Welcome to the Practitioners’ Hub
The Practitioners’ Hub is a community of practice made up of people with shared objectives in the home performance advice ‘space’.
Our common goal is to provide New Zealanders with high quality, independent, personalised advice to help them improve the performance of their homes and their quality of life.
The purpose of the Hub is to share knowledge, resources and best practice to foster peer learning, synthesise best practice, and produce high quality practical tools to support advisors in their practice.
Key project partners are Community Energy Network, The Toimata Foundation and Beacon Pathway Incorporated. We believe that strong links between different types of practitioners (advisors, researchers, community organisations, government and others) allows for information sharing and learning that will strengthen all of our work.
What do we mean by home performance?
“Home performance” is the science and practice of building and improving homes to make them as comfortable, safe, resource efficient and durable as possible. A home that performs well is one that is warm, dry, uses resources efficiently and is affordable to heat and maintain. Good home performance depends on lots of things interacting well – the design of a house, the materials it is built from, the systems and appliances that use energy and water and deal with waste and the habits and choices of the occupants.
For Practitioners
Who is a Practitioner?
A practitioner is someone who through their professional practice provides, promotes, supports, or researches the basis of independent, expert, advice to help New Zealanders improve the performance of their homes and achieve a better quality of life.
Core Principles
The Practitioners’ Hub has a set of core principles according to which members work together. They also determine our membership criteria. We believe that advice should be provided to New Zealanders in accordance with the following principles:
- Advice should be independent (i.e. not used primarily as a sales technique),
- Advice should be based on good science and best practice, and
- Advice should be personalised and in the best interests of the clients.
We strongly believe that advice should not be driven by a particular product or ‘solution’, but should be based on a sound understanding by the advisor of the way a building performs; diagnosis of the causes of problems in the house, and recommendations for solutions that meet the needs of the client and their circumstances. These recommendations may include appropriate product or service types.
The Practitioners’ Hub does not support any particular products or manufacturers.
Membership
We’re currently developing a membership application process for practitioners who did not participate in the Hub’s pilot phase. It is expected that membership will open to new members who can demonstrate they are a ‘practitioner’ (described above), subscribe to the Hub’s core principles (above) and reflect these in the intent and delivery of their professional practice.
Members will be required to adhere to a code of practice and meet the terms and conditions of use of the site.
If you are interested in membership please contact us for more information.
For Homeowners and Tenants
Why independent, expert advice is important
Home performance is complex and its easy for people to get swamped with information or get confused. Sometimes the information available is conflicting and its hard to know who to trust. Sometimes it can seem like the only way to improve your home is to spend lots of money that you may not have – or you may not own your home and you have to rely on a landlord to make changes.
Independent, expert advice is important because a trained home performance advisor can help you understand the underlying causes of the problems in your home and help you navigate the array of options to make improvements. This may be a simple as choosing to dry your clothes outside (which helps reduce internal moisture and condensation), installing curtains or insulation (to reduce heat loss) or a major renovation or building project.
An advisor can help you address problems like high energy bills, condensation and mould, choices about heating and ventilation and reducing your water consumption.
For general information about improving the performance of your home try the following links:
To find an expert, independent advisor try these links:
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