Insulation installation has been regulated in Victoria since 1991, and nationally since 2003. But no one checks that the insulation has been installed properly.
Five per cent of gaps in insulation drive 25 per cent or more extra heat transfer, so gaps matter a lot. How many existing homes actually have effective ceiling insulation? I suspect not many.
One of the problems in installing insulation is getting close enough to the edges of the ceiling due to the difficulty of getting access where the roof clearance is tight.
Regulations also require that no insulation should be near recessed halogens and most LED lights, and there is ventilation for fire safety reasons.
Tradies may also shift insulation around when rewiring or doing other work.
The result is that many ceilings are poorly insulated.
Insulation training will help
Dedicated insulation industry efforts have recently led to the development of training and certification for installers of insulation retrofitted into existing homes.
This is rebuilding the confidence of paranoid governments, so they are beginning to reintroduce incentives for insulation, more than a decade after the outrageous lies associated with the Pink Batts fiasco.
Pink Batts did not kill anyone and a responsible insulation manufacturer’s reputation was smashed thanks to [Liberal politician] Greg Hunt and others.
Yes, there were accidental deaths but it seems they were from poor installation practices not the product. One set of problems came from the use of metal staples with a reflective foil that were illegal but still used, and another from poor management of people who suffered from heat exhaustion. The problems were intensified in context where a naïve government drove a factor 10 expansion of an unregulated industry without putting in appropriate checks.
See our article here that puts into context the accidents with insulation and house fires before the Pink Batts program.
The images below show the insulation in the ceiling of a recently completed 8+ star NatHERS rated apartment. What a mess! How can this still happen?
The underlying problems are that we do not have a culture of building performance excellence and that there is no independent inspection at the time of building completion and handover.
Many tradies simply don’t care, and builders don’t demand that they restore insulation, as no one checks. In new homes, plasterers or other untrained people install the insulation; then tradies shuffle it around. The result is a mess.
The building industry screams about the extra costs of building performance requirements, but if we had a positive culture where builders and tradies took pride in doing a good job, we would not need costly, time consuming and traumatic inspections and rectifications.
This problem reflects a much broader problem with the Australian and global building industry. The consumer comes last.
Some RMIT colleagues documented this global problem in a recent book Constructing a Consumer Industry: Cracks, cladding and Crisis in the Residential Constructions Sector. It seems to be a miracle that a building actually works properly. Many buyers pay an enormous financial and emotional price.
NSW, with a proactive building commissioner, has begun to lift the lid on the disaster.
Independent inspections needed
In the short term, we need large numbers of independent inspections and serious penalties for non-compliance with new homes.
We need a major study of existing homes to identify the scale of the existing problem and a government program to fix the millions of existing problem homes. We need formal training, certification and inspections of the behaviour of electricians, plumbers and other tradies with requirements to fix the mess they have left behind.
We need to build a culture of quality in our building industry. This will only happen if those who fall short face significant penalties; practitioners believe they will be caught and will have to pay for restoration and compensation for the trauma they have caused, and if those who excel are recognised and rewarded. Educators and trainers will have to emphasise accountability and pride in work as core elements of competence.
I’m not holding my breath.