2023 Good Friday Appeal Charity Home
2023 Good Friday Appeal Charity Home (copyright Henley Arch Pty Ltd.). For the second year in a row, Sustainability Victoria has collaborated with Henley Homes to deliver the Good Friday Appeal Charity Home. This luxurious all-electric, 7 Star home is packed with sustainability features ensuring the home is comfortable, healthy to live in and kinder to the environment, all while saving the new owner 66% on their energy bills.
Snapshot
House Design: Henley Electra 35, featuring the contemporary Novello facade.
NatHERS energy rating: 7 stars.
Energy efficiency achievement: High – all electric, Net Zero Emissions.
Other features: All electric appliances; 6.24kW Solar PV system with 10.08kWh battery, EV Ready.
Size: 274m2
– 4 bedrooms, 2.5 bathrooms, 5 living spaces, and 2 car garage.
Annual emissions: -1.74 tonnes CO2-e
Annual energy cost: $515
Comfort, health, quality and savings
Energy-efficient homes are better for the environment and better for your hip pocket. By including energy efficient features in your new home, you can significantly reduce running costs, improve the quality of your home and ensure it is more comfortable to live in year-round. By choosing to build all-electric with solar PV, you can take control of your energy consumption and protect yourself from the rising cost of energy in the home.
Comfort
More comfortable than a standard build
- Consistent internal temperature; not too hot and not too cold.
- Not draughty.
- Quiet.
- Full of natural light.
Contributing features
- Insulation: extra care was taken when insulation was installed, and thickness of insulation is above minimum standard, therefore reducing the transfer of heat. Additional insulation is installed in internal wet area walls and between floors also helps to reduce noise between spaces in the home.
- Draught seals: these have been installed on all windows and doors, and additional sealing was completed at the plaster stage, helping to minimise air leakage and uncomfortable draughts. The decision to avoid cavity sliding doors also helps to reduce draughts in this home.
- Orientation and shading: the home’s main living areas face North. This enables the home to take advantage of the winter sun, keeping these rooms light and bright. Shading helps to keep this home cool in Summer while still allowing access to plenty of natural light.
- Windows: high performance double-glazed low-E windows and doors keep warm air in during winter and hot air out during summer, with up to 70% less heat loss. Double glazing also reduces external noise. Careful decisions about the size and placement of windows also helps contribute to keeping this home comfortable.
- Thermal mass: tiled floors in the main living areas add thermal mass, absorbing heat from the winter sun and releasing it during the night. Thermal mass helps to maintain a steady internal temperature and reduces the need to use heating systems.
Induction cooktop, 2023 Good Friday Appeal Charity Home (copyright Henley Arch Pty Ltd.). Health
Promoting improved health and wellbeing
- Reduced likelihood of mould and mildew.
- A comfortable temperature inside the home promotes a better night’s sleep.
- Healthier air.
Contributing features
- Appliances: all-electric appliances including an induction cooktop contribute to healthier indoor air. Induction cooking avoids the release of harmful pollutants released by burning gas including carbon monoxide and formaldehyde. Gas use in the home has been linked to childhood asthma.
- Ventilation: all exhaust fans and the kitchen rangehood are vented externally, helping to avoid the build-up of moisture in building cavities and ceiling and reducing the risk of mould forming in the home.
- Windows: double glazed windows reduce external noise and contribute to ensuring the home maintains a healthy indoor temperature.
Quality
Confidence that the house was constructed to meet the correct standards
- Minimal insulation gaps, with verified insulation coverage of above 98% in the walls, floors and ceilings.
- A verified air permeability rate of 7.67 m3/h/m2 @ 50Pa making it less draughty than a minimum standards home.
Contributing features
- Extra sealing behind the walls: use of additional sealing treatments between the slab and frame, around the windows and fixed services for a more air-tight home.
- As-built verification: this assessment has been conducted and passed to confirm insulation coverage and airtightness meets or exceeds required standards.
Savings
More money in your pocket and less impact on the environment.
- Estimated annual dollar savings: $1,016.
- Estimated annual energy savings: 39,266 MJ.
- Estimated annual emissions: 1.74 tCO2-e.
Annual energy and utility bill savings of 2023 Good Friday Appeal (GFA) Charity House
| GFA House baseline (if it were a standard mixed fuel 7-star home with solar PV and battery) | GFA House (actual) (7-star – all electric with solar PV and battery) | Savings [%] | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Annual energy use | 32,760 MJ | -6,506 MJ | 120% |
| Annual energy bill | $1,531 | $515 | 66% |
Annual energy and utility bill savings of 2023 Good Friday Appeal Charity House when compared to the same home if it were mixed fuel. This assessment was conducted using Sustainability Victoria’s Whole-of-Home Pilot Tool.
Contributing features
- 7 Star NatHERS rating: this home achieves a 7 star NatHERS rating; From October 2023 the minimum rating for new homes will increase from 6 to 7 stars out of a possible 10, making homes cheaper to run, more comfortable to live in and more resilient to extreme weather.
