Partnering with Energy Lab to deliver accuracy, confidence, and compliance

At A&L, we’re committed to making energy efficiency easy and effective.

As part of that approach, we’re connecting with our long-term partners and collaborators to understand what’s most important, what’s changing, what the challenges are, and what the future holds for energy efficient windows and doors.

Established in 2005, Energy Lab has become one of Australia’s leading energy efficiency assessment companies. With offices in Australia, Europe, and Asia, the team has completed over a quarter of a million residential and commercial projects.

With a commitment to innovation—having developed a proprietary AI-based software that provides automated house mapping, API integration with Sustainability Victoria, and the innovative magic energy box website, which converts PDF plans into FR5 files for energy raters—we’re proud to have worked with Energy Lab for many years.

We recently caught up with Brian Haines, Director of Energy Lab, to talk about navigating updates to code, what makes for successful partnerships, and the importance of compliance in protecting home buyers against potential unforeseen costs.

 

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Navigating updates to the NCC’s energy efficiency requirements

Since 2022, the National Construction Code has implemented updates to code that have changed the construction landscape. In addition to requirements for accessibility, plumbing and other factors, energy efficiency is now a crucial concern. Brian elaborates:

“As a result of the National Construction Code’s recent update, we’re now chasing specific star values in all States. Specifically, a 7-star rating for all new home builds. Windows play a really important role within that framework. Say a house is rating at 6.5 stars, and we’ve maximised the insulation in the walls, the ceilings, and the floors. It’s often difficult to make any adjustments from a design perspective, because builders work to a fixed design. At that point, we need to increase the energy efficiency of the window specification.”

Brian continues: “In terms of hierarchy of importance for energy efficiency considerations… Insulation is obviously highly important. But, if you’ve maximised that aspect of the home with the thickest batts you can possibly fit into the walls, the ceiling, you’ve built on a waffle pod…or insulated slab you can’t do anything else. There’s a point of diminishing returns where you could put R100 into the walls and it’s still not going to increase your rating by any more than 0.1 or 0.2 of a star.”

“You could say, or I would say, that the window specification is the most important part of an energy efficiency assessment.” – Brian Haines, Energy Lab

Window specifications are key in energy efficiency, and particularly for the energy raters creating the reports that certify compliance. WERS codes (Window Energy Rating Scheme) relate to how well a window product performs in terms of energy efficiency. There are two types of WERS code a rater can use: product-specific (which includes performance data provided by the R&D labs of specific manufacturers) or generic codes. For Energy Lab, when specificity is crucial, product-specific codes are key.

Brian says: “If we scroll back the years and look at the information that was within the NatHERS rating software—specifically the window codes that were provided—A&L always had the largest amount of WERS codes within that software. Working with A&L from that perspective was quite easy, because we had a large selection of codes to choose from.”

“I would say A&L have been much more diligent than other manufacturers, because they commit to having all the windows in their range thoroughly tested and provide the resulting codes.” – Brian Haines, Energy Lab

The knock-on benefit of having a greater selection of product-specific codes? A higher level of accuracy in energy reports, and a greater level of surety for builders and home buyers that a home’s design is compliant with energy efficiency requirements.

Brian affirms: “From our perspective, if you have more product selection, more deviation of U-values and solar heat gain coefficient (SHGC) values, it makes it much easier to provide an accurate, compliant energy report.”

 

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Building confidence with builders and home buyers

Energy efficiency can be technical and sophisticated. But with the right partners—being product manufacturers and energy assessors—builders and buyers can have confidence that specific designs meet the NCC’s stringent 7-star requirements.

“Whenever there’s a new product, an update, or even a rumour about the specifications builders will need in specific climate zones in each state, A&L would proactively contact us on behalf of their builder customers. From there, we’ll do the necessary calculations to quantify and confirm the exact information or specification they need. There’s nothing more valuable for builders now than what A&L are doing.”

“That’s done so that A&L can provide full certainty for builders. Using real information with properly calculated data from a credible source, we can say, in this design with this window product, this is the exact energy rating you’ll achieve.” – Brian Haines, Energy Lab

Brian continues: “[These types of calculations are crucial] for the NCC 2022 updates, because there’s a lot of misinformation out there and a lot of misunderstanding about the different microclimates that exist within each state. The states vary with their requirements too. And because it’s now very much oriented around the design of the house, we can’t just add insulation to the house and expect it will be compliant. It is very much about the specification of the windows used and the shape of the house.”

“A&L does their due diligence and they’re in front of the pack, because they will proactively take real designs on behalf of their builders, give them to us, we’ll do the analysis and the calculations, and provide real, credible answers for how certain windows contribute to energy efficiency.” – Brian Haines, Energy Lab

 

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Protecting against the risk of non-compliance and unforeseen costly upgrades

Due diligence in energy efficiency is essential. While the benefits of compliance with energy efficiency requirements are clear—reduced money spent on bills, improved comfort, fewer emissions, and less impact on the environment long term—ultimately, providing accurate, specific detail ahead of time is the best way to protect against unwanted upgrades, and potentially uncomfortable conversations with prospective home buyers.

Brian outlines a potential hypothetical situation: “Imagine you go to market with a display home with a certain price, and a client walks in and falls in love with that specific design. They’re attached to a specific façade, a structural option; they fall in love with everything. They can’t do anything about the orientation of the house because they’ve already bought a block of land. They’ve been told a specific price, and they go in for the tender. Suddenly, they’re told there’s an additional $20,000 being added to the build because it never met the 7-star requirement. This is because the builder hasn’t done the necessary calculations to begin with to know what it’s going to cost to reach 7 stars on all orientations in every possible structural combination.”

“A&L are again so far ahead of the pack because they’re thinking about these types of scenarios and working to prevent them. A lot of manufacturers aren’t. They think, ‘we went from 5 to 6 stars easily enough’. But the same is not true in going from 6 to 7.” – Brian Haines, Energy Lab

 

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Looking for guidance with energy efficiency?

If you’re building or designing a home and you need some experienced technical guidance to meet—or understand—energy efficiency requirements, get in contact with our team today.