'Get it Right with Undercover Architect' Podcast
Season 15: 44 Ways to Create Your Sustainable Home
Sustainability can feel overwhelming, full of jargon, competing opinions, and no clear starting point. There's also not a 'one-size-fits-all' approach.
Season 15 uncovers 44 practical ways to sustainably design, build or renovate your home so that it performs well, costs less to run, and feels genuinely great to live in.
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SECTION 1: DESIGNING FOR CLIMATE + SITE
[#401] 44 Ways #01: Design Your Future Home for the Orientation of Your Site
Season 15 | Episode 01
Of all the decisions you will make in a new build or renovation, one has more impact on your home's comfort, sustainability and running costs than any other. And it needs to be made before design begins. In this episode, Amelia explains why site orientation is where every great home design starts, how the sun moves across your site across the seasons, and how to use that knowledge to design a home that stays cool in summer, warm in winter, and costs far less to run year-round.
[#402] 44 Ways #02: Design for the Breezes + Wind at Your Site
Season 15 | Episode 02
Your site has two distinct wind stories, and they often come from completely different directions. One is a natural asset that can cool your home and reduce your reliance on mechanical systems. The other is a force to design against. In this episode, Amelia walks you through how to read your site's wind and breeze patterns, how to design your floor plan and windows to capture natural ventilation, and how to protect your home from the harsher wind events that can drive up maintenance and make outdoor spaces unusable.
[#403] 44 Ways #03: Naturally Heat + Cool Your Home
Season 15 | Episode 03
Orientation and breezes don't work in isolation. In this episode, Amelia brings the first two ways together into a whole-of-home passive design strategy, showing how orientation, shading, thermal mass, and the building envelope interact as a system to keep your home comfortable across the seasons. You'll learn how this daily cycle of passive heating and cooling actually works in practice, why thermal mass is only beneficial when the design supports it, and how getting this right from the start can dramatically reduce what you spend on energy bills for the life of your home.
[#404] 44 Ways #04: Know Your Climate Zone
Season 15 | Episode 04
The design strategies covered in the first three episodes of this series don't apply the same way everywhere. What works brilliantly in a temperate climate can actively work against you in a hot and humid one. In this episode, Amelia explains what climate zones are, why they matter so much for sustainable home design, and how knowing yours gives you a practical filter for every design and specification decision in your project. This is the episode that puts everything covered so far into context for where you are actually building or renovating.
SECTION 2: SUSTAINABLE DESIGN STRATEGIES
[#405] 44 Ways #05: Design a Smaller (Smarter) Home
Season 15 | Episode 05
When most homeowners think about sustainability, they think about what to add to their project. But one of the most impactful sustainability decisions you can make is simply to build less. In this episode, Amelia introduces the concept of enoughness as a practical alternative to the default assumption that bigger is better, shares data on how Australian home sizes compare internationally, and gives you a framework for interrogating your design brief so every square metre earns its place in your home and your budget.
[#406] 44 Ways #06: Choose an Aligned Team
Season 15 | Episode 06
Your sustainability goals are only as strong as the team delivering them. In a project where thousands of decisions get made, many without you even knowing there was a choice, a team that doesn't share your values will quietly erode your priorities at every turn. In this episode, Amelia walks through what alignment actually looks like in a designer, architect and builder, the questions to ask before you hire, the red flags worth paying attention to, and what to do if you're already mid-project and realising the fit isn't there.
[#407] 44 Ways #07: Create an Efficient Structural Design, Collaboratively
Season 15 | Episode 07
Most homeowners never think to discuss structural design with their team, yet the decisions made around your home's structure have direct consequences for cost, material use, and embodied carbon. In this episode, Amelia explains what structural efficiency actually means, why it rarely happens when designers and engineers work in sequence rather than together, and how bringing your structural engineer into the design conversation early, rather than after the floor plan is locked in, can save significant money and materials while simplifying your build.
