Do I need stamped Drawings?

You're building or renovating a home, yay for you! Or you're helping someone build or renovate a home, that's also nice.

You've just gotten comments back from the Registered Building Surveyor - or RBS - and they're asking you for an energy report (you know what that is!) and stamped drawings (you do not know what those are). What exactly are they asking you for?

When a NatHERS Star Rating assessment is finalised and certified, it comes with a small stamp that your energy rater is required to place on each relevant page of your construction drawing set. This contains the star rating of the dwelling and a QR code that links to the whole certificate from NatHERS, which itself details all the insulation and glazing requirements. More than anything else, its purpose is to make sure that the specific requirements for this project don't get lost along the way, and can always be checked to make sure they're being complied with. 

But, and here's where things get a little niggly, the stamp only comes with a NatHERS assessment. A NatHERS assessment might be the most common compliance pathway chosen for dwellings, but it certainly isn't the only one allowed by the National Construction Code. There's a chance that your dwelling has been assessed using a Verification Method, or the Deemed to Satisfy pathway. What then?

If you've been asked for stamped drawings but you've used an assessment pathway that doesn't come with any certified stamps, the RBS should accept the report by itself. After all, if a pathway doesn't come with a stamp, it doesn't come with a stamp. As we said, NatHERS is the most common pathway so your surveyor may have simply not edited a pro-forma request that they send to all their clients. On the off chance that the RBS is adamant that stamped drawings be provided, a simple stamp can be produced by your energy rater and placed on the drawings. It isn't a certified stamp, but it does verify on every page that an assessment has been completed for the project.

So to summarise:
NatHERS Star Rating = stamped drawings
Verification Method = no stamped drawings
Deemed to Satisfy Report = no stamped drawings

If this still feels a little confusing, rest assured that your energy rater has this all ironed out on their end. This is what we do, we've got you.