By Dean Bradley, sales and marketing manager, Glazpart

Glazpart has been providing fenestration parts and accessories for over 36 years with over 3,000 products for system houses, fabricators, and Installers. In recent times we have developed an ever-evolving range of trickle vents.

This is important with the recent changes of the building regulations approved documents (AD) L and especially F for ventilation. This document comes into force on 15 June 2022 for installations on site!

It is important to dispel a lot of myths and rumours which have emerged from commentators who don’t understand the issues recognised by the government and that have come to the fore. These changes are not due to the lobbying of trickle vent manufacturers! There are clear benefits, as there has been a lack of compliance across this area.

The government audited 55 sites for compliance to AD F and only two sites complied to the 2006 regulations. This was due to a lack of value given to the need for the provision of background ventilation by house builders, fabricators and installers with a lack of education of the homeowners as to the need.

In fact, there are in the impact assessment of AD F, £15m benefits for the change as this is the cost of remedial works needed for not providing good background ventilation. Even the government couldn’t clearly assess the cost to the NHS but their own estimate is between £6m and £76m additional benefits over the period.

Therefore £21m – £91m! Therefore, there are new educational and compliance paperwork needed for all dwellings once works have been completed in the AD.

Document L clearly increases the air tightness of a property and the more you make the building envelope energy efficient, you must give the dwelling a way to ‘breathe’ naturally otherwise it will become uninhabitable and energy efficiency measures cannot be installed.

With the latest generation of trickle vents, most applications will not see an increase in trickle vents used as designs have either doubled their performance or halved in size making them less obtrusive.

If you try and continue to use the traditional free area vents, then you will need to use twice as many!

It is just the scope of needing to fit them to all replacement windows which has changed.

In terms of aesthetics, we are now in a new world of colour, foiled coloured profile demands are up to 60% of the market. It’s a bit like when TV’s from black and white to colour – the ‘white gold’ is now ‘any colour gold’ with over 40 finishes available just in trickle vents.

I suppose the final point to note is this apparent increase in cost. Consumers typically only purchase windows once in the ownership of a property, it’s not a regular purchase and their wants change. If it was a purely cost driven purchase, then all windows would be white with plastic handles.

Here, the opportunity to increase sales and margins seems to have been missed in blinkered responses. At least one commentator estimated a cost of £50 per window. The majority of this is retail mark up for installers which in a tight market surely, can only be healthy.

If sold correctly there is value here, those not complying to the AD’s can be held up as being in the so-called grey market.

With the incontestable proposed draconian ‘policing’ of the market that is due to be implemented across the UK construction industry from 2023, and proposed changes to AD Q there may be more important issues of increased costs to focus on.