Our Systems and Materials research
The house as a system
Although we think of the materials our home is made of, we don’t often think of each component working together as a system. In fact, our homes are made up of systems, each with a role to play in the performance of the home. The combination of these systems directly affects the home’s overall performance. We cannot fix one area only without compromises and under-performance in other aspects of the home.
As an example, a house might be clad with weatherboards. The weatherboards, though, are only one part of the wall system. They need to work together with timber framing, building paper, insulation and plasterboard to form a wall which is weathertight, retains heat inside the home, keeps moisture out, and is structurally sound and safe.
Treating the house as a system means the impact of materials can be evaluated in terms of the performance of the systems they are part of. Overseas experience has demonstrated that energy consumption can be reduced by as much as 50% through the use of a systems engineering approach (Build America, 2007).
Setting benchmarks for the whole house
Beacon’s HSS High Standard of Sustainability® takes a holistic view of a home’s performance. We’ve set benchmarks for more than just energy efficiency because we believe it is how the whole house works together that is important: water conservation, indoor environment quality, waste reduction and healthy materials are equally important.
By looking at the home as a system, and the systems within a home, we hope to identify the systems and materials which could be improved. Our focus is finding the systems which can best meet the benchmarks set in the HSS High Standard of Sustainability®.
Cradle to cradle
The environmental impact and performance of systems also needs to be considered from cradle to the cradle. From the energy it takes to make the product, to the resources it uses during operation, to the environmental costs of its disposal or (hopefully) recycling, a product has more effect on the environment than just what we see in our homes. This is where Life Cycle Assessment comes in – it is a method of identifying the environmental impact of a product over its life time.
By using Life Cycle Assessment to gather data on our existing new and renovation projects we hope to gather data on the systems that perform well over their full life cycle.
