Where and how are we going to dry the clothes?

Picture this: you’re in a typical New Zealand villa or state house. It’s the kind of cold you can feel before you notice it – condensation beading on single-glazed windows, damp creeping around the frames, a faint smell of mould that never quite leaves, and draughts slipping in through gaps you’ve learned to live with. The house is technically standing, but it is working against you as much as it is sheltering you.

Now imagine that same home after a retrofit programme. The ceiling and floors are insulated, a heat pump hums in the living room, and extractor fans have been installed in the bathroom and kitchen. On paper, it should be transformed – warmer, drier, healthier.

But clothes are still drying on racks in the living room, near the heat pump. The windows still mist up in the mornings, the mould is reappearing in the same corners as before. The technology is there, but the home is being lived in as if it weren’t.

At a time of public debate comparing the circumstances of social housing tenants with those of other low‑income households, it’s worth taking a closer look at what life inside these homes is actually like. The reality is more complex than such comparisons suggest.

Over the past two decades, New Zealand has invested in programmes such as Warm Up New Zealand, Warmer Kiwi Homes, and the Healthy Homes Initiative to upgrade housing with insulation, heat pumps, and ventilation systems. But how much warmer, drier, and healthier are the people living in them, really? And how would we know?

One of the problems is that retrofitting is largely treated as a technical exercise: install insulation, add a heat pump, etc and move on. The assumption is that better technology will naturally produce better living conditions. But homes do not perform on paper. They are lived in, shaped by routines, habits, and constraints that often sit well outside policy assumptions and design briefs.

To understand how these homes perform in the real world, I studied retrofitted houses in Otago — one of the coldest, dampest parts of the country. I tracked things including temperature and humidity but also spent time talking to householders and the people delivering these programmes about how homes were being upgraded and used.

On paper, many of them “worked”. Temperatures improved. Insulation was installed. New technologies were operating as intended. The question was why outcomes still differed so much from one household to another once the retrofit teams left.

That meant spending time talking to people about how they actually lived in their homes. How was the home-improvement process? How did they heat rooms? How did they dry clothes? Whether they opened windows. Whether they understood the technologies installed around them. It also meant observing how retrofit upgrades fit into daily life, and how they sometimes didn’t.

It became clear that retrofit programmes are making a difference. Most householders I spoke with were grateful for warmer bedrooms, less draughts, easier heating, less damp. These programmes matter, and should continue.

But old habits can die hard and upend the best intentions.

Many retrofit programmes are under tight funding constraints and pressure to deliver upgrades quickly and cheaply. That leaves little time for follow‑up, troubleshooting, or ongoing support once the job is done.

There is no nationally coordinated long-term retrofit policy but a fragmented system of funding streams, reporting requirements, and administrative processes that retrofit providers need to navigate. The result is a system trying to solve a complex social and technical problem through piecemeal programmes and off-the-shelf solutions.

Retrofit professionals were under huge pressure. Builders need to install unfamiliar materials and technologies in older housing stock, often without formal retrofit-specific training in building performance, ventilation, moisture management, or how people use these systems day to day.

There was another barrier. Many householders didn’t like reporting problems or criticising retrofit work because they were grateful for receiving support in the first place. In some cases, people quietly finished incomplete work themselves because it felt wrong complaining about something they hadn’t paid for. Gratitude and whakamā became part of the retrofit process in ways that technical assessments alone would never pick up.

Simple design choices sometimes clashed with long-established routines. Replacing combined bathroom light-and-fan switches with separate controls sometimes meant people stopped using extractor fans altogether. Some householders reduced heat pump use because they associated dry heat with headaches or dehydration. Advice about opening windows in winter or avoiding drying clothes indoors was also often ignored – these practices were tied to decades of adapting to cold, damp houses.

One householder had grown up drying their clothes wrapped around large, uninsulated hot water cylinders. Today’s cylinders are smaller and insulated, but the practice survives: drying racks positioned in front of heat pumps instead of on their hot water cylinders. When the sun isn’t shining, people still needed to dry their clothes.

That is the central challenge. People are not simply “using buildings wrong”. They are making decisions within the realities of cost, comfort, weather, routine, and habit. If retrofit programmes ignore that, they will always fall short.

What would a more people-centred, socio-technical retrofit approach look like?

It would start with understanding everyday practices alongside building conditions. Where are people going to dry their clothes in winter? Which rooms do they heat, and which ones don’t they heat? How comfortable are householders using new technologies? What financial or cultural realities shape those decisions?

A better system would include follow-up support after installation, and closer communication between householders, builders and providers.

We need to rethink how retrofit success itself is measured. Temperatures, humidity levels, and energy use still matter, but we should also be asking whether homes are comfortable to live in, whether technologies fit naturally into everyday routines, whether people understand and trust the systems installed around them, whether the retrofit is making their lives better. Because in the end, we’re not just upgrading houses – we’re trying to improve people’s lives.