Innovative building products company Bondor is undertaking a study with the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) to assess the effectiveness of current strategies and products used in sustainable construction.
Residential homes in each state constructed using Bondor’s innovative InsulLiving building products, InsulWall and SolarSpan, will be monitored over an extended period of time to evaluate how the high performance thermal building systems meet the needs of residents in relation to both energy cost savings and comfort.
QUT’s Dr Wendy Miller said this is the third joint project to be undertaken with Bondor since they began working together in 2009.
“The goal of the project is to develop an Innovations Adoption Toolkit (IAT) that will enable housing supply chain agents to identify and implement innovations with benefits for all stakeholders,” she said.
Dr Miller said the project would look at innovation within all areas of the housing market, from homeowners and real estate agents to builders and manufacturers like Bondor.
“This particular project came about from previous research saying that sustainable housing wasn’t a focus in standard methods of housing construction, and it was hard to cater for customers who wanted something more sustainable,” she said.
“We wanted to find out if there were leaders in the market working on construction methods which lent themselves to sustainable living, and how they were doing so.
“We are hoping to show that doing things differently to ‘business as usual’ has benefits for everyone – the supplier and the consumer.”
Each home under analysis will be measured in a range of areas including temperature, electrical circuits, thermal imaging and air tightness.
The project began seven months ago and ends in 2017, with the first set of results to be available from mid-2015.
Bondor’s InsulLiving national sales manager Paul Adams said its partnership with QUT was an excellent way to continually review the benefits of building products and construction methods that promote sustainable living.
“Anything which works towards a more streamlined and widespread approach to sustainable living is something which we at Bondor are enthusiastic about,” he said.
Details about the study at https://www.qut.edu.au/research/our-research/student-topics/toolkit-for-transforming-australian-housing-behaviour-culture-and-practices