Innovation starts with a problem that needs solving, father and daughter team of Ross and Haylee Brown have the award to show for their ground-breaking solution to a longstanding issue with recessed window installation.
The merging of Ross’ traditional building know-how with Haylee’s modern technological expertise produced the award-winning Eurotect Flashing System for recessed European window.
Eurotect hit the market three years ago and has won approval from builders across the country.
This year, the system won a Highly Commended James Hardie Innovation Award at the New Zealand Building Industry Awards.
Long the bane of builders working on passive houses, the high-performance window and door joinery required a bespoke flashing solution for each individual application of the European joinery in each project.
Ross, a builder of high-performance homes, understood those frustrations full well, installing flashings on his projects that resulted in wasted time and resources, and provided no absolute certainty of weathertightness.
Together, Ross and Haylee combined their skills to work on a solution that would benefit not only their own projects but the wider building industry.
Haylee took Ross’ builder scribbles and ideas for flashing solutions, and turned them into 3D drawings, which could then be 3D printed into prototypes that could be tested and improved as needed.
“My mantra has always been to ‘de-complicate’ things … to take something that was quite complex and causing a lot of people a lot of grief and just simplify it down and apply basic, practical knowledge and come up with something that works,” Ross says.
“I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I didn’t have Haylee, who could take my ideas and sketches, and transform them to computer drawings and to model them three-dimensionally so I could then make them.”
Solving the complex problem of a recessed and weathertight window installation is not new, Haylee says BRANZ has been funded to work on bringing a solution to market for over 10 years with no success.
Ross and Haylee, and Julie (wife/mum) through Brown Construction invested their own time and money into doing what BRANZ couldn’t do.
From the end of 2017, when they realised there was a need to design their own recessed flashing system to 2019 when the product was ready to hit the market, has been a whirlwind of designing, modelling, 3D printing prototypes, refining and filling out NZ Building Code compliance paperwork.
While they are proud of the award, it is the acceptance of the product by their peers in the construction industry that is proof of the success of their product.
“It’s exciting that it’s being accepted by a wide group of people in the building industry as a good and really robust solution,” Julie says.
“We have had lot of inquiry from people interested in higher performing houses and a lot of interest from architects designing higher performing houses,” Ross says.
The system also has commercial applications, with enquiries from larger scale projects like school and hospital buildings.
Keen to support local, they’ve tried to source mostly locally made material.
“Most of it is made within two or three kilometres from our office. But there’s a little bit from Auckland and a little from Wellington,” Haylee says.
On the market now for three years, Eurotect window flashing system significantly enhances thermal performance by around 14% and improves the window frames’ surface temperature reducing and sometimes eliminating condensation, which in turn inhibits mould growth, therefore creating a healthier indoor environment.
By using aluminium extrusion and cast components, the flashings can be powder coated to colour match the joinery, which ensures they are seamlessly integrated.
Not ones to rest on their laurels, Ross and Haylee are investigating further development of the system to offer a concealed jamb option.
The New Zealand Building Industry Awards judges said Eurotech had huge potential; not only delivering on Passive Housing accreditation but also allowing designers to create aesthetic pleasing joinery installation that was weathertight and isolated thermal connectivity.
