2nd Storey with Master Wall

[westminster]

I think it would work well if you were holding the property and not selling. Like WM said we WA people love our double bricks.

Would the masterwall cladding me durable enough for a house to be rented?

It would certainly be durable enough.

I think products like this will become more popular, especially in the more inner city areas where people seem to be more conscious about the environmental impacts of building and willing to accept alternative construction and even pay more for a good sustainable design.

Most examples of alternative design are either in the city or the more rural areas of the metro area. Between 5-30km from the CBD is brick brick brick.

For example Sanj (on here) has built the first ever 9 star rated apartment building in Perth. This will be a major point of difference and attraction for his development.

As blocks become smaller it also makes sense that a lightweight construction material that can be carried (by hand if needed!) from the road to the site also makes sense.

 

[sanj]

Yeah the market is changing but it's hard to get the balance right between sustainability, profitability and practicality. I've had 4 or 5 people wanting to buy them and I'm not even selling and have done zero marketing so I guess demand is there!

 

[HiEquity]

Keep in mind that the insulation benefits are not what they seem.

Everyone focusses on R rating, which is about 1/3 of the picture. This is because the ratings programs model a house as a simple box and ignore reality.

Case in point - cavities are important. In a double brick wall, when the outer course gets hot in the sun, it creates a chimney effect within the cavity that draws in cool air from the rest of the house cavities (which don't have sun on them). This cools down the bricks in the sun and significantly reduces heat transfer to the inner course. Add a radiant and conductive heat barrier (foam with double sided foil) in the cavity and maintain the air gap on both sides and you have a wall that beats massive R-ratings in the real world. R-ratings don't consider any of that effect but put a temperature probe in the wall, or take the tiles off a cavity that is in the sun on a hot day and stick your head over it and you will see the difference is huge.

Likewise, most of the heat transfer from the roof to the house occurs where it is closest to the house (behind the cornices), yet all the insulation goes in the ceiling, ignoring the transition from the cavity to the ceiling, which is where most of the heat flow is.

And again, everyone focuses on the same thing with windows with double glazing, which perform just as badly as single glazing in most cases without a radiant heat barrier (e.g. comfort glass), particularly on west or east walls.

You can have a single glazed double brick house with hardly any insulation that doesn't really need heating or cooling and out performs a 9 star house with these fancy materials if:

- You have lots of north facing windows to heat the slab in winter - no garages on the north side! After a good day in the winter sun that slab will take five days to cool down even without insulation.
- You have no east and west facing windows
- You plant some deciduous greenery around the house or have a vergola to reduce the heat that reflects back into the house from hard surfaces in summer.

This was all demonstrated decades ago by people like Griff Morris in Subiaco but nobody wants to know about it - likely because there is no money to be made out of the basics. Instead most people end up with the icing instead of the cake....

All this R-rating focus and double glazing etc does my head in - it's designed for very cold climates where it makes a real difference. Perth has a mediterranean climate and that has different rules. Yet these modelling programs and star ratings pretty much assume assume we all live in Norway! Or just want air con regardless of whether we need it.

 

[sanj]

That's an excellent post, agree that design is the most important factor but I do think things like cavity insulation and anti con or similar are important.

I'm at upper floor lockup atm and have been in on the hot days recently and it's been very pleasant.

 

[westminster]

Keep in mind that the insulation benefits are not what they seem.

This was all demonstrated decades ago by people like Griff Morris in Subiaco but nobody wants to know about it - likely because there is no money to be made out of the basics. Instead most people end up with the icing instead of the cake....

All this R-rating focus and double glazing etc does my head in - it's designed for very cold climates where it makes a real difference. Perth has a mediterranean climate and that has different rules. Yet these modelling programs and star ratings pretty much assume assume we all live in Norway! Or just want air con regardless of whether we need it.

All true but even Griff would say that brick is a poor performer in terms of thermal efficiencies. Building with poor performers makes design all the more important.

I spent some time with Griff Morris when we were designing our current PPOR. I bought Warm House, Cool House back in the early 2002 and it's getting reread at the moment for our new PPOR.

It is interesting the things they do to make a bad design 6 stars compliant when really they just need to do a better design, better materials (ie give up the black roof tiles) etc etc