Episode Details

Our first New Zealand builder steps onto the couch, and Aaron reckons he summed up everything TGB stands for in about thirty seconds.

Dan Saunders started building in 1993 and formed DS Construction in 2002. In 2012 he built the first 8 Homestar-rated home in Australasia, the highest rating going at the time. Since then he's built close to 30 high-performance "super homes," helped get the Super Home Movement off the ground, and co-founded EcoPanel, a prefabricated wall system that can get a house closed in inside a week.

This one covers a lot of ground that lands the same on both sides of the Tasman:

• Why Dan calls the building code "the worst house you're legally allowed to build" — and why he walks away from jobs that won't go above it
• The link between cold, damp homes and New Zealand's childhood respiratory problems
• Where to actually spend your money: the thermal envelope, not the stone benchtop
• The numbers on healthy homes — every $1 spent saves $4 in the health system, and an energy-efficient build can wipe out an $11,000-a-year power bill
• EcoPanel and prefab: how a job gets framed, wrapped and ready for roof in two to three weeks
• New Zealand's first zero-carbon home, built eight tonnes below zero
• Shared pressure points: $3-a-litre diesel, road user charges, and the post-COVID timber and plasterboard shortages
• His link with Future Builder's Kyle Zanetto and Luke Davies
• And the simplest answer we've had to "what makes a good builder": good grounding, good morals, and leaving a bit of skin in the game for the next guy

Dan's coming back as a regular, so consider this the first of a few.

Find Dan's work and EcoPanel in the links below.

Links
DS Construction: https://www.dsconstruction.co.nz/
EcoPanel: https://www.ecopanel.co.nz/
Super Home Movement: https://www.superhome.co.nz/

#TheGoodBuilder #HealthyHomes #SuperHomeMovement