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Useful links

There is a lot of information about housing, energy efficiency, air quality and health available online. Below is a list of useful websites to look at.

Get the most from your firewood

The New Zealand Home Heating Association has prepared a guide to the selection, installation and operation of solid fuel heaters (PDF 1.0 MB). This is a detailed guide with a lot of good information including pictures on how to load a wood burner.

Natural Resource Canada has published a website dedicated to wood heating called Burn it Smart! A good place to start is the good firewood section of the website. This explains how best to prepare and store firewood. There are good colour pictures and the detail is easy to understand (Disregard the section on firewood measures as we in use cubic meters to measure firewood in New Zealand).

Natural Resources Canada has also published a guide to residential wood heating. This guide is extensive and covers all facets of wood heating.

Natural Resource Canada have produced a set of video clips detailing how best to collect and burn firewood. Due to the very large size of the files the video clips are not available on the web, nor can they be sent by email. You can order them from us and we will send you a CD.

www.woodheat.org is a non commercial service in support of responsible home heating with wood. This Canadian website is dedicated to all things to do with burning wood. Note that the terms they use are different to the terms that are commonly used in New Zealand.

The Air Resources Board of California has developed a very helpful handbook on burning wood. The handbook contains technical detail using easy to understand language and colourful graphics. Go to the Air Resources Board’s publications page and look for the ‘Woodburning Handbook’.

Energy use

EECA (Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority) has published Getting Warmer by Degrees (PDF 1.4 MB) which is a good consumer oriented resource. It gives advice on what you can do around the house to save energy and keep warm.

EECA are also working on developing a Home Energy Rating Scheme which is going to give a real boost to people’s awareness of energy efficiency, particularly when buying a house.

BRANZ (Building Research Association of New Zealand) has published the most indepth account of how we use energy in our homes. This report, technical in nature, is called HEEP and the executive summary can be downloaded for free.

BRANZ has also pulled together several case studies of energy efficient houses. The design highlights can be found at the Zero and Low Energy House project (ZALEH).

Beacon pathways are building NOW homes as part of an extended research project into how to create affordable homes that are warmer, healthier, cheaper to run and kinder to the environment.

The Centre for Housing Research, Aotearoa New Zealand (CHRANZ) has released “The Impact on Housing Energy Efficiency of Market Prices, Incentives and Regulatory Requirements”. Download either a summary or the full text version from the CHRANZ publications page (http://www.hnzc.co.nz/chr/publications.html). The publications are set out in chronological order (look for October 2006) beneath the corporate publications.

Buying a new heater?

Then check out the appliances’ efficiency first. For heat pumps see EECA’s website on labelling requirements for heat pumps and search for heat pumps on the energy rating website to compare the efficiency of heat pumps before you buy. Similarly, for flued gas heaters you can check the Australian Gas Association’s product directory for an appliance’s efficiency.

Air quality and health

To support the development of the national environmental standard for air quality we carried out an economic appraisal of the costs and benefits of the standard. There is a lot of detail in here on the reason we developed the standard for air quality and what the health benefits are.

This technical report on the health effects of PM₁₀ in New Zealand describes the potential health effects caused by inhaling PM10 in New Zealand towns and cities.

A second technical report issued by the Ministry considers the health effects of carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen oxides (NOx), sulphur dioxide (SO2), ozone, benzene and benzo(a)pyrene (BaP) currently measured in New Zealand. It provides an indication of the extent to which existing concentrations of air contaminants in New Zealand may adversely affect human health.

For more reports on the health effects of air quality see this page, which has a link entitled ‘Studies on Health Effects of Wood Smoke’. This is a long list of studies which have been carried out prior to 2004.

Research on health effects of cold homes

The Wellington School of Medicine and Health Sciences runs the Health and Housing unit. They have published an authoritative account of the positive effects of insulation and heating on the occupant’s health.

The Healthy Housing unit has also published a more detailed account of the insulation study (PDF 254 KB) in the journal of Social Science and Medicine. Using data from the insulation study, a cost benefit study (Word document 177KB) has also been prepared. Although several reports have been published on the insulation study, final results of the heating study are yet to be published. Two interim reports have been published about the heating study, so far.

Referencing the insulation work above, EECA give examples of how their EnergyWise home grants have improved the health of participants in Investing in Insulations for a Healthy Return (PDF 584 KB).

The photo used in this page was provided by Greater Wellington Regional Council.

Last updated: 25 November 2008