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In these newsletters, we cover the latest building industry news, trends, and tips. In this particular issue, we touch on building inspection timeframes, the best in the business at providing as-built drainage plans, innovation with prefabrication, and the latest on stormwater flood hazard maps for Wānaka and Albert Town.
Building trends
First of all, I’d like to share a big thank you with builders in the district for their patience when booking inspections. Timeframes for an inspection recently blew out to three weeks as we experienced a perfect storm of surging demand for inspections (usually around 1,500 per month, now 1,800) combined with reduced staff and contractor availability. However, I’m pleased to report our team is working through these challenges and we’ve reduced our timeframes to two weeks. Hopefully we’ll be back to three-to-four-day turnarounds in early December.
As an aside, I’ve heard one of our northern neighbour’s building consent authorities is currently taking 45 working days to process a consent (QLDC sits at 13.5 days) and has no inspections available until the beginning of February 2023!
Building consent numbers have been steady for the first four months of this financial year, however November numbers are very low; approximately 100 building consents received compared to our average month of 150 consents. It will be interesting to see whether this is the start of a trend due to looming interest rate rises and costs of building increasing, or just an anomaly.
And for those who haven’t heard, we recently released an update on the Licensed Building Practitioner investigated by Council. The builder in question has been struck off the register. If you’re interested in reading more about this case, head to https://www.qldc.govt.nz/2022/november/22-11-24-mayor-lewers-praises-council-team-after-building-practitioners-board-decision.
Chris English
QLDC Building Services Manager
Christmas shutdown for QLDC offices
QLDC offices will be closed from Saturday 24 December 2022 and open again on Wednesday 4 January 2023. However, please be advised the statutory processing clock will be stopped over the Christmas period between Tuesday 20 December 2022 and Tuesday 10 January 2023. This period is excluded from the 20 working day period Councils are given to process applications.
Please keep this in mind when submitting your Building Consent applications.
Drainage - who said it's boring?
Check the connection
A friendly reminder to those connecting the water supply into buildings that you have a responsibility to check foul water is flowing down the right pipes in the street. This follows recent discoveries of a small but unacceptable level of cross connections (wastewater flowing into stormwater pipes) throughout the district.
This simple check at the commissioning of a building can reduce potential environmental impacts and save costs for our community.
Many in the industry use these plans for maintenance and alteration works, years on after a building is completed. These plans stay on QLDC’s property files for the entirety of a building’s life. While there are no national specific standards on requirements for as-built drainage plans, they need to be legible for our administration staff to understand.
And on that note, our staff would like to thank those who are going above and beyond in this space.
As-built Awards
Finalists:
As part of our inaugural “As-built Awards”, our CCC staff selected the finalists, with most of these tradespeople located in the Upper Clutha. Notable mentions go to McIvor Plumbers, QT Plumbing and Gas, B K Plumbing, May Plumbing, and TaylorMade Plumbing.
The winner:
But the winner of our “As-built Awards" was Gordon McTavish and the team at ALBA Plumbing. Congratulations to Gordon and the team!
We’d like to wish all contestants the best of luck for our next “As-built Awards” in 12 months’ time!
Prefabrication
In June this year Offsite NZ held its annual Colab conference. Hosted over a single day, the event featured presentations from clever people doing from New Zealand, Australia, and the United Kingdom doing clever things. While we often think of prefabricate construction as a recent development, elements of buildings have been prefabricated for years (frames and trusses), bringing efficiency, consistency, and precision to building elements.
The Colab conference highlighted some of the innovative construction methods being used on our shores and around the world. We’ve highlighted some of the interesting products that were presented on in the list below:
Kainga Ora’s Building Momentum plan aims to lead transformation in the offsite manufacturing section by playing a role in increasing demand and capacity in the industry. They have identified construction methods and materials that match their building typologies. Including SIPs, CLT and floor cassettes for onsite construction, volumetric construction with fully finished units and bathroom and laundry pods. They have found prefabrication delivers better quality builds and helps reduce the cost of supplying housing.
When constructing the Mary Potter Apartments in a built-up area of Wellington, those involved found prefabrication generated less noise onsite, assisted with precision, created less waste, required fewer lifting operations, made for happy subcontractors, reduced propping, and weathertightness was achieved faster. Oh, and it saved time and cost.
Timber Building Systems (TBS) based in Australia turned the downfall of the automotive industry into an advantage, using the skills, experience, and knowledge of former employees and applying these to the construction industry. TBS constructs closed wall panels predominately used in midrise construction, applying ‘lean manufacturing’ to consider and reduce seven wastes identified by the technique: overproduction, inventory, defects, motion, over processing, waiting and transportation. Offsite manufacturing enables these areas of production to constantly be reviewed and improved upon.
XFrame produces load bearing timber partition walls primarily used for commercial building fit outs. This product was born out of post graduate research in New Zealand, and enables faster construction of internal space that uses sustainably harvested timber to produce a high quality and smart looking product.
These is a small selection of products presented and available on the market. Modular and prefabricated construction is now well supported by legislation with Building (Modular Component Manufacturer’s Scheme) Regulations 2022 and MBIE’s BuiltReady scheme, which is a volunteer scheme for manufacturer of modular components to enable fast and more consistent building consent approaches for these components.
New stormwater flood hazard maps for Wānaka and Albert Town released
QLDC has released new stormwater flood hazard maps for Wānaka to help Council staff and the community better understand and plan for flood risk in the area.
The maps identify potential flood risk from extreme rainfall events to properties in the Wānaka and Albert Town areas, and are publicly available online using QLDC’s GIS map tool.
Please follow this link to access the map: https://www.qldc.govt.nz/stormwater-hazard-maps. Residents and property owners can zoom in on any property and identify the potential flood risk.
Two maps have been produced based on the same modelling results. One map indicates possible water depth caused by stormwater flooding. The other indicates any potential hazard affecting people, property or vehicles, and is based on a combination of water depth and velocity.
Council has sent owners of properties within the flood assessment areas letters advising them that potential flood information will appear on a Land Information Memorandum (LIM) if one is requested for their property.
For more information see our website: QLDC Stormwater flood hazard maps and for any quesitons contact us via email: building@qldc.govt.nz
To view previous issues, please visit: https://www.qldc.govt.nz/services/building-services/additional-information/brace-yourself-building-services-newsletter
If there is a topic that you would like to see covered, please let us know by emailing: chris.english@qldc.govt.nz
