Standards – a drag on home assessors

[alexking]

I’m just starting out as a home energy assessor, and I want to do a good job for those who use my services. I am not making a lot of money from it, and I don’t have a sponsoring organisation with access to much money either.

I was just reading EECA’s guide for retrofitting wall insulation from the resource library, and it assumes familiarity with NZS 4246: 2006. To purchase this standard would cost me $140.

It wouln’t be so bad, if that was the only standard I had to buy. Recently I was assessing what the likely level of insulation on a hot water cylinder had, and it was labelled as meeting another standard. There was one standard for low pressure HW cylinders and another for installation.

These standards might be available at the library; I’m not sure, I haven’t make the trip to find out. I completed some reports with less background information than I would have liked; I need to get the reports out on a schedule.

I would benefit from access to multiple standards. I’m an independant assessor, not a product installer, and unlike installers I probably need access to more standards yet have less opportunity to make money through their use.

Unlike many other types of information (product manuals etc.) copyright on standards seems to be used strictly to limit distribution and derive an income, making the standards less available. This is restricting the knowledge available to home assessors like myself, and probably to motivated DIYers too.

I’d like to se standards published freely, obvoiusly that is in the domain of standards NZ and I haven’t asked them about it yet. (And don’t expect to get far if I do)

Another thought is to develop a new set of freely puyblished standards between home assessors which would be developed independently of the NZ standards but a superset of them, so that anyone meeting our standards would always meet the NZ standards.

Short of either of those (difficult to achieve) options, could the practitioners hub subscribe to certain standards from standards NZ and make them avilable to members? This would be a real benefit for me.

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[Christian Hoerning]

Hi Alex,

NZS 4246 can be viewed online free of charge on EECA’s website http://www.eeca.govt.nz (search “4246”). EECA’s guide for retrofitting wall insulation says this in footnote 2.

Re Hot water cylinder standards, I think you may not need to read these standards to perform your work. I understand that the Home Performance Advisor Certification manual includes a table that shows the different cylinder grades depending on cylinder age.

Hope this helps,
Christian Hoerning from EECA

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