It's Here....

Well if you expected me to lead off this post with anything other than Monday’s NFRC news, then you sadly were wrong. There’s no way I could not talk about the release of the “fees” associated with the program. I was quoted in the USGNN piece and I can not stress a few things enough, most of which, is these costs will be passed all the way through, forcing the glazing contractors to get after their customers for payment. The confusion and ire this program will cause will be epic. But then again I have been hammering this for a few years… so what’s new?

The biggest thing that is new is the release of the costs and it just sends the message home even more on how real this is. These will be costs that will have to be explained up the food chain as I guarantee you when it hits states outside of California and Washington, no one will have a clue on what this is all about and why these costs are being passed along.

As for the info itself, the NFRC release was typically cryptic. I’d expect nothing less from them really. But what kills me is their desire to make their investment back in such a quick time period, they are afterall a non-profit, yet unlike most non profits that would do something this bold, NFRC wants to get back to level a lot quicker. Plus it’s amazing that NFRC continues to live off the backs of only part of their membership that pays the bills. Yes in case you don’t know, product manufacturers and installers pay on a sliding scale based on total company sales. While the people who will benefit from this new program, because they will be the testers and inspectors, pay a cool $400. Shouldn’t it the other way around? Shouldn’t the people who will profit tremendously be the ones paying on a scale, while the people who have to adhere to the rules and still PAY to have services performed pay the simple low rate?

Remember the NFRC and the main group that dominates them (test labs and inspection agencies) will say how they experienced resistance on the residential side and how great their program works over there. Well while it works or not is truly up to the eye of the beholder, I can’t ever get by the fact that NFRC has never figured out that commercial building is as different from residential as I am from Mike Tyson. It’s not even close, yet it was that impetus and the desire to oversee another industry that brought this on.

(And at this point, I’ll be accused of making things up, but it was an NFRC board member who publicly stated a few years ago in a NFRC meeting that the Commercial industry was an “untapped” market- then when that was brought to light is when all of a sudden NFRC started to “dig up” all of the reasons they have for doing this)

And the bottom line… It’s absolutely pathetic we find ourselves in this position… being dictated to by a profiteering group of test labs and inspection agencies that are given carte blanche by a sound asleep group at the Department of Energy. While I have said it before and I will say it again, our industry has nothing to hide and is more than open for a creation of a system to calculate full system values. However when that system is built by people who have zero interest in our industry, zero clue on how the industry works, zero care about what we do, and zero desire to talk and LISTEN to the people this will truly affect (Building Owners, Architects, General Contractors, Glaziers, Suppliers etc). Yes this program goes forward despite all that…