New Zealand’s curtains crisis
There’s a curtains crisis in New Zealand.
Winter now pushes the majority of households into rationing heating as they can’t afford to warm their homes to healthy levels.
But an unfolding crisis sees much of the heat pumped into many homes disappearing through single-glazed windows for lack of thermal curtains, or any curtains at all.
There’s no data on the state of the nation’s window coverings, but an insight into the curtain crisis came at Wellington’s Eco Design Conference.
Ministry of Health speakers Natalie Burton and Bronwyn Petrie revealed that the Healthy Homes Initiative (HHI), which has been running in 11 health districts around the country, had resulted in home visits to more than 9600 families with young children at high risk of serious illnesses like rheumatic fever.
In around 3200 cases, a curtains ‘‘intervention’’ followed.
New Zealand’s houses are cold and badly insulated, and the country has some of the highest power prices in the developed world, but many homes lack even basic window coverings, said Conrad Lapointe from Auckland’s Habitat for Humanity charity, which runs an overstretched curtain bank.
Demand was so high there was now a two-month waiting list for curtains.
‘‘We’re not able to promise people curtains in time for winter,’’ Lapointe said.
Lapointe said the HHI interventions would have revealed homes with mouldy curtains, inadequate curtains, or no curtains at all.
‘‘We are seeing rental properties with no curtains, or people with blankets up,’’ he said.
‘‘We are dealing with very poor housing stock. People deal with it by pumping heat into their homes, if they can afford it.’’
Lapointe said hanging thermal curtains was the ‘‘most valuable’’ thing households could do to decrease heat loss, but they were expensive.
The Warehouse sells thermal, curtains for $89 each.
Buying enough for a three-bedroom house was beyond the means of lowerincome families. fulllength