Just watched you all videos! A lot of likes going on throughout. We have just started the planning stage for a build in Napier. Your guys approach looks similar to what ours most likely will be. We are def going SIPS, air tight, and build to last, only we hopefully will do a lot of the build ourselves. I am very interested now you shared this info on this site and though video. This is something I have been working on building our tiny house on wheels (www.weemakechange.co.nz). I have been thinking about now to apaprach this for years and get the balance right. You can flick me an email or comment here would be great! Thanks

We put in a ducted Daikin system. Can’t recommend a system like this highly enough. We have two units, one for the living area and one for the bedroom wing. Each bedroom has a vent, two in the living area. Then there are two extraction vents on the living room side and two on the bedroom side (one in our walk in wardrobe which has the added benefit of keeping clothes smelling fresh). Ours are in the floor as we didn’t have the cavity space in the roof (due to thick SIPs and wanting to keep a low/flat roof profile) but definitely decide what you want to use during the design stage and factor that into your drawings to get everything fitting/working well.

Like you say, a SIP house is so air tight that you do need a good system to circulate fresh air through the house if you don’t have windows and doors open regularly. You’ll find the house is super energy efficient, it will hold heat really well in winter (a plus for Te Anau!), naturally if you have lots of sun coming in too. In summer, it will hold the heat too, unless you can cool it down with some A/C. I can’t comment on a HRV system as haven’t used them before. The best advice I have for whatever you choose is while the upfront cost may seem high (on top of all the other eye watering quotes!) it’s priceless for years and years of living in a perfect climate year round. We’ve found that is the case over and over again on most items in the house – while at the time of building it was tempting to choose lower priced products for things like glazing, light fixtures, flooring, handles, tap ware etc now we’re in and using them day in, day out, they are well worth every dollar – still look like new and don’t even think about the cost now.

Yes, we did use composite decking from Outdure http://www.outdure.com and highly recommend it. http://www.outdure.com/gallery/gallery-by-industry/ben-kylie-resortdeck Three years on and no fading, no maintenance, no splinters and super fast to install (so install costs low). It is a premium option, about $10 per lineal metre so around Kwila pricing without the hassle. We actually added onto one of our decks a month ago and you can’t see any difference between the new boards and the boards that have been down for three years.

Anyway, hope this helps! Cheers.

We are developing a new build product for manufacturing. Would you know of an engineer that would be able to work with us in the validation of a new SIP product.

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Tracy

Awesome house – congrats!
We are just starting the process of designing a house on a tricky section in Auckland also and your project and style of house is along the lines of what we had mind broadly speaking. We’d love to pick your brain on your experience and what you think of the house now that you’ve been living in it for a while (comfort, sounds proofness, insulation with SIP walls). Would you mind having a quick chat at some stage?

Thanks,
Ben

Yes, Nick and his team at Formance/Method are awesome

It has been a bit stressful however building consent has been lodged and we hope to start building in Titirangi early September.

We’ve gone for a Zehnder system from Fantech and have a log burner.

The guys from EAV are also looking at our electrical and AV works too!