Re: Environment friendly Living

EDIT: Note that this thread was started by another poster. For some reason, the opening post was removed. I am not the OP!

Good subject.

To kick things off, I offer the following.

A supposed "energy efficient" home is often far from environmentally friendly.

Energy and water efficient appliances can be bought for any home, they are not exclusive to new homes.

The modern new home trend is for black rooves with large evaporative air conditioners sitting on top. Add the obligatory black driveway and the resultant harsh heat signature contributes substantially to the Urban Heat Island effect.

Black rooves should be strongly discouraged and heat reflective paint should be mandatory use on all new homes, renovations and driveways.

Cement production is a massive contributor to greenhouse gas production. Information about the use of alternative driveway materials should be made available and their use encouraged.

Every house sits on land that once had trees and grass. A 25 sq m lawn produces enough oxygen to supply a family of 4 and it provides a cooling effect for the immediate area, unlike synthetic grass or concreted areas. It's dense root system also sequesters carbon.

http://www.greenwayturf.com.au/environment.asp

The % of porous area on most new house blocks is very small. This is detrimental to ground water recharge, a growing environmental concern.

New homes should be required to off set the destruction of the block's natural environment by having a % of the block set aside for environmental contribution and ground water recharge.

Evaporative air conditioners typically use 1 litre of water per minute. It should be a mandated requirement to have a water tank to off set an evaporative cooler's water use.

Many new house designs cannot breathe and this can lead to condensation issues in many areas. It is an emerging problem.

Skylights should be encouraged.

Roof gardens are well known in many other countries, particularly Germany, but virtually unknown in Australia. These utilise an otherwise unutilised area for entertainment, clothes drying, vegetable production, PV generation and a host of other uses. With increasing numbers of two and even three storey homes being built on tiny blocks, surely this is the future.

EDIT:
Hmmm, for some reason, the Opening Poster's post has been deleted and I now appear as the OP!

It did link a blog but I didn't think that the content was business advertising but I may have missed something. Can't remember who the OP was.

I think the black roof phase is dying out now. Where we built the vast majority of houses have gone with pale colourbond although the digusting plastic grass abounds.

Lots here to talk about indeed. I agree there's a huge difference between building a sustainable house and an environmentally friendly house - they are two different concepts. We're building something that has the future potential to go off grid, it's sustainable in that it shouldn't need heating and cooling most of the year (and won't have heaters at all, but will have evap air con because we do get a couple of 37-43 degree WEEKS where we are ) - but we aren't trying to be environmentally friendly - instead we're trying to build something that will last, be built once, resist the harsh arid environment we're in, resist the termites, resist two small boys and reduce the need for ongoing electrical thermal control. We're a bit slap happy with the concrete, doing double brick - but we're doing simple zincalume roofing, air vents, properly positioned to the sun blah blah blah too.

The black roof and black tiling and black paving option has us laughing. It's crazy to do that in the Aussie homes.

The big one that gets me is the number of houses that don't get built with proper eaves, proper alignment to north etc. Also rather insane.

I'm not sure whether roof gardens are a good idea vs rainwater collection. Roof gardens require a change in our standard roofing practice (the standard is wood frame yes? Which won't carry a roof garden, nor would wooden frame internals?) because of their sheer weight. They are a nice idea but maintaining them (how much water would you have to put up there?) and the increased building requirements might make them impracticle for our environment. In Europe etc they are being used for thermal properties we just don't need. If you mean roof top living areas though... there's some potential there - again we'd have to rethink the standard Aussie home design though.

Water runoff and ground water regeneration is a significant issue, but it's not just houses, it's carparks, roads, all manner of infrastructure. Should we expect similar from all infrastructure owners?

^^ All good advice and I agree wholeheartedly.



I can't speak for other councils other than those on the northern beaches here in Sydney but our council ( Warringah ) has a 60:40 ratio of hard surface to landscaped area. Manly council has an open space then a soft open space criteria ( depending on which sub-zone you are in ) which works out on average to something similar to Warringahs,
I'm sure these councils would like the soft landscaping areas of each dwelling to be higher but as these suburbs were laid down a long time ago, I think that would be very hard to change.
What concerns me is that in some newer housing estates which sees the average suburban block becoming smaller ( 450 sq m ) following a state govt decree to help slow urban sprawl the amount of green space for each block is becoming ridiculously small. Some of them are ending up with postage stamp sized backyards which inevitably leads to the problems mentioned in the posts above.

Stewie

Wow, 450m2 blocks... that's a luxury!

Up here the new satellite cities of South East Queensland such as Yarrabilba have average sizes of sub-300m2.

Would love to see how they can get away with putting more than 200m2 on them, as there'd really be nothing left other than a concrete garden the size of a cat litter dish!

There was talk of making some blocks even smaller than that. It would make it near impossible to really make them eco friendly.