Thanks a bunch for the timely info - curtain dude!

“as an aside, honeycomb blinds are the best!”

Agreed! And they fold away to almost nothing, unlike roman blinds (until recently the main choice for energy efficient window coverings) they don’t block off the first 10″ or so of your window (= winter sunlight).

The verticals are great for glass doors too. We have them on a 5.4m width and they go back to just 10cm each side.

Luxaflew now have a double honeycomb version, which I think would provide even greater insulation.

One con though – you can’t wsh the blackout version due to the aluminium backing, and the non-blackout version lets significant light through, so for our bedrooms we’ve put heavy curtains over the top of them. Makes the insulation even better though…

I think I will schedule an audit Sepi anyway. We have done our best to maximise energy efficiency thus far (double glazing, maximum insulation, honeycombs, pelmets etc…) but I’m sure there is a lot more that we could do.

The HEAT visit is good, but they don’t just hand you 500.00 to spend on blinds.

They make a list of recommendations, and you have to spend the money on the ‘top tier’ recommendations before you can spend money on any second tier stuff. You also have to spend 2000.00 to get 500.00 back.

So if the top tier recommendation is removing a large West facing window, or putting an external awning over it, you have to spend your money on that before spending money on block out blinds and curtains elsewhere in the house.

They do give you good advice, although it depends on the particular assessor you get. I’ve had it done twice (two houses). One was fantastic. The second one was still useful, but not as knowledgable the first one we had.

When I got a quote for blinds ~2 months ago, the guy mentioned this to me as well. However, he actually stressed that we had to get the $30 audit before even accepting a quote, let alone installation.

Also the website is http://www.heat.net.au for anyone else interested.

It makes you wonder why the store didnt tell you about the audit before you made the purchase. Having recently installed some fairly pricey insulating curtains in our house, this could have been useful information for us to be told too.

Interestingly, if there is such a big amount of money to be saved or rebated, why isnt this much more widely publicised? A similar thought went through my mind while reading the solar thread, but with comments disabled we’re unable to post in there.

If you buy ethanol fuel, you get a 3c rebate from the government, which is applied at the time of sale, so why can they not figure out a way to include this rebate in the upfront cost? Its alost as dodgy as companies that advertise some item as ‘$500 (after $100 cashback)’, meaning they give you credit some weeks or months after youve made a purchase, and after youve jumped through the hoops they require (such as pre-installation audits).

Surely to its more extreme, this could be classified as false advertising?