Australian buildings are becoming more comfortable, cleaner and greener thanks to a technology revolution which includes natural ventilation, intelligent glazing, low-energy building materials - and better ways to choose and design your house.

CSIRO building scientists say that compared to poorly-designed houses, the latest energy-efficient house designs can save a substantial amount of the energy needed for either cooling or heating - and they have come up with a great new way to help home buyers and renovators to choose wisely.

In fact, by using the current best practices in energy conservation, Australia's home owners could substantially reduce both their energy bills and the nation's Greenhouse emissions.

This would make a significant contribution to the national Greenhouse effort, as dwellings generate about 22% of Australia's total man-made carbon dioxide emissions.

Researchers at CSIRO Building, Construction and Engineering have devised a software package which provides a simple zero-to-five star rating system to help home buyers and owners reliably compare the energy efficiency of different house designs, anywhere in Australia.

The software supports the National House Energy Rating Scheme (NatHERS) scheme, a joint Commonwealth, State and Territory Government initiative highlighted in the Prime Minister's Statement on Climate Change.

Licensed to about 200 users so far, the NatHERS software has also been used to evaluate housing designs proposed for the Olympic Village in Sydney.

"Using NatHERS, we've demonstrated that energy-efficient house designs can achieve superior thermal comfort and substantially reduce heating and cooling energy requirements when compared with poorly-designed houses," says Dr Angelo Delsante.

"NatHERS uses real hourly weather data for a full year to calculate the heating and cooling energy requirements for up to three different zones of the houses-such as two living areas, and a bedroom zone," Dr Delsante says.

A second software package, BUNYIP, is being developed to help designers reduce energy consumption in commercial buildings - in some cases by up to 50%. This software can be used to assess whether buildings will meet the minimum energy performance standards for commercial buildings proposed in the Prime Minister's Statement on Climate Change.

More information:
Dr Angelo Delsante, CSIRO 03 9252 6056