LBP Skills Maintenance, December 2024 — for all LBPs | The Building Practitioners Board considers complaints against LBPs. To assist the Board, the Registrar of LBPs delegates the task to the Investigations Team within Occupational Regulation, MBIE. The Registrar will provide a report to the Board for consideration. If the Board decide to hold a hearing and an LBP has breached a ground for discipline, the complaint is upheld and the Board will then decide on an appropriate penalty.

This month I look at how we can raise our insulation game when it comes to window and roof design + we have a new round of the Medium Quick-Fire Quiz. 

Recently in the architectural community there was discussion around the need to have a thermal break in the concrete ground floor of a house where the attached garage is within its footprint, but outside of the thermal envelope, and how to achieve this in a buildable and structural manner.

Any design process balances client aspirations against budget constraints. How often have you faced the challenge of aligning a project's cost with its needs and vision?

The key challenge will be designing systems for both the recognition of overseas standards and product certification schemes where, for many products, the expectations of performance are universal, but there are some unique situations in NZ that may mean some products are not appropriate.

Along with hydraulic demands there are other risk factors that should be considered when selecting a channel system and deciding on placement.

It seems that finally the problem of summer over-heating of newly built medium-density housing, especially terrace housing, is gaining traction and being noticed by the mainstream media where it is starting to become a subject of public comment and discussion.

There has been a recent trend for council RFIs and requests from specifiers around threshold detailing vs surface water drainage, with confusion around the separation of their functions. Threshold drainage and surface water drainage are designed to perform two different tasks. Here I outline some of the commonly queried situations.

In this post I’d like to explore the concept of price. How important is it? What is a fair price? Will high prices come down?

Understanding and applying Test Standard AS1530.4 — Section 10.12 Permissible Variations to projects can dramatically increase the availability of passive fire stopping solutions.