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.

Epiphany-like experience seemed somewhat prophetic

Suddenly, I was saddened that this is all going to slip away.

Melbourne's Swanston St in
 the midst of its redevelopment.

The epiphany-like experience engulfed me as I crossed Swanston St walking toward the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas.
It was not a longing for any specific thing, rather the perceived erosion of the cacophonous life and the overwhelming and embracing sense of community that existed as thousands went about their disparate affairs in a wonderful public, shared space.
The Melbourne experience was little more than what I frequently feel in Shepparton - a microcosm of bubbling life in which individual intents are different, but from which intuition discerns co-operation and collaboration.
Melbourne’s spacious inner-city streets, which some claim were the outcome of a misinterpretation of street plan dimensions, a refreshing error, have always had a welcoming and wonderful human-scale about them.
Central Melbourne is emerging from an epoch in which the motor car had almost uninhibited dominion of the streets with the pedestrian pushed to the fringes.
That, however, is changing and Swanston Street is being redeveloped to make it essentially car free and people will again prevail, although Melbourne’s wonderful trams will still course up and down the street.

Roy Neel

As I write the sounds of what could be a dying dinosaur reach my Ashenden St home from the Springcar Nationals at the city’s showgrounds as people engage in an activity, which I can understand, but within a few decades be something people will equate with the final deathly moans of the petroleum era.
The epiphany-like Swanston St experience and the Springnats appear at first glance to be unrelated, but they are not for the purpose of my visit to Melbourne was to hear the Adjunct Professor of Political Science from a Tennessee University and Al Gore chief of staff and former U.S. assistant secretary of state, Roy Neel, talk at the University of Melbourne about a just and sustainable post carbon economy.
Prof Neel gave optimistic and pessimistic views of how the world will unfold between now and 2050 and in either scenario pedestrians will still be in Swanston St, trams will be doubtful and nor will I, anyone else for that matter, be assaulted by the noise of events such as the Springnats.
The unanswered question, of course, will be: “What will the mood of the people be like?” after decades of living in an energy-depleted world with a desolate landscape troubled by massive weather events or living and surviving in a world that is understandable, but substantially changed from what exists.
That sounds, rather apocalyptic, but Neel’s pessimistic scenario was just that and although his optimistic scenario was somewhat better, it demanded understanding that civilization’s survival rested with co-operation and the embrace of the “other”.