Sustainable housing is increasingly sought-after by Australians – but how effective are current strategies and products used in sustainable construction?
A study, which sees Queensland University of Technology (QUT) team up with Bondor, aims to find out.
Residential homes in each state constructed using Bondor’s innovative InsulLiving® building products, InsulWall® and SolarSpan®, will be monitored over an extended period of time to evaluate how Bondor’s high performance thermal building system meets the needs of the residents in relation to both energy cost savings and comfort.
QUT’s Dr Wendy Miller and Bondor have been working closely since 2009 when Bondor first began marketing to residential homes. This is their third joint project.
The goal of the project is to develop an Innovations Adoption Toolkit (IAT) that will enable housing supply chain agents to identify and implement innovations with benefits for all stakeholders.
Bondor’s InsulLiving® national sales manager Paul Adams said Bondor’s long-term partnership with Dr Miller and QUT was an excellent way to continually review the benefits of building products and construction methods that promote sustainable living.
“As always, we are excited to be a part of this project and look forward to seeing the results,” he said.
“Anything which works towards a more streamlined and widespread approach to sustainable living is something which we at Bondor are enthusiastic about.”
Dr Miller said the project would look at innovation within all areas of the housing market, from homeowners and real estate agents to builders and manufacturers like Bondor.
“This particular project came about from previous research saying that sustainable housing wasn’t a focus in standard methods of housing construction, and it was hard to cater for customers who wanted something more sustainable,” said Dr Miller.
“So we wanted to find out if there were leaders in the market working on construction methods which lent themselves to sustainable living, and how they were doing so.
“We are hoping to show that doing things differently to ‘business as usual’ has benefits for everyone – the supplier and the consumer.”
Each home under analysis will be measured in a range of areas including temperature, electrical circuits, thermal imaging and air tightness.
The project began seven months ago and ends in 2017, with the first set of results to be available from mid-2015.
Further information on the study and a full overview of expectations: Toolkit for transforming Australian housing: behaviour, culture and practices.
