Why High-Performance?

(How to get the ‘Tesla’ you paid for)

If you paid for a Tesla Model 3, you wouldn’t expect to drive home in a Nissan Leaf, would you?

When people build their own home, they take for granted that a new house will be state of the art, energy efficient, comfortable and healthy. It should comply with the NZ Building Code. They pay good money for it. They expect a ‘Tesla’ home.

Why wouldn’t it be?

Unfortunately, this is not the case. And new homeowners often find this out the painful & expensive way. The NZ Building Code isn’t adequate to guarantee that a new house will be state of the art, energy efficient, comfortable and healthy.

And even if the NZ Building Code was adequate, the process of designing, building and getting code compliance isn’t rigorous enough to guarantee the outcome it promises. It’s not a car production line with quality controls at each stage.

So new house owners struggle to keep their house warm in winter and cool in summer. Or they pay massive heating & cooling bills to be comfortable.

And this doesn’t just happen with ‘cheap’ houses, Architecturally Designed award-winning houses suffer the same poor performance.

3 steps to avoid this and get the ‘Tesla’ you pay for:

1. The first step is to research High-Performance homes, as you are doing now by reading this. To help you with your research, we’ve developed a High-Performance Project Planning Pack. Click here to request yours.
2. The next step is to get a High-Performance Needs & Options Review of your project to analyse the opportunities and constraints. (More on this in a future blog post.)
3. The third step is to find the right Architect to design a High-Performance home for you. (The High-Performance Needs & Options Review will help you with this.)

• Your High-Performance Architect will guide you through the subsequent steps that follow to design and build your home.
• Bonus: make sure any claims about ‘High-performance’ are substantiated. The best guarantee of this is to make sure you get a certified Passive House; the ultimate in high-performance.

The right architect needs to be a good fit for you and they need to know how to design and deliver a High-Performance home, so you get what you pay for.