Page 964 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 31 March 1993
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important energy conservation factors. Something like 14 per cent of energy loss actually goes through windows. People are putting up sheets for a while because they are that stretched. In six months' time you will start to see curtains go in. People get a little on top of things and they gradually improve. The point I am trying to make is that people really are stretched to the limit when they go into these houses, and any additional cost is something that we need to be very careful about.
The Government has taken the view that it is sensible to make it compulsory to have insulation in walls and in inaccessible ceiling areas. Wall insulation is something that you can do very easily and comparatively cheaply when the house is going up. In the typical brick veneer house, when you are at the frame stage it is very simple to strap in fibreglass batts, put on aluminium foil and then put the brickwork up and fix the gyprock on the inside. It is very easy to do it comparatively cheaply then. It is virtually impossible to do it when the house is up, although there are some companies that provide a technology whereby they pump fibreglass into an existing wall cavity and do some drilling to make sure that it goes right through.
We think that it is sensible to make it compulsory to have insulation at the appropriate Australian standards in wall cavities of new houses. The Government has achieved that by regulations made on 3 December and which were tabled in this place on 17 December. We have also agreed that it would be sensible to make it compulsory to have that type of insulation material in inaccessible roof and ceiling areas. In a flat-roofed house, or a flattish-roofed house with very little ceiling space, a cathedral ceiling, where there is very little space between the interior ceiling and the exterior roof, we think it is sensible to make the insulation compulsory. But in the standard house with a large ceiling area we do not think it should be compulsory at new construction stage.
The young couple that move into that house with, under our regulations, the now compulsory wall insulation, which does add some hundreds of dollars to the cost of the house, will, after a few months, put sufficient cash together to put up appropriate curtains and that type of material. That will probably be their first item, and it has a significant energy saving. Perhaps a year or a couple of years down the track they will be in a position where they can put fibreglass insulation in the ceiling. In the conventional ceiling it is not a particularly difficult task. People can do it themselves - it is common to see ads on TV for the various coloured batts at the various hardware or do-it-yourself stores around Canberra - or they can get somebody in to do it. It is not a terribly difficult task.
We think that the sensible balance here is to make wall insulation compulsory because it is very expensive to do it other than at construction stage. Our estimation is that that would add some hundreds of dollars. The initial cost of putting fibreglass batts in walls on a 100-square-metre brick veneer house in the ACT, on the information that I have been given by my Building Control people, would be about $500. This is for fibreglass batts, thermal resistance R1.5, installed in the walls. The initial cost of putting that in is about $500. It represents an energy saving of about $120 a year. There was a suggestion somewhere that you could recoup the cost in a year, but it takes a little longer than that. There is no doubt that in three or four years you would recoup the cost, and we think that that is a sensible requirement.
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