New science

The majority of residential buildings worldwide are ventilated through natural ventilation, infiltration and exhaust fans. Up to 30% of space heating and cooling load are due to air infiltration. Air infiltration is a nonlinear phenomenon which is dependent on the air leakage of the building envelope and the weather-driving forces (wind and indoor-outdoor temperature difference). […]

The following graphs show the distribution of ratings by state for new Class 1 dwellings rated between 1 January 2015 and 29 August 2016 with AccuRate and from 27 April 2016 to 29 August 2016 with BERSpro. In these periods there have been a total of 25,488 ratings completed for new Class 1 dwellings using […]

With the Certificate data stored in the Hstar portal, CSIRO is able to extract building data to understand what is being designed.  As time goes by a more complete data set will be available, however, we have a few interesting facts from the initial data collected over the past 12 months from over 24,000 ratings […]

How well houses are sealed against air leakage can have a significant impact on their energy efficiency. Until now, little data has been collected on newly built houses to quantify their air-tightness. CSIRO has recently completed a project to quantify the air-tightness of current housing construction around Australia. Results were mixed, however, the average air […]

Air infiltration modelling Air infiltration is the unintended flow of air into a building through the cracks in the structure due to pressure differences across the building envelop caused by wind and stack effects resulting from the inside-outside temperature difference, and internal mechanical ventilation systems. With the improvements of window products and building insulation, air […]