[#408] 44 Ways #08: Future Proof Your Design with Accessibility
Season 15 | Episode 08
Accessible design isn't about hospital handrails and clinical aesthetics. It's about designing a home that works well for the people living in it, at every age and stage of life, without needing expensive modification when circumstances change. In this episode, Amelia explains why accessibility is a genuine sustainability strategy, the specific features worth considering from the brief stage, how to raise it with your design team, and why building these inclusions in from the start costs a fraction of what retrofitting them later will.
[#409] 44 Ways #09: Improve Your Indoor Air Quality
Season 15 | Episode 09
A sustainable home is also a healthy home, and the quality of the air inside it is directly shaped by decisions made during design and specification. In this episode, Amelia covers the main sources of indoor air pollution in residential homes, what VOCs are and where they show up in standard building materials, why moisture and mould are a bigger indoor air quality issue than most homeowners realise, and the practical steps you can take at the design and specification stage to create a healthier, safer home for everyone living in it.
SECTION 3: YOUR SUSTAINABLE SERVICES + INFRASTRUCTURE
[#410] 44 Ways #10: Reduce Your Energy Use Through Your Selections
Season 15 | Episode 10
Most homeowners start their sustainability journey by thinking about solar panels and efficient appliances, but without the right sequence those choices can cost far more than they need to. In this episode, Amelia breaks down where your home's energy is actually being spent, how to approach appliance and system selection for maximum efficiency, how to correctly size your heating and cooling so you're not paying for capacity you don't need, and the hierarchy that ensures every sustainability dollar you spend works as hard as possible.
[#411] 44 Ways #11: Reduce Your Water Use In and Around Your Home
Season 15 | Episode 11
Water tends to get less attention than energy in a sustainability brief, but the decisions you make about how your home uses it will carry through for the life of the home. In this episode, Amelia breaks down where household water actually goes, what the water efficiency ratings mean in practice and which fixtures have the greatest impact, how design decisions like hot water unit placement and plumbing configuration can reduce waste before a tap is even turned on, and why outdoor water use deserves far more attention than it usually gets.
[#412] 44 Ways #12: Store and Reuse Water for Greater Water Saving
Season 15 | Episode 12
Even a home with highly efficient indoor fixtures is still directing an enormous volume of treated drinking water onto the garden, and that's worth addressing. In this episode, Amelia covers the full picture of household water use, explains how rainwater harvesting works and how to size a system for your project, shares her own experience living entirely on rainwater for over a decade, and walks through greywater and blackwater systems and what each option realistically means for your site, your regulations, and your budget.
[#413] 44 Ways #13: Select an Efficient Hot Water Unit and Get the Plumbing Layout Right
Season 15 | Episode 13
Hot water accounts for approximately 23% to 25% of your home's total energy use, making it the second largest energy consumer after heating and cooling. Yet most homeowners hand the decision to their plumber without a second thought, and lock in a decade or more of unnecessary running costs as a result. In this episode, Amelia walks through the four main hot water system types and how they compare, busts the most common myths that lead homeowners to dismiss heat pump systems, and explains the plumbing layout decisions that can reduce both water and energy waste.
[#414] 44 Ways #14: Use Renewable Energy to Supply Your (Reduced) Energy Needs
Season 15 | Episode 14
Solar feels like the obvious first sustainability move, and it's easy to see why. But putting renewable energy on a home that hasn't addressed its energy efficiency first is like fitting out a leaky bucket before fixing the holes. In this episode, Amelia explains why sequence matters so much, why going all-electric is the prerequisite for running your home on 100% renewable power, what rooftop solar actually involves and how to think about sizing and storage, and why the sustainability decisions made earlier in this series directly reduce the size and cost of the solar system you'll need.
With over 30 years industry experience, Amelia Lee founded Undercover Architect in 2014 as an award-winning online resource to help and teach you how to get it right when designing, building or renovating your home. You are the key to unlocking what’s possible for your home. Undercover Architect is your secret ally