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Energy Warm Homes Project
Useful links
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.
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
The EECA has funding available for energy efficiency improvements.
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. The publications are set out in chronological order (look for October 2006) beneath the corporate publications.
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.
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.
The photo used in this page was provided by Greater Wellington Regional Council.
Last updated: 22 July 2009
