Q: Insulated safely ? Ans: Only insulated from the truth.

The free insulation debacle continues for so many with no end in sight.....

I accepted the freebie like so many thousands with the view that the government was splashing about my money so freely that I would be fool not to accept a bit of it back.
I foolishly assumed that “Insulation Victoria” was working under the supervision of the government, I was at work the day they installed, and my wife did not feel competent to climb a the ladder and judge their work.
I did not get around to looking in the roof until I got cold enough to want the gas central heating. I noticed the loose insulation had been sprayed all over the ceiling gas heating unit, which gets very hot, and wondered if I was looking at the next house fire to hit the news.

Phone calls to the company merely revealed that the lines were dead and that they had decided to close the business down. Phone calls to the government hotline allowed me to register 3 or 4 times for an inspection over the last 5 weeks.

The first time I rang, an inspection was going to be arranged within days. On second and subsequent calls this timeline was now “indefinite”. As the weather is getting colder and, knowing that squeaky wheels get more oil, I ring every week or so.

Last week, I got sick of waiting and merely asked for the name of an insulation installer that I could pay for myself. The poor girl on the phone had been given the bare minimum of information (probably a deliberate ploy so that the caller would be sorry for her and accept the stonewalling).

Politely persisting, I was told that there was no list of recommended installers and that I should ring a number of installers and ask them directly if they were any good ! I was told that there was a list of deregistered installers – not really much good as they would presumably not be taking calls ! I checked this list online as we spoke and found that even this list did not exist.

At the end of the call, I expressed my sympathy that the poor girl had to work for such a shonky operator and asked her to confirm that:

• There is no indication of how long I will need to wait for inspection i.e. how many people require more urgent inspections ahead of me and how many are being done each week.
• There is no list of deregistered insulation installers available
• There is no list of registered insulation installers available.
• There is no list of insulation installers with complaints registered against them.
• I am advised to make my own private investigations before trusting a registered installer as they may have complaints against them.

Of course the only thing I got from her was the same embarrassed silence that we are all getting from most of Rudd’s Ruinous Rorts.

Stephen Digby