ECCHO – Energy and Carbon Calculator for Homes 

Nobody wants to move into a brand new home only to find it's actually not as warm, dry and efficient as they expected. We're working to take away the guesswork, with modelling offering a comprehensive assessment of a home's energy, carbon emissions, and thermal comfort from early in the design stage. 

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 emission; from walls, roofs, floors, and windows, through to size, orientation, heating and hot water systems.

The latest version of Homestar (v5) has compulsory targets for heating, electricity and summertime overheating. ECCHO provides a pathway to demonstrate performance not just for Homestar certification, but 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