Hit the books

This week began with finalizing our Student housing town planning project; we completed the STORM and BESS assessments and prepared the client’s report. As mentioned last week the project is passing all criteria except daylighting, the building design will likely need to be altered accordingly. In an attempt to pass the daylighting criteria we ran the assessment again with the project as a class 2 building. A class 2 building requires 0.5% daylighting factor (DF) in bedrooms and 1% DF in living rooms, whereas a class 3 building requires 2% DF in all transient living areas. With these changes the project was able to pass, we are now in discussions with the client on how to proceed.  

Early this week we completed another residential town planning project. We are now getting quite comfortable with FirstRate5 NatHERS assessments and did not need to ask Rob/Sean for help so much. This was also our first project to require a waste management plan in compliance with the City of Melbourne’s guidelines. This week we also were able to accompany Peddle Thorp’s team on a site visit to the East Keilor Leisure Centre. On our site visit we attended a meeting with the project manager, contractors, engineers and the council, this meeting mostly consisted of discussing feasibility of designs, delivery dates and resolving conflicts between architectural and structural designs Following the meeting we witnessed the foundation preparation for the leisure centre’s pools.

For the latter half of this week we have been burying our noses in NCC 2019, NCC 2016, Guide to NCC 2019, Handbook Energy Efficiency NCC 2019…. Trying to wrap our brains around the upcoming implementation of NCC 2019, particularly section J. One of the major changes we are looking into is how façades and glazing are now treated as a whole. It is interesting to see how you can trade off the performance of glazing with walls to achieve minimum requirements. At a first view the new code appears to be more stringent but allows greater design flexibility.  This week closed with a briefing from Rob regarding Passive House (Passivhaus), Rob was able to give us some insights into the criteria to achieve certification and the design principles of Passive House.

Next week we hope to further study the NCC 2019, we are currently producing a deemed to satisfy (DTS) building to both the 2016 and 2019 standards. We plan on testing how each standard will perform thermally and hope to publish the results. We also plan to touch on more Green Star and WELL with Sean also meet with superstar ex SBE intern Leah to learn of Rhino and Grasshopper.

More to come…

Thinking about incorporating ESD initiatives into your next project?


Whether you are considering incorporating ESD initiatives into your next project, or you need to demonstrate a commitment to sustainable design to planning authorities, or you need Section J reporting for Building Permit, we would love to hear from you!

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