ABSTRACT

No two sites, locations, designs or lifestyles are the same, so a key question is how do you compare the performance of different ecohouses? In this chapter we offer three different ways of assessing ecohouse performance in different regions of the world. The Nicol graph gives you an indication of the climatic challenges faced by a designer in a particular climate – how much heating or cooling the building will need to keep people comfortable indoors. By counting the carbon emissions from different comparable houses you will see the scale of that local climatic challenge, as well as how efficient a building is, and how much of its energy is generated by renewable zero-carbon sources. Environmental accounting methodologies, such as ecological footprinting, can provide important insights into those factors which are most important in minimising the environmental impacts of your lifestyle, such as your travel and dietary, as well as energy impacts. As the old saying goes, ‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’, so here are three very different ways of measuring the performance of houses and each may be useful in showing how different buildings rate against each other, but even more importantly they provide tools that will help designers improve their grasp of the key issues at hand and also home owners with tools to understand their own impacts and form effective action plans to reduce them.