BACKCOUNTRY STUDIO

Customers are often asking us what are the best cost effective ways to reduce the energy consumption in their new home. With new materials and new technologies, finding the best compromises could be confusing.

At Backcountry Studio, we believe an energy efficient home always starts with a simple compact design. It is quite common to find pavilion style houses in magazines, but these structures typically contains more surfaces in contact with the outside, which is having a negative impact on their energy consumption.

To illustrate this, we have compared a compact design made for one of our client, to a similar size pavilion house. Both options are using the exact same standard construction materials (complying with the NZ building code).

Option 1 is the typical pavilion house. It is a 70.3 square meter house with a central hallway.

Option 2 is our compact design, it is also 70.3 square meters.

We have entered the two designs in the BRANZ tool, which is calculating the total heat loss for each design.

The pavilion design is having a total heat loss of 128.6 W/K.

The compact design is having a total heat loss of 91.8 W/K.

Which means the pavilion design has a 40% heat loss increase compared to the compact design.

A good energy efficient design should always be compact, no other decisions down the design process will have such a great impact on the thermal performance of a house.