Draughts are the enemy of energy efficient houses

Unwanted draughts are the great enemy of maintaining comfortable temperature in homes.

In the winter leaky house quickly becom

e colder and in the summer it is the reverse.

So in the winter the air you have paid to warm, and used lot of energy to achieve, escapes through the almost invisible gaps, while in summer you have again expended huge amounts energy, not to mention cash, to cool the interior of your house, only to have hot air leaking in.

Melbourne’s South East Council Climate Change Alliance (SECCCA), an amalgam of eight south east municipal councils, has worked hard to educate the community, and itself, about the challenges arising from climate change.

Understanding the limits of its influence, SECCCA has focussed, primarily, on housing and so through a collaborative project has built and set up a display home, which doubles as a community centre, where people can go to learn about planning and building a low energy use house.

Beyond housing, SECCCA considers agricultural emissions, electric vehicles, public lighting, education into schools and resource efficient farming.

SECCCA’s climate change project coordinator, Daniel Pleiter, puts draught sealing at the top “must do” things when building a new home.

He has said that also of critical importance was the orientation of the house on the block, double glazing, solar energy, insulation and shading.

Mr Pleiter has argued that draught sealing for both extremes of weather is so important in terms of conserving energy and the year-round comfort for the occupants, that people should be insisting home builder give it the highest priority.

He said new style material and processes are readily available, but even if those are not used, then a tightening up of general building standards, meaning the elimination of gaps allowing the creation of draughts, would make the home more comfortable and noticeably reduce its energy us.

That lift in building standards, something he said was relatively easily achieved, although it required some training, the correct positioning of the house on the block, insulation, solar energy and shading were relatively cheap, easy to do and would have measureable impact on both comfort and cost.

Mr Pleiter said builders were the first line of attack in improving Australia’s housing stock suggesting they needed to work hard to ensure homes they built were draught proof.

Selandra Community Place is a collaborative process involving the City of Casey, Stockland, Henley Properties Group and the SECCCA.

Members of Slap Tomorrow from Shepparton, together with the City of Greater Shepparton’s Sustainability and Environmental Officer, Mr Travis Turner, recently inspected the display building and spent nearly three hours talking with Mr Pleiter.

Slap Tomorrow is advocating for a similar house to be built in Shepparton illustrating advantages and cost savings to Goulburn.

Adding community gardens to our parks would help build our resilience

Morning walks regularly take me past two or three of Shepparton’s small community parks south of the railway station.

One of Shepparton's many
small parks that could easily
be a community garden.

This mosaic of parks was once the focus of activity with regular gatherings, kids playing and people talking, adding much neighbourhood building and bonding.

With rare exceptions, and one is Victory Park in St George’s Road for with a cricket pitch and being big enough for soccer is used regularly, most have fallen largely into disuse.

The City of Greater Shepparton has invested, in some cases, in the establishment sophisticated and safe play equipment, but missing, mostly, is the throng of kids and adults that would bring life to the parks.

A fellow who lives near a park said that it was once a space used every two or three weeks for an event organized by a former local councillor, but now it was largely unused and simply little more than a “short-cut’ for pedestrians.

A retired fellow, who lived close to a nearby park when his kids were young, said they always wanted to play there, but now its use, despite having a sophisticated and safe playground, had dropped close to zero.

The parks, well cared for and ringed by houses are a wonderful community asset and are perfectly placed to play a critical role in helping those nearby feed themselves as a different future emerges.

Beyond being the perfect place for community gardens they are equally a perfect space to launch a community strengthening program; a program that hopefully would allow escape from the individualism that has predominated for decades, but happily goes missing when communities are troubled by disaster, as is evident with such things as bushfires.

Realities, facts that are clearly indisputable, point to the importance of the City of Greater Shepparton taking the lead, that is what leaders are meant to do, to begin a movement that would see our mosaic of parks become, in addition to what they already are, community gardens.

The present picture in Australia is one of plenty, but with the rapid depletion of various fossil resources such as oil, gas and phosphorous (an essential ingredient in fertilizers and without which most of Australia’s ancient soils will grow little), and to further complicate things, top soil, the abundance we enjoy is finite.

Living on the driest of continents, we need to do all possible to save water and with a whole neighbourhood contributing to just one garden, such conservation is possible.

Listening to many of Australia’s leading thinkers who have no obvious ideological bias or links to various lobby groups, say we have passed our economic “sweet spot” and with the resources boom in retreat, our future resilience is linked to far simpler things; things such as community gardens.