Mandatory Requirements
and Council’s Best Practice Standard
Environmental Sustainable Design (ESD) Principles
There are two levels of compliance when it comes to ESD principles – mandatory and best practice.
Mandatory Requirements
You must meet Australian Standards and the Building Code of Australia (BCA) requirements for thermal comfort, ventilation, daylight and energy efficiency.
Council’s Best Practice Standard
Provide a healthy and comfortable indoor environment that reduces energy consumption and reliance on building services:
• For the provision of sufficient daylight, habitable rooms of single-aspect apartments should be limited in depth to 8 metres from a window.
• The average daylight factor for 90% of the habitable floor area should achieve 1.0% for living areas and 0.5% for bedrooms. A daylight modelling report for large scale developments may be required.
• Living rooms and private open spaces for at least 70% of apartments in a development should receive a minimum of three hours direct sunlight between 9am and 3pm in mid winter. This can be demonstrated through section drawings.
• Size windows at 20% of a room’s floor area to balance access to daylight, heat loss in winter and solar heat gains throughout the year.
• Limit the number of single-aspect apartments with a southerly aspect (SW-SE) to a maximum of 10% of the total apartments proposed.
• Limit the number of apartments with internal bedrooms to a maximum of 10% of the total apartments proposed.
• At least 60% of a development’s apartments should be naturally cross ventilated.
• Courtyards in multi storey buildings should be a maximum of four storeys in height to ensure adequate daylight access to the open space and apartments. Internal courtyard dimensions should not lead to the requirement of screening in regard to overlooking.
• Consider acoustic impacts when designing for a natural ventilation strategy.
• Install appropriate external shading devices which respond to different facade orientations.
Developments, which seek to vary from these best practice standards, must demonstrate how indoor environment qualities can be satisfactorily achieved