Gregory over at The Joy of Home Ownership posed a few very good questions to me about why out house was constructed the way that it is. I’ll go through some of his questions to see if I can answer them well enough.

1. Why is your house built on stilts?
From what I can tell there are a few reasons for this:

• It keeps the house cooler
  – By allowing the breeze to blow under the house it is supposed to help cool the house down. In the older houses that have not had the floors covered up or replaced you can usually even find gaps in the floorboards that are supposed to help even more with the cooling.
• Keeps us away from the critters
  When the Europeans first started coming to this area they wanted to stay as far away from the snakes, crocs, spiders and other insects as they could, so they went up
• Flooding
  Being in the tropics there is always the threat of a lot of rain and flooding. By being up higher it helps keep us away from the water.
• Emulates the style in the Pacific Islands
  I read this somewhere, but of course now I can’t find it. Apparently Captain Cook was quite impressed with how well the huts in the Pacific Island withstood the weather and provided a good home so the style was somewhat emulate in Northern Australia. This also explains the unique shapes of some of our roofs.

2. What is the space under the house used for?

• Most people seem to use the space for car parking, storage and a workshop. I did that at our other place and did it here for the first few months.
• Raising and restumping the houses so that the area under can be enclosed and built in is become more common in the old Queenslanders. This is the route that we have gone with this place. This house is high enough above the flood zone that it should never really be an issue and it is a fairly easy, but not cheap as we are discovering, way to double our floor space.

3. Are there basements or crawlspaces?

• The closest thing that I have seen to this in Australia is wine cellars, but other than that almost all construction is above ground.
• A unique difference to this is Coober Pedy, where a lot of the homes, businesses and even a church are built in old mine shafts.

4. What about using block-work for construction?

A lot of the new homes are build using cinder-block or besa brick construction. Then the weight of the house can sit on the block work instead of stumps. Our house before we lifted had a combination of stumps and block-work for the walls under the house.

We considered using block-work again but decided to use stumps because it is difficult to insulate besa brick and they would have had to build an internal timber frame anyways. The width of the walls would be 10 – 20cm less if we used timber instead of block work and also the exterior finish would flow better from top to bottom.

I found one of my older posts entitled “Why is my house only 5 feet above the Ground?“, which explains one builders explanation of why a lot of the houses are a rather awkward 5 feet above the ground.

If there are any other questions out there please let me know and I will do my best to answer them…

One of the challenges that we face living in such a large and diverse country as Australia is that national standards don’t serve the entire nation. I read an article a while ago about a new 5 Star Energy Efficiency Rating system for new homes and thought that the methods they were using sounded a bit crazy for us up here in the tropics. I wasn’t alone in that analysis as the Queensland Government has decided not to implement that standard in Queensland according to an article I read tonight in our free local weekly paper The Sun – part the Townsville Bulletin.

I do all that I can to make my house energy efficient. Our hot water is not too hot, I use the Air Conditioner as little as possible, our walls are insulated to reflect the heat and we will be insulating our roof with a reflective paint when we have the new roof installed over our deck. The problem with the new 5 Star Rating is that it is written with recommendations for down South in Australia, where it is much colder and they have a very different climate.

Some of the recommendations in the standards are for smaller windows and less natural ventilation. This is crazy for up here where many of the houses depend on large windows and as much natural ventilation as possible to cool the homes. Right now the coolest place in the house (and believe me, our biggest desire up here is to cool the house, not heat it) is the office area where there are two full walls of louvers to let the breeze in. These louvers are fairly new, so once we get our main living area air-conditioner installed they will provide a fairly good seal as well when they are closed to keep the cold inside when it’s just too hot.

My ideal situation would be a house with high cathedral style ceilings and louvers at the peak to allow the hot air to escape and provide plenty of natural ventilation. This combined with plenty of louvers, insulation, overhead fans, window glazing and good exterior shading would provide a house that would remain naturally cool without having to rely too much on the air conditioner.

I was in a fantastic example of a house like this in Fairfield Waters. It is the Fairfield Waters GreenSmart display home and the natural cooling was good enough that when I walked in the house in the middle of summer I was sure the air conditioner was on, but of course it wasn’t. This home would not meet the new 5 Star rating, but for the climate up here it was great.

In Victory these regulations will increase building costs by about 6% or $15,000.
By 2020 the regulations will cost $31.3 billion dollars and contribute only 0.8% of Australia’s greenhouse gas abatement
These standards would virtually eliminate timber floors and replace them with concrete slabs