Location, Location, Location!

Location is a very important part of building a house, and probably one of the most important when building a sustainable house  Its also one where some important factors are often ignored. It is one of the cheapest ways to improve your house efficiency since where you place it can have a big impact on heating/cooling. I am going to discuss location with regard to building on a piece of land that is already purchased.

The factors that dictate where you build will change depending on your latitude and local climate. Some common location factors here in Victoria that are usually taken into consideration when building a house are:

1. the view - important to some people, I personally don't mind taking the time to walk to a place on the property to admire the view (on a good day we can see Western Port Bay and Wilsons Promontory National Park), it makes it more special.
2. access to the road - it can be cost prohibitive to build a good long track, but the benefit's are privacy and less disturbance from local traffic.
3. distance to services, ie. telephone and electricity - this can have a major impact on the cost of connecting to public services, running power/telephone a long distance increases the cost of earth works and the cost per meter of cable for power, and could require 3-phase connection depending on load and length of cable. For us this wasn't even a factor since we had decided long ago to run of our own power (solar and wind) and are successfully using mobile broadband and voip for phone.

The major factors that WE used when choosing a location to build our house on the property were

1. has good sun access in the winter (when it is needed, our winters are quite mild with some snow every couple of years) - this is important for passive heating, you do not need to face the front of the house north, just have the big windows facing north (with adequate eaves to shade out direct summer sun).
2. protection from strong winds - this can be negated by planting trees and building shelter around the house, but why do that when you can do the same with less cost by good placement. The last thing you want is to be blown away as you step out of the house. The other thing with an exposed house is that the wind will cool it down, a sheltered spot will naturally have less heat loss.
3. use of natural environment - for us the site has a hill to the east which shelters us from the wind. The other side benefit of having the hill next to the house it that it will be the perfect place to put a water tank on top of to supply the house (by gravity, avoiding the need for electric pressure pumps).

There are other factors that you need to be aware of are the local council building regulation that dictate setbacks from boundaries, creeks etc. This is important to know when buying a property as a spot that you think would be ideal to build on can be excluded by these laws, which usually are very strictly enforced (some for good reason). For us, we are located in an erosion overlay in rural Victoria. We have a creek starting in the middle of the property which has a setback of 100m and a 20m setback from the boundary which severely limits the spotsp where a house can be placed. We picked out several possible house sites at the time of purchase based on setbacks and flat spots that would minimise earth works (and hopefully house footings).

After buying the land we then spent the next few years assessing the different house sites based on weather conditions at different times of the year, during the extremes, summer and winter and the change in autumn where we get strong westerly winds. We noticed that when we got the extreme winds that one of the sites was sheltered (a big plus to that particular site). We were not keen on building near the road as privacy was a consideration but one thing that we noticed was that passing traffic on the dirt road during summer causes a large dust cloud that would cover anything near the road in a thick layer of dust (a big minus for any site near the road).

The extra benefit of the sheltered site is that the hill that shelters the site is ideal to put the solar panels and a water tank on top for gravity fed water. This eliminated the need to run a water pump whenever water is need in the house. Water will be pumped up using an electric transfer pump running straight off the 12V DC battery bank.

The other thing to watch for when choosing a location to build your house are pockets of low land which can trap cold air and frost during winter, the stability of the land. We are building in an erosion overlay and the surrounding area has visible signs of land slippage. This can increase the cost of house footings considerably and the last thing you want is for your new house to be split in half by moving foundations.

My personal 'favorite' biggest house location mistakes are facing a house's main windows west (closely followed by south). Which means you have the hot afternoon sun shining directly in, and the only way to avoid the sun is to block it. Also building on top of a hill where you are exposed to the elements. If you do want a nice view then the choice of property is very important because it's very hard to enjoy the view when the sun is streaming in through your nice big windows on a 40°C day or you get blown away by the wind every time you step outside you house in autumn.

Other important topics of location are with regard to location of windows and rooms in the house which will be discussed some time in the future.

To finish off here is a picture of our house and a description of its location.

As seen from the hill next to the house site

This picture was taken in the morning. You can see from the shadow that west is to the top of the photo (you can see the road which is one of our boundaries), north is to the right, south is left and the photo was taken with me standing on top of the hill to the east of the house.

The 'front' of the house is to the north, where we will locate the sun room for passive solar heating in the winter. The west side has the bathroom, toilet and a short hallway(storage area). The bathroom will have west facing windows but we will have a treed outside area to shade the windows in hot summer evenings(we are may make this outside area accessible from the bathroom). The hallway will have a narrow long window facing south west for light and a view of the paddocks to the south and west (this window will most likely be one that is tinted and has high IR blocking).