As a fellow assessor I concur with Tony C. The 4-day course was a joke - bare minimum of info and an open book exam. I leraned nothing I hadn't already taught myself. No, being fair, I did learn ONE new thing - high pressure zones caused by blocking wind path to increase passive flow-thru ventialtion. Wasn't part of the building course back in 1985!
Like Tony I also have a background in the construction industry, both residential and civil, local and international.
In the beginning of the Green Loans program, there WAS a requirement for "industry experienced" people to become assessors. This was dropped when the take-up rate was too low, and the flood gates opened.
It is widely accepted that that single decision is what stuffed the GL program.
Many of the less trained (or let's face it, 'money focused') "assessors" dropped out of the running when the daily/weekly numbers restrictions were placed on assessors back in March. At a max of five per week for a total billing of $1000, not many could afford to stick it out, and the smarties who had been billing $3-7K per week prior to this soon realised it was no longer an 'earner' and disappeared.
But alas, the way the Green Start scheme has been promulgated, as a grant scheme, has meant that a lot of small, independent assessors have not bothered to apply, and it appears likely that most of the Green Start assessments will be completed by larger companies employing qualified assessors on a lower pay rate than the Green Loans scheme.
Some of these larger companies are less than scrupulous, so there is a likelihood of further rorts.
Ultimately, there will be a Cert IV in Sustainability Assessment - the CPSIC is in the 'pre-testing' phase of curriculum development as I write, so once finalised and approved and made available to training providers (such as TAFE) then it will become the standard, and most existing assessors will (probably) have to be re-trained, hopefully with 'prior knowledge' provisions.
It's interesting to note GreenJill's comments about what happens in the UK. We are heading for the same scenario here, with what she does currently being covered by the HERS assessors operating under the NatHERS training and using second gen NatHERS software packages such as AccuRate and BersPro - they provide an energy assessment of building envelope performance by reading off the plans.
Residential Mandatory Disclosure, agreed by COAG to be introduced from 2011, will involve residential walk-thru assessors doing what GreenJill describes they do in the UK, and which is a similar process to what an HSAS (Home Sustainability Assessment Scheme) assessor does right now - on Green Loans or soon on the Green Start program.
Over time, such innovations as thermal imaging cameras and other non-invasive technologies will make the 'walk-thru' assessments as accurate as the 'off-plan' HERS assessments.
There is ongoing discussion on the HSAS forum (ABSA forum) regarding the necessity to further engage with households about MANAGING the energy consumption in a building. Clearly one family with profligate habits will use FAR more energy than a more frugal family living in an identical house.
And it is THAT component of the GL scheme which provides the real benefit, and if included under RMD, should have the same impact.
I assessed a home yesterday where the female parent was in the habit of soaking in a 500mm deep 450L spa bath every night. And they wondered why their Off Peak power consumption was 45% of their total consumption and was costing them $130/qtr at off peak rates????
I showed them how to measure the flow rate of the shower and demonstrated how little that would be by emptying a bucketful of water (one minute's worth) into the spa. It barely dampened the surface. She got the message that each spa bath she had was the equivalent of about 30 showers - a month's worth of showers in each bath.
That's the kind of value being brought to householder's by the better-trained and more knowledgeable sustainability assessors.
So while we knowledgeable assessors decry and deplore the "training" initially provided, we do believe there is a sufficient pool of real talent building slowly in the Australian community.
The moss is slowly shedding and the stone is beginning to roll........
Posted Wednesday 25 Aug 2010 @ 12:00:44 am from IP
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