We are destorying our buildings

How did we end up in this mess? A mess that could be totally prevented if we understood sustainable construction methods and adopted passive house construction.

It's a mistake that cost Canada more than $4 billion dollars to fix in 1980

One that is now costing New Zealand $23b (with some estimates as high as $47b) due to decisions made in the early 2000s.

And now we are in 2024, it looks like Australia is has decided, hey lets go down the same path.

We are talking about leaky building syndrome, where houses are not designed or built correctly, and water damages the building envelope. It has nowhere to escape, and then it starts to eat away at the structure. We are ignoring the most basic of building science and at the expense of what?

Going down this path has led to a boom in sustainable construction, passive house design and passive house construction.

But let's explain how we ended up in this mess. Older buildings were able to be old and worked because they had a crazy amount of energy moving from the inside to the outside and the outside to the inside with no resistance. Our buildings get wet through things like rain or moisture movement, but that is totally ok and normal if they dry. Being energy inefficient is what saved these buildings. Running the heater would then dry out any moisture issues in the structure. Then we had a problem where the energy crisis hit, and we worked out we were spending a ton of money to heat or cool our home. 

So people complained that their homes were energy pigs and very inefficient.

To combat this, we insulated our homes like crazy! In doing this, we saved energy as insulation provides resistance to heat or energy. As a result, we changed the physics behind the building. But our buildings still got wet, and they did not dry out due to the insulation. We changed the physics and drying potential of our structure. By introducing insulation to our walls, roofs, and floors, we reduced our buildings' drying potential. we also didn't pay any attention to making our buildings more airtight than we have in the past.

The result of this is that water vapour would move out through the structure and condense, but no longer is there much heat travelling through to dry this moisture (due to insulation's thermal resistance). So now we have somewhat energy-efficient buildings that are rotting and full of mould. We now use materials that are not natural such as plywood or osb. We used to use hard plaster finishes on the inside; now we use paper-lined plasterboard. We changed how we built our homes, but building physics has never changed.

We now have a problem with weather tightness and indoor air quality, and everyone is kicking and screaming because we have a problem. 

But at the moment, we are the dumbest of everyone. We are following the mistake that New Zealand made, and before that, the USA, and even before that Canada made.

These silly decisions have been made in the past, and they cost a fortune to rectify. Now, australia is the dumbest of all, following this path, knowing exactly what the outcome will be. It for this reason we decided to become passive house builders, as we felt this was the best way to become sustainable builders and build homes to last.

In both of these cases, this situation happened during a construction "boom," and there was a massive uptake in the number of homes that needed to be built. Low-cost construction habits and practices were followed without any thought, and there was a large uptake of unskilled trades carrying out these jobs. In Victoria, somehow, we still have not licenced important and skilled trades such as carpenters, concretors, bricklayers, and waterproofers, who have a huge say on how this home will last the test of time.

And hey, yep, that's right, the Australian government wants to build an extra 1.2m homes in 5 years following the same path Canada and New Zealand.

That means if we follow down the path of Canada, USA and New Zealand, which we currently are, there will be 1.2m homes that we will need to fix very soon.

The trouble is that in Australia, we have let dumb and uneducated politicians decide how to build our buildings. These people have no idea how to build a building and wouldn't know the difference between a left- and right-handed hammer!

They are only worried about getting more homes built, not about the outcomes of these homes. They are ignoring decades of mistakes simply just to build more homes.

As a society, we are more worried about the cost of what we build than the durability of our homes.

And i will tell you what cost more: building a home twice because you ignored the mistakes of others in the past and basic building science. 

It's a simple equation.

If you build shit = more shit to fix.

Unfortunately, we are not looking at what mistakes have been made in other countries and have taken the same path that others went down 40 years ago. We know the result, but unfortunately, the government is so short-sighted and would rather spit out 1.2m homes of poor quality because that's someone else's problem to think about in 10 years!

The answer is right in front of us. We need more passive house architects and passive house builders to construct quality homes. Everyone always talks about how they want a sustainable home in Melbourne, but how is that possible if we can't follow basic building science and need to build a home twice? Is there anything more unsustainable?