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How does your home rate?
Home » Blog » Lynda Brendish » How does your home rate?Rate your home's energy efficiency with Homestar, a new online assessment tool
Photo by Stuart Pilbrow via Flickr
In Home Sick Home (Good #6), a look at how damp homes contribute to health problems in New Zealand, we reported a full one million of the 1.6 million homes in New Zealand are inadequately insulated, according to a 2008 study from the New Zealand Business Council for Sustainable Development (NZBCSD).
The study goes on to say that a whopping 45 per cent of homes are mouldy.
Those numbers are staggering and—when you think about it—unacceptable for our health, wallets and the environment.
Now, as our sister blog at Design Daily reports, a free online assessment tool, called Homestar, has been developed to help home-owners judge the energy efficiency of their home and suggest ways to improve it.
From Design Daily:
The free online assessment— a collaborative effort between BRANZ, Beacon Pathway and the New Zealand Green Building Council—covers areas like insulation, heating, water use, waste, ventilation and indoor air quality. Among other features, it also calculates a value rating—from one to ten stars—based on these factors. It also provides information on cost-effective upgrades and other available options for improving home health, comfort and efficiency.
But it's not only current home-owners who look set to benefit. If widely used—the assessment is not mandatory—Homestar could become standard required information for prospective buyers when comparing homes.
Read more at Design Daily.
