22 April 2005

Reality Check for ACT Energy Efficiency Ratings

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The CT has this article on the Council of Energy Commissioner Neil Byron saying that the council would stop and do a reality check of the ACT regulations on home efficiency ratings before those regulations were mandated nationally.

More social engieneering through legislation, but at least someone is stopping to look at the outcomes before forcing it onto everyone else in the country.

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Well I support the scheme. I don’t think it is perfect, but I think it is better than nothing. Some of the categories are quite hard to determine, so I think you can get slightley different results on the same house. But Ithink a house that gets 0 is always going to be worse than a house that gets 4 or 5.

There are two points here.

One is that a vendor sponsored report is largely worthless to a buyer. They who pay the piper call the tune.

The second is that a $100 a year energy saving is a very minor cost in the average property purchase.

If (and I cite this as an extreme case) a $100,000 increase in the cost of building the property yeilded a $1000 reduction in energy costs then it would take 100 years to pay it back. And most people don’t expect to be in a house for 10 years let alone 100.

i note that the new 600k palaces going up in nth mckellar have no insulation built into their single brick veneer walls.

It could be a conspiracy to get you to spend more money on improvements to home and grounds, but I haven’t reviewed the full list of criteria they apply so I couldn’t say.

It would be good rant material, but I’m feeling to lazy today.

I reckon it’s a pretty good rort for anyone to get into.

Get yourself a laptop with Excel, plug in a couple of formulae, then hang out your shingle as a home energy efficiency expert.

A couple of hundred bucks a throw for wandering around a home for 10 minutes noting the number of windows.

Hit “enter” and the magic number apears (pity it’s often got stuff all to do with reality).

The best thing – Stanhope’s forcing everyone who wants to sell their home to employ you and your laptop.

Or, a Labour Government is looking to take a swipe at a successful Liberal Government program.

… I can’t believe I said that.

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