. But chances are the reason you’re cold is not only due to a polar air mass sweeping the country, but because millions of Australian homes aren’t well insulated.. Homes with zero stars provide little to no protection from the outside climate. On the other end of the spectrum, 10-star homes require little-to-no heating or cooling.
Experts estimate more than 70% of Australian homes were built before 2003. The chart below estimates the number of dwellings in each star category based on when they were built.them to tents. This makes it more costly to heat and cool our homes and harder to bring down emissions.“The way we design and construct is not even suitable for our current climate,” Associated Professor Trivess Moore from RMIT’s School of property, construction and project management says.
Minimum insulation requirements were introduced in the 1990s and a national standard was introduced in 2003.
Many homes will have been renovated since 2003, but experts say most renovations will still be below the current new housing standards. And theThere isn’t a comprehensive dataset of energy efficiency of Australia’s housing stock; experts estimate energy efficiency by looking at how many homes are constructed in between changes to the energy efficiency standards. Guardian Australia followed the same methodology in the chart above.
“We don’t have any trustworthy, robust data about our entire housing stock,” says Prof Moore. “Which mean policymakers are developing policy without good evidence. But also individual households don’t have information about what they could or should be doing to improve the quality of their dwellings.”Dwelling stock for the years between each census are estimated by averaging the number of dwellings added in the period between the census.