Other Resources

Providing independent information and links to guidelines and tools to help design and construct sustainable buildings.

Building Rating Schemes/Tools

This section contains information on New Zealand’s building rating tools.

Homestar

Homestar™ is a New Zealand home rating and advisory tool that examines a broad range of home performance and resource consumption-related issues and is applicable to both new and existing homes.

The tool helps people assess the intrinsic value of their homes using a robust framework adapted from similar tools throughout the world, based around key indicators of warmth, health and resource performance.

A star system is used to indicate the overall performance of the house and ranges from 0–10. A 10-star rated home is an exemplar house across all areas of energy, comfort, health, water, waste, operation, proximity to amenities and material management.

The rating tool has three interactive levels – for homeowners, building professionals and certified Homestar™ assessors.

TUSC

TUSC – Tool for Urban Sustainability: Code of Practice – provides web-based tools for sustainable urban planning. These include:

  • a site scoping tool – allowing you to access council GIS databases to view a site and details its infrastructure
  • a site tool – which evaluates the amount of energy and water the house potentially will use
  • a neighbourhood tool – for evaluating a proposed neighbourhood's transportation/roading, amenities, parks, green space, water use, stormwater and wastewater, social issues and economics to decide if it will be sustainable.

TUSC has been developed with support from the Waitakere City Council and the Ministry for the Environment.

There are a number of overseas energy-related tools which have some application in New Zealand, such as the Canadian-based online software programme RETScreen.

RETScreen can be used to evaluate the energy production and savings, life-cycle costs, emission reductions, financial viability and risk for various types of energy efficient and renewable energy technologies (RETs). The software is free to download and the website includes data and case studies. Energy studies include technologies such as wind energy, solar hot water, solar space heating, biomass heating, passive solar heating, ground source heat pumps, photovoltaics and wind energy. Climate data for various locations in New Zealand is available.