NZ Tech to Help Build Greenest Building

NZ Tech to Help Build Greenest Building

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 1st December 2016

Smart home technology company JUCEBOX will help build New Zealand’s most sustainable building, by making it one of this country’s most technologically advanced too.

Coastline and waterway restoration charity Sustainable Coastlinessuccessfully raised $75,366 to fund the build of The Flagship Education Centre in its Kickstarter campaign which ended last night.

The charity will build what it believes will be New Zealand's most sustainable building in Auckland’s Wynyard Quarter, and it’s receiving the help of Kiwi smart home company JUCEBOX to make it happen.

JUCEBOX is an Auckland startup which is building leading edge smart home device enabling technology.

It is donating its time, expertise and technology to fit Sustainable Coastline’s Flagship Education Centre with the latest in smart home tech and solar panels.

“The Sustainable Coastlines team will be able to turn the centre’s lights on and off from a smartphone anywhere in the world,” explains JUCEBOX founder and CEO Ulrich Frerk.

“That’s pretty cool but the real game changer we’re putting into New Zealand’s most sustainable building is a whole bunch of measuring equipment to monitor power generation and consumption.

“We’ll then show that data in a clear and interactive way inside the building to help visitors get a better understanding of how building energy consumption works.”

The data will also help the building meet the extremely stringent requirements set out by the international Living Building Challenge certification.

“To receive Living Building Challenge certification, we need to not only produce 105% of our energy needs, but to design a building that looks to regenerate its surrounding environment,” says Sustainable Coastlines General Manager Camden Howitt.

JUCEBOX will work with electricians and plumbers to ensure the systems are installed in the most efficient way possible and fitted with devices to monitor them.

“Smart homes are sustainable homes,” explains Frerk.

“Put simply: you cannot manage what you do not measure. Smart connectivity lets us measure many many sources of data from all of the building’s appliances and systems before using that data to automatically optimise energy consumption, thanks to our technology.

“That makes for an unbeatably efficient building.”

The Sustainable Coastlines Flagship Education Centre will house a range of displays to raise awareness and knowledge around ocean and freshwater conservation.

Frerk has been a longtime supporter of Sustainable Coastlines and has volunteered at their beach cleanup events.

"I'm hugely passionate about keeping New Zealand's beautiful coastline pristine, so helping Sustainable Coastlines with this building is just an extension of that," he says.

The centre has already been partially built off-site through the workshops at Auckland Prison as part of a broader social initiative to provide trade skills to prisoners while engaging them in meaningful community projects.

It sits on the corner of Beaumont and Madden Streets and will be open to the public from January 2017.

ENDS

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