- Solar PV and battery storage: a 6kW PV system ensures the home generates more energy than it consumes and a 4.98kWh battery means more of the energy generated on site is consumed in the home. The PV and battery storage system result in an annual utility bill savings of $1263
- Energy-efficient appliances: all-electric energy-efficient appliances paired with solar PV ensures the home offsets its operational emissions, making it net zero. The ducted electric reverse-cycle heating system is 35% cheaper than gas ducted heating and the heat pump hot water system is 37% cheaper than gas instantaneous hot water.
More information
To learn more about the home, visit Henley Homes and Villawood Properties Charity Home and watch the video.
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Visual summary
The video shows the 2023 Henley Good Friday Appeal Charity Home. Representatives of Henley, Sustainability Victoria and Efficiency Matrix tour the home and discuss its energy efficiency features and the benefits of building all-electric
The speakers are:
Sarah Fiess, Team Lead Sustainable Homes, Sustainability Victoria
Aimee Callahan, Henley
Mike Evans, Henley
John Konstantakopoulos, Efficiency Matrix
Text
Representatives of Henley, Sustainability Victoria and Efficiency Matrix tour the 2023 Henley Good Friday Appeal Charity Home and discuss its energy efficiency features and the benefits of building all-electric.
Aimee: Welcome to Henley's beautiful Electra 35.
It's actually a 36 square home, and it's got four beautiful, spacious bedrooms, five living areas, and a grand alfresco.
Sarah: Lovely.
It's also part of Sustainability Victoria's 7 Star Homes program.
So Sustainability Victoria, on behalf of the Victorian Government, has been working with Victorian builders to improve the energy efficiency of these beautiful new homes and this is a great example.
Aimee: Yes, yes it is.
This is actually a 7 star home and it produces more energy than it consumes, which makes it a net
zero house, which is fantastic.
Sarah: So the new energy efficiency standards come in in October 2023, and that will mean we move from a minimum of 6 to a minimum of 7 stars for all new homes. And this is a great example of a 7 star home.
Can you tell me a little bit about what makes that possible?Aimee: Yes. So we were very fortunate. We have great orientation with this block. So we have northern access into the main living areas. We also focus quite heavily on window sizing and location and obviously the use of double glazed windows really helps us out there. We've got insulation all throughout the home, which is fantastic, and we really tried to focus on some thermal mass with our flooring. So we've got tiled flooring to our main living areas, which obviously helps.
Sarah: Yeah, it does. And it also means the home is going to be cooler in summer and warmer in winter, which I think is going to be great for the climate resilience we need for our homes in the future.
Aimee: Yes, it's fantastic.
Sarah: [New] Energy efficiency standards also include the introduction of a whole of home energy use budget, which looks at the appliances in the home, such as heating, cooling and hot water and lighting.
Aimee: Yes, that's correct.
And with the help of the Seven Star Homes Program and Sustainability, Victoria's whole of home pilot tool Henley has actually been able to demonstrate savings of up to 70% with the use of all electric and solar, which is just fantastic.
Sarah: So Mike, the new all electric homes, they tend to be cheaper to heat, cool, and run than traditional gas and electric homes that we look at. So can you tell us a little bit about what the energy savings would be for at this home?
Mike: Certainly, so the new home owners of this rather large house would expect to pay around about $515 per year on their total energy bills. So that represents a saving of around about $1013 per year over this exact same house in dual fuel configuration. We've achieved a lot of that via the ducted heat pump heating and cooling. We have a heat pump hot water system as well, and also we don't have the gas meter coming in, so around about $338 per year on connection or service fees.
Sarah: Fantastic. And all those savings are going to be passed on to the new homeowner
Mike: Every year. Yep.
Sarah: So, John, can you tell us a little bit more about as built verification?
John: Sure, so when we modelling these homes for its energy efficiency capabilities, we assume that all of the walls and the ceilings are completely airtight, but also very well insulated. In fact, perfectly insulated.
So when we actually do our process of ABV for the Sustainability Victoria 7 Star program, we install a blower door and induce a pressure differential for the building envelope, and when we’re inducing that pressure differential, we can feel leaks coming from all the different holes around the building envelope, which contributes to the level of air tightness of the home. And then we also go through and with the temperature differential between inside and outside we can document where there might be insulation missing on the ceilings or the walls, which goes towards a percentage of uncoverage.
Sarah: And that helps those homeowners get that certainty, in the quality of the product that they're
getting at the end of the day.
John: Correct. Because we document exact locations of where these issues are so that the builder can go ahead and remediate those before handover.
Sarah: Fantastic.
Mike: So Sarah, thanks for coming to take a tour of our Henley Electra 35.
Sarah: It's a wonderful home and 7 stars, all electric, too, so thanks so much.
Aimee: No worries, lovely to have you.
<End of transcript>