Michael Kingsland

I grew up in Germany. Studied Physics in Germany and on exchange in Sweden for a year met my Australian wife and ended up here. After a few small jobs, I added a Master in Engineering in the solar energy field and joined LAROS after finishing the thesis in 2012. LAROS Technologies started as a solar business (SOLAR re-arranged becomes LAROS) and we supplied and delivered the first larger scale solar installations in the ACT around 200kW peak capacity. As a pure product supply and system design business but without capacity to install in-house, we found it harder to compete in the solar energy market and the contractors we used for installations started competing with us after learning more about system design from us. This and the fact that I was looking to replace the single glazed windows in my house with triple glazed units from Germany kickstarted our transition into the healthy and high performance building market. We quickly built up our products and expertise around the basic building blocks and associated science that are required to make energy efficient buildings also healthy and durable (hint - the fact that it's mentioned like that means it is not something that happens automatically. The best intentions with regards to energy efficiency can have detrimental effects on these other key elements if these relationships are not well understood).
The key principles that combine efficiency, health and durability are often called Passivhaus principles based on the German building standard, but in reality have nothing to do with "Passivhaus" level performance. These principles are crucial for any building even well below the energy efficiency performance of a certified Passivhaus and cannot be neglected for non-Passivhaus buildings.
The key products we supply are high performance doors and windows, heat or energy recovery ventilation systems, the Pro Clima building wrap system, structural thermal breaks, and any associated consulting. Consulting services include Passivhaus modelling (also very useful for non-Passivhouses), hygrothermal modelling (WUFI) to assess the risk of condensation inside structures, thermal bridge modelling (Flixo) to assess the thermal conductivity and associated condensation risk with specific construction elements, mechanical design for energy recovery ventilation systems and general education and workshops around the above topics.

In 2018 the business split with one of the executive directors moving into a new business taking some of our non-key product lines and the other director going into retirement. As there was no buyer for the business at the time, the original business was liquidated and shut down. I was really passionate about continuing this work and was allowed to run a new start-up while retaining the original LAROS name. We were also commited to service previous clients and honour warranties where they still applied for the products and services we retained in the new business which still include the 4 pillars of products and services as described above. Over the years between then and now we added our own in-house developed prefabricated building system (currently on hold while looking for better manufacturing facilities) with LAROS Structures and set-up a dedicated consulting business LAROS Consulting to better present our focus in this area.
This is where we stand today and going forward, servicing a range of residential and commercial projects and developments.