The next insulation fiasco?

BPN (Building Products News), an Australian trade rag, recently carried an article titled 'Industry alert over reported insulation defects', with the lead paragraph:

Australian insulation experts have issued a warning against the ongoing use of poor-quality, hazardous insulation products.

In Australia, this topic strikes deep and fearful resonances.  It is not because insulation failures are catastrophic to the same degree or with the same frequency as they might be in other places on earth with less benign climates.  Rather, it is because the same headlines a few years ago brought to an abrupt, and politically hurtful halt the Federal government's initiative to upgrade the insulation levels of most Australian homes.  The scheme was one of several injections of Federal funds that probably helped Australia survive the Global Financial Crisis in better state than otherwise might have been expected, so technical issues were easily conflated with political point-scoring.  Be that as it may, it put tremendous pressure on the supply chain for insulation products, and exacerbated issues related to certification and quality control of imports, principally from China.  Those issues are still with us today.

And so it is that the article once again highlights the problems consumers face in choosing appropriate insulation products.  Noting the temptation for purchasers of imported and locally manufactured insulation products to buy on price alone, Keith Anderson, Technical Manager at Kingspan Insulation explains that this is false economy, due to potentially large replacement costs, energy wastage, construction delays and an increased risk of fire.

"The defects reported widely are said to include delamination, where the surface foil layer separates from the insulation core, and oxidation, when the insulation breaks down to a brittle dust over time, not having the ability to withstand long term exposure to high operating temperatures.  More subtle failures occur when low quality reflective surfaces are affected by aging, even when they have a protective film, so that they lose their reflectance and thermal properties over a relatively short period of time."

As is often the case with articles in the trade press, the undoubted relevance of the news reported is slightly tinged with an advertorial flavour.  I normally try to avoid jumping to that conclusion, but in this case it led me to wondering what other issues are at play in the consumer's choice?

These days thermal insulation in new buildings is invariably specified to obtain mandated energy efficiency performance.  To meet the controls relies on accurate declared thermal properties for the wide range of insulation products that make up the total building envelope. 

It took no more than a few minutes of inquiry to find out that the rumblings in the industry centre as much on whether insulation performance claimed by different suppliers can be trusted.  There is a very strong suggestion that many, possibly most such declared thermal properties are overstated.  Even more forcefully put to me was the question of how this can be done with impunity?

 

The principal implication is that there is very little point in being particularly rigourous with energy efficiency controls, if designers cannot have confidence in the data on which their decisions are made.  This issue cannot be simplified to the easy duality of cheap imported versus more expensive but more reliable local product, and may raise questions not only about the commercial practices of the suppliers, but also about the probity of the certification and testing arrangements on which we so absolutely rely.

 

One has to tread very carefully indeed when probing these issues.  At the moment, I cannot pretend to be in possession of enough facts to do more than sketch out the problem.  Even casual googling quickly reveals byzantine arrangements of local suppliers, overseas manufacturers of finished product or component materials, local certification with testing outsourced to overseas laboratories, etc.  

 

One thing is certain:  the problems of the insulation industry are complex, and it is urgent to bring them into the open. 

 

Read 'Industry alert over reported insulation defects' here.

No ifs or batts on the banned wagon

In the Sydney Morning Herald on 17 March 2012, by Tony Wright, national affairs editor of its sister publication The Age of Melbourne.  A relatively short opinion piece about the state of play with government schemes to promote better insulation of Australian homes.  Read it here.

The Age article is what passes for informed discussion these days, and I can hardly be bothered to think about it.  Except that it probably accurately mirrors the knee-jerk, poll driven, emotive, catchword foundations of much of what in turn passes for policy formulation in all levels of politics….and of that I need to be reminded sometimes.  

So what is the bottom line?  If I am kind, the journalist is saying that we can’t have an intelligent conversation about insulation or home energy efficiency, because in the wake of the infamous 'Pink Batts Fiasco', senior Labor Party hacks in our present federal government will panic at just hearing the word 'insulation'.