What is Gold Star?
Gold Star is a design system and standard that delivers safe, durable, healthy, comfortable & energy efficient buildings.
Gold Star places emphasis on the building envelope in a ‘fabric first’
approach. This approach ensures that the envelope of the building is addressed according to the four control layers (Water, Air Vapour & Thermal) and is optimised to provide healthy and comfortable indoor conditions, and structural
durability.
A Gold Star building is appropriately insulated for its climate zone, is built to address leakiness with an airtightness strategy, and has a 24hr ventilation system. A Verified Gold Star building has a quality assurance process including site checks to guarantee installation standards have been met.
Figure 1: Heat Load pie chart (leaky building).
A Certified Gold Star building has a heating and cooling load calculation for equipment sizing and includes a blower door test at final inspection to check that the airtightness target has been met.
The verification and certification process ensures that a Gold Star building is built to its design standards.
Figure 2: Gold Star certificate.
What makes Gold Star perform so well?
Gold Star is a building performance approach, not just an energy efficiency tool. Energy efficiency is only one part of building performance and is a by-product of good building performance. Gold Star is a holistic system.
Addressing air leakiness is a big part of the success of the Gold Star
System. In a typical house, without the Gold Star process, air constantly leaks out of the building and is replaced by air leaking in. Air leaks in at outside air temperature. This means that ‘outside air’ is constantly being heated or cooled. Constantly conditioning outside air is not efficient, and it is not cheap. Air leakage is money leakage.
An airtightness strategy minimises air leakage. An airtight envelope also enables the insulation to perform to its full potential leading to superior thermal efficiency, and reduces the risk of moisture damage to the building structure.
Figure 3: Blower door testing.
Ventilation goes hand in hand with airtightness. Only contained air can be controlled. A 24hr, super-efficient mechanical ventilation system reduces CO2 and airborne moisture levels providing a comfortable indoor environment, and mitigates the risk of condensation.
Figure 4: 24hr ventilation.
How did Gold Star come to be?
First came the realisation that the National Construction Code approach to energy efficiency is not a ‘systems’ approach, and consequently has potential to cause unintended consequences such as overheating, discomfort, an unhealthy indoor environment, moisture issues, and inconsistent energy efficiency outcomes.
After researching other schemes throughout the world, North America became the focus of attention. North America has adopted an evidence based building science approach to achieve high performance buildings. This method began in the U.S.A. in the 1970s following the 1973 oil embargo and resultant energy crisis. It was further developed in Canada in the 1980’s. This method of airtightness and insulation proved to greatly outperform the passive solar method in all American climate zones.
In the late 1980’s a contigent from Germany went to North America to learn this method then created their Passive House scheme based on the same principles.
Gold Star has been developed based on these principles to suit our Australian construction methods and our climate. This ‘building science’ based method has had decades of proved results and delivers a superior outcome.
Australia shares similar construction methods and some similar climatic conditions with North America so the system is quite easily and cost-effectively adapted to suit us.
Gold Star brings everything together to produce a safe, durable, healthy, comfortable & energy efficient building in an affordable way.
Figure 5: Heat Load output.
Figure 6: Gold Star inclusions.
List of participating builders to come soon.