Strawbale House

Andrew, our architect, finished the preliminary drawings a few days ago and as part of that has performed a preliminary energy assessment. The outcome was better than both Rosalba and I expected.

In Andrew’s own words: “It doesn’t get much better than 10 stars!”

To clarify, in Australia, houses are rated according their nergy needs for cooling and heating on a scale from 1 to 10. 1 being “bloody atrocious” and 10 being “as good as it gets”.

Also to put the preliminary energy rating of 10 into perspective, most brick veneer homes currently built in Australia achieve a rating of somewhere between 4.5 to 5.

So, as you might imagine we are quite chuffed about this extraordinary good result, even being preliminary only.

The next thing we are doing now is to speak to an accredited installer of solar panels (photovoltaic) to perform an assessment of our energy needs. Shane from Alternative Energy Solutions is going to meet with us soon to help us with that.

I’ll keep you posted on the outcome of that assessment.