It’s the Kiwi dream, to build a bespoke home, which comes at a cost but we’ve worked out how to save money when building, and you’ll be surprised how simple it is.
Over the last 30 years of designing homes and buildings, we’ve learnt a few tricks of the trade which can help save money during the build. Often when you’re comparing prices of different architects and designers it’s not crystal clear who is the best value for money, so going with that low cost, one man band in his shed might sound cheap, but it might cost you during construction.
(The Big One) H1 Insulation Rules
Back in 2023 the New Zealand government introduced updated rules to a part of the building code called ‘H1’. You can read more about these in our blog post here. In short, they increased the required insulation values for floors, walls, roofs and doors/windows of new homes around the country. As you can imagine, everyone freaked out at the extra cost of using higher insulation values for these components of your building envelope.
Not us.
We decided that it all can’t be that bad and found a way to keep the cost down. Many other designers haven’t made these changes which is why we say we can save you tens of thousands of dollars during the build, if you use us to design your home.
(It’s almost a secret, as it’s one of our points of difference, but we’d be selfish not to share!)
In short, there are three ways of calculating the required insulation in your home. An easy method, which is lazy and inaccurate, a semi easy method which again isn’t very accurate, and a hard method which we use, and is very accurate and is where thousands can be saved. Let’s go over them.
The Schedule Method (Easy)
This is where designers just take the table provided in the H1 document as gospel, and specify R6.6 insulation in your ceiling space.
The Calculation Method (Medium)
Here, your designer will put in the size, shape and wall size and window sizes of your home, which is slightly more accurate and can help reduce the required R value in your walls, ceilings etc.
The Modelling Method (Hard)
The best way, and what we at Arcline use. This takes into account the size of the home, where the site is in NZ, the orientation of the home, to name a few items. It is very specific and allows the R values in the envelope of the home.
In most projects around Northland and Auckland, where other designers are specifying thermally broken aluminium joinery ($$$), under-slab insulation ($$$), slab edge insulation ($$$) and increased wall and roof insulation R values ($$$) – we are compliant in specifying double glazed, non thermally broken joinery, with no underslab or slab edge insulation, with very normal R value insulation values in the walls and roof.
This item alone is saving our clients $20,000-$50,000 on their project.
But Isn’t Additional Insulation Good?
Th is true, but you may also have been seeing in the news about homes in Auckland and Northland overheating, often caused by overinsulation. So again, by using the modelling method to determine how much insulation your home needs, we can minimise the risk of using too much insulation, at the same time reducing cost.
Other Ways To Save Money When Building
We’ve only briefly touched on one way to save tens of thousands of dollars when building a home. We have many more up our sleeve which we implement when designing your home, that other designers don’t know about.
