greenvalue.com.au

Your Home Sustainability Assessment

ATTENTION: a new statement, released by Hon. Peter Garrett on Friday, the 19th of February 2010, advertised fundamental changes to the Green Loans Program! The interest free loans will not be continued after the 22nd of March 2010, subsidies for insulation are cancelled until a new programme will be introduced, and the rebate and conditions to receive subsidies for replacing a electric hot water systems have been changed. Households are, at this stage, still eligible for Free Home Sustainability Assessments, but without qualifying for an interest free loan! 1300 778 451 is the number of a new enquiries hotline if you want to find out how these changes affect you, or complain about missing reports! Some information on this page is now out of date - my apologies!

So, you are keen to proceed with your assessment.
A few easy steps to facilitate your Home Sustainability Assessment!
 

1. make your appointment

Obviously the first step is to make an appointment; to arrange a time, please ring me either in the early hours of the evening, or in the morning between 8:00 and 8:30.
phone (02) 6687 6416 or mobile 0418-965 966
please note: during home visits I prefer to concentrate on the client - so I might not answer my mobile during the day...
 
My next step is to enter this appointment into a government database, which then assigns an individual number to your assessment for further processing; this process unfortunately means that spontaneous “on the spur of the moment” appointments are out of the question.
 

2. on the day of the assessment

A complete Home Sustainability Assessment should take around 1½ hours; this is the time the government allocates for it. Obviously the time needed depends on a number of factors, like the size of your home, how many questions you have, etc.
You can make a few preparations to facilitate the assessment and get the most out of it:

• first and foremost, make sure that you will be home for your appointment; if you cannot be present, please ring me well in advance to re-schedule.
• if you have particular questions or a wish-list for specific improvements to your home, please write them down and have the list at hand.
• it helps a great deal if you have recent utility bills (like power, water, gas) readily available. These bills indicate a lot about specific areas in your home which may need attention (eg. higher power consumption due to electric heating in winter).
• if you have details of energy consumption of appliances (like fridge, washing machine, TV, etc.) available, they would help me to enter more accurate data. (If you don't, no problem; then they will be based on average values for comparable appliances.)

• I will need to access all rooms in your house, and maybe even want to open your fridge, so please take this into consideration.
• it would be preferable to have access to your hot water service; if this is crowded in inside your garage or under the house then it would help the process if you clear access to it beforehand.
• my insurance policy tells me, for OHS reasons, to make sure that all pets are restrained during my visit; personally I like dogs, but the work is certainly easier if they are not under one's feet...

3. the assessment process

First I will sit down with you and have short chat about your home and how you are using it, and then we will go over your utility bills together to analyse consumption patterns. After that I will ask you to accompany me as I do a room-by-room assessment, writing my findings onto a form.
Later, at my office, I will transfer these findings into an on-line form, from where the data is analysed. You will receive a detailed printed report by mail; the government's time frame for this printed Home Sustainability Assessment is normally 2 weeks. I will telephone you at a later date for follow-up and feedback about the entire process.
Once you have received the report, it is up to you what steps you take. There may be suggestions listed in the report which you want to attend to immediately; in this case you can apply for a Green Loan, which is interest free credit to finance improvements to the energy consumption of your home. You may also find some suggestions which require little more than your initiative to implement, and others which you may prefer to postpone to a much later point of time. This is all up to you.

Your Home Sustainability Assessment
is your first step
to a more comfortable and energy efficient home!

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