Revote Stops the NFRC Meeting

While USGNN covered the NFRC meeting last week, we did not get a chance to explain some of the controversy that occurred toward the end of the meeting.

A revote temporarily halted proceedings at the National Fenestration Rating Council's (NFRC) summer meeting last week came, during the meeting of the Component Modeling Approach (Rating) subcommittee.

In discussing, NFRC CB-PCP-2006: Component-Based Fenestration Product Certification Program, Michael Thoman with Architectural Testing Inc. motioned that the term "approved calculation entity," referred to throughout the document as "ACE," be changed to "accredited calculation entity."

An approved calculation entity calculates the energy indices for fenestration systems using NFRC-approved procedures and the component library database. Such a change would have limited the types of entities that could have been called ACEs.

According to Max Perilstein, with Arch Aluminum and Glass, keeping the word "approved" allows for the possibility of having the manufacturer or end user involved in the process. Because of the way "accredited" was defined in the NFRC Laboratory Accreditation Program (LAP), as only applying to laboratories, changing the word from approved to accredited could potentially lock out anyone except for "accredited labs."

Thoman added that the definition of accreditation included in the NFRC glossary (which was also being balloted at the meeting) could be changed to not be laboratory-specific. After a vote, the motion failed.

A second motion, to specifically use the term "approved calculated entity" throughout the document, rather than the abbreviation "ACE," passed.

However, following the voting process, Thoman suggested that the official procedures for voting had not been correctly followed throughout the meeting, and asked for a revote of the failed motion. Following a lengthy discussion with the council's lawyer over voting procedures, the vote was retaken, with one vote having changed; the revote upheld the original decision to keep the term "approved," rather than "accredited."

For a complete review of the NFRC meeting, see the September issue of USGlass magazine.