lot of that ubiquitous water vapour.
Houses are very tightly sealed these days. A building’s “envelope” is designed to keep moisture out and keep heat in. So ensuring that you have a good supply of fresh air, and can extract all of the smells, water vapour and other products of your chemical reactions is a vital part of making a home liveable.
Sure, you could just open the windows…that wouldn’t use up any energy at all. But opening up the house lets pollen, noise and airborne pollutants in from the outdoors. A much better solution is to have a system that freshens and controls the airflow within.
It’s All About Control
As well as designing for energy efficiency, you need to consider the systems that make your home liveable. By carefully designing the way that your home’s heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems function, and how easy those systems are to control, you can ensure that your house is comfortable to live in as well as being energy-efficient.
Simplicity versus complexity
If you asked a child in a Kindergarten to draw a house, chances are they would draw a box with a triangle on top of it, with a few square windows. It’s exactly the same when it comes to designing a house. Lots of angles, hips and gullies on a roof, and all sorts of secluded nooks and spaces in the floor plan, might look good on an architect’s desk. But when it comes to making a house an efficiently livable space, keeping it simple is the key.
Automate your air
The key to efficient livability is using automation to circulate, clean and refresh your air. Your HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) system should efficiently extract and purify the air inside your home, introduce fresh air from outside when it’s needed, keep you warm when it’s cold and cool when it’s hot, and do all of this with a minimum of input from you.
An effective HVAC system should be fully automated so that all that you have to do is live happily and comfortably inside while your fresh air supply is managed and maintained for you.
A River of Fresh Air
Fresh air should flow through your house like a river. The smells and vapours created by you and your family – along with your pets, your plants and your visitors – should be carried away, and your home’s air should be as pure and fresh as if it had just been bottled on a Central Otago mountain.
Extraction
The kitchen is one of the main places where the chemical reactions of your household take place. So ensuring that the air of your kitchen is extracted and replaced correctly is a vital part of making your home efficiently liveable.
A perfect example of this is the design and placement of your range hood. Wall-mounted hoods, with automatic controls that start the extractor fan whenever you turn on your stove, are far more efficient than hoods mounted over island cooktops. During the design phase, you should ensure that there are extra outlet points close to the range hood for plugging in such appliances as kettles and toasters so their smells and vapours can be whisked away.
Bringing the outside in
In the olden days, opening up the windows and doors during the day was the only way to ventilate a house. But today’s ventilation technology means that fresh air can be refreshed, warmed or cooled, and circulated throughout a building without bringing the outside air in.
This is especially effective if you have family members who suffer from allergies brought on by pollen or aerosols in the outside air. For city-dwellers, being able to keep the windows closed means that the noise of the city can be kept to a minimum.
A Living Space
At first glance, it may seem that using energy to purify and circulate the air in your home is less efficient than, say, opening the windows. But installing an effective HVAC system will ensure that your home is not only energy efficient but is a pleasant place to live. Rapid advances in HVAC technology mean that energy-wise homeowners can now enjoy all of the benefits of fresh, dry, clean air, without having to compromise on liveability.
The crew at Homesol are HVAC experts. They can design a system which will give your home a river of clean, fresh air and make your new house or stylish renovation efficiently livable.
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