Perhaps your architect friend meant that it’s too expensive to replace existing windows with double glazing. A friend of mine building a house went for double glazing everywhere, IIRC the windows cost only 30% more than single glazing.
Like most ways of insulating a house it’s only an incremental cost if you do it when the house is built, but painful and expensive to retrofit to an existing building. I say this as someone who spent several weekends crawling around under our house fitting polystyrene to the floorboards and battling spiders.

Auckland… true.. not that much value in building anything good there.

Depends on the way you build in the first place. Me, I like the idea of using almost NO energy and still being comfortable. As it is right now, on a cold day I have am tempted to give names to the rivers of condensate off the windows.

Really, it is NOT hard to build a house that doesn’t take a lot of energy to keep comfortable. It is hard to persuade anyone in New Zealand about that. I mean, if the bathroom doesn’t have sliding glass doors onto a patio it’s hard to say that the house has “great indoor-outdoor flow”.

More to the point, in my little editors letter to the Dom Post I pointed out that the way we discourage people from owning the homes they live in makes it damned hard to get anyone to invest in making homes comfortable.

After all, the renter pays for the electricity, gas, wood or coal to heat the place.

respectfully
BJ

In general, I quite like the old stoical ethos, that originated in days when NZers had no great expectations of comfort in their homes. All those wooden houses built in the 20s and 30s, the wind whistles through the walls! but it won’t kill you. NZ is incredibly lucky to have such a temperate climate, it is surely one of the most humanly habitable places on earth (Ireland is close, very nice place to be during a Euro heat wave).

So stop grumbling and put on a jumper (er and perhaps gloves. Hands get cold sitting at the computer.)

I wouldn’t give people TOO hard a time about wanting to be comfortable.

The point isn’t to tell everyone they have to wear hair shirts and suck it in…. melting in the Summer or freezing in the winter. Proper insulation and glazing is worth three of whatever you use as your primary heating and cooling resource. New Zealand has to correct OTHER problems.

A heat pump may triple the efficiency of your electrical heating, but it costs somewhat in complexity and production. In other words, there are resources consumed in producing the compressor and motor and the rest.

A wood pellet fire is efficient and uses renewable resources as well. It also works just as efficiently when it gets cold. Most all of it is made in NZ as well… unlike the heat-pump.

respectfully
BJ

> “Your microwave oven could be using more power on standby than heating
> food� - what, 700watts, bollox!

But it’s only in use for a fraction of the time. If you use your microwave oven for 15 minutes a day, it’ll consume .175kWh. If it uses 10 watts on standby for the remaining 23.75 hours, that’s .2375kWh. Your standby power and microwave mileage will vary.

Regarding heat pumps, feedback from Consumer Magazine readers suggests that people use heat pumps to keep houses warmer in winter than they would with ‘normal’ electric heaters, so they don’t save much power (but do at least get warmer & healthier homes).

Good idea in theory. However they are almost (as far as I know) always two way, running as aircon in summer. It’s questionable whether the power saved in winter outweighs the extra energy used in summer (against putting up with being hot, using shade and fans, etc).

“Simple resistive heaters” - sorry, but my basic understanding of physics leads me to think that *any* electrical heater is 100% efficient (in electrical energy, not raw fuel terms) as the only significant way power is being converted is into heat, if you see what mean. (Burning a fuel directly is of course somewhat more efficient than using it to generate electricity for heating - although with a portion of our power being generated sustainably I’m not sure which is actually the best).

One should also bear in mind that many electronic circuits (like TV tubes) have a limited number of power cycles they can endure. Since they use energy to make, not having a standby setting could result in more net energy use.

I suspect that when this measure eventually gets implemented (and it will have to be by the EU or a global standards body, not the UK, who have no powers to set equipment standards) they will mandate maximum standby power for various types of equipment, which seems much more sensible.

thanks for your comment. I wonder who packed the bags of common sense and left town. I often wonder as I look at the leaders of the country where the bag went. I sometimes feel we have become too precious and PC instead of just getting the job done. New Zealanders know the results required so why not do it. Just cast your mind back to the terrible time Auckland had with power failure all due to a main simple probably $2.00 shackle. Rusted old and bound for failure. Time we took care of common sense and the small things.

marie hazledine-barber