ECCHO – Energy and Carbon Calculator for Homes 

Nobody wants to move into a brand-new home only to find it's not as comfortable as they expected or that it overheats at night.   We're working to take away the guesswork, with modelling offering a comprehensive assessment of a home's thermal comfort, energy and carbon emissions - now including embodied carbon assessment - from early in the design stage.   This will help ensure people are healthy and happy in their new home.

To help you and your project teams, we've built a simple online web app called ECCHO that allows you to not only see how your current design performs, but to experiment with all the different variables that influence energy demand and emissions; from walls, roofs, floors, and windows, through to size, orientation, heating and hot water systems.

The latest version of Homestar (v5.1) has compulsory targets for heating, electricity and summertime overheating. ECCHO provides a pathway to demonstrate performance not just for Homestar certification, but for what is increasingly recognised by local councils for H1 compliance under the Building Code.

The Government is expected to set similar performance requirements under the New Zealand Building Code. ECCHO is a great way to get up to speed with where our regulations are likely to head in future years.