Feel the difference of a better home

Comfortable, healthy homes with deeply imbedded passive sustainable design principles can make your home healthier and have the added benefit of costing less to run and help to drastically reducing our household carbon footprint. 

Maximising the sustainability of your home not only reduces your environmental footprint, but it drastically enhances internal comfort. If the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything – it is that our homes genuinely are our castles and if we are spending lots of time indoors – living, working, studying, entertaining and relaxing we definitely want them to be as comfortable as possible.  

You can feel the difference between an efficient, sustainable home and one built to minimum requirements, and there are tangible health benefits too.  

Homes with a more comfortable temperature year around require less active heating and cooling and help to keep our bodies at a more comfortable temperature more often which is excellent for our health and our body’s ability to more effectively fight off disease. Mechanical ventilation systems in combination with air filtration can provide homes with clean, tempered air and protect indoor spaces from dust, allergens and pollens.  

Homes that optimise natural light and ventilation and are constructed where possible with natural, low Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC) materials enhance the mental and physical health of their occupants. Homes that are all electric, with no gas connection, can be 100% powered by clean energy, either generated and stored on site with solar panels and battery systems, or purchased from the grid. As well as embracing clean energy, all electric homes can have additional health benefits, for example choosing induction cook tops over gas reduces the likelihood of respiratory conditions such as asthma and are much safer to cook on, not to mention removing pressurised pipes of highly flammable poisonous gas from within your home. Parents can tell you how much happier they are when their kids are cooking pancakes on an induction cook top – no open flame, no overheating frypan, and no chance for it to be left on accidently!     

Reducing the energy requirements of your home with passive design and energy efficiency measures also provides for the remaining operational energy requirements to be generated on-site through solar panels during the day with battery storage providing energy captured from the sun to power your home or even charge your car/ bike in the evening.  

For HIP V. HYPE Directors, Liam Wallis and Katya Crema, moving into an 8+ star energy rated home at our Davison Collaborative project at the start of Melbourne’s lockdown in 2020, “really highlighted the benefits of a sustainable home.” The Davison Collaborative integrated passive design principles that maximise natural light and cross ventilation with solar panel and battery storage systems, an electric heat pump for hot water and a heat recovery ventilation system. These measures allowed the homes to be 100% fossil fuel free in operation by eliminating the need for gas or coal powered energy. Spending 23 hours a day indoors, Liam and Katya came to appreciate having a home that “constantly has fresh air, is at a remarkably stable temperature, even deep in winter, and requires very little energy to run.”  

You can feel the difference between an efficient, sustainable home and one built to minimum requirements, and there are tangible health benefits too.  

Six months after moving in, with near full-time occupancy throughout the winter months due to Melbourne’s COVID-19 lockdown, the benefits of living in an energy-efficient, well insulated home were clear – the three-bedroom, two-bathroom dwelling was using 9 kWh of energy a day and feeding back 2 kWh of energy to the grid, using 33% less than a home with the same number of occupants in the area.  

The homes were constructed with the Structurally Insulated Panel System (SIPS), that provides for airtight, highly insulated living spaces.  

“It’s the difference between seeing your breath when you wake up in the morning in winter and waking up and being able to walk to the shower in bare feet, even without having the heating turned on”, said Katya.   

The homes are fitted with a heat recovery air filtration system which draws old air out and pumps fresh air in. The system had a teething period and took a few weeks to be fully operational in Liam and Katya’s home, “I’m almost happy that we moved in with the system not working,” said Liam, “just to appreciate how much of a positive effect it has”. The difference the system makes when living in an airtight house is palpable and has proved invaluable for spending long periods indoors. “The filtration system is worth its weight in gold, the house always feels fresh, we haven’t once felt ‘stuck’ indoors,” agreed Katya.  

“The filtration system is worth its weight in gold, the house always feels fresh, we haven’t once felt ‘stuck’ indoors,”