Sustainability Victoria (SV) is pleased to announce that the FirstRate5 (FR5) website has been upgraded and can now generate NCC 2022 NatHERS Whole of Home (WoH) Certificates. SV has updated the FR5 website user interface to make the new certificate generation process simpler and more streamline.

Sustainability Victoria (SV) has consolidated the FirstRate5 Website End User Terms of Service (End User Terms of Service) and FirstRate5 Software Licence Agreement (Software Licence Agreement) into a single software licence agreement. The title of the new single agreement is FirstRate5 House Energy Rating Software License Agreement (License Agreement) and it will govern the use of the FirstRate5 desktop application, the FirstRate5 website and FirstRate5 Whole-of-Home.

On 20 March 2024, the NatHERS Administrator approved the FirstRate5 (FR5) NatHERS Certificates which combines both thermal and Whole of Home (WoH) results. Sustainability Victoria (SV) is now in the process of finalising the implementation of the combined NatHERS Certificate generation functionality on the FirstRate5 website. Public release of the updated certificate generation functionality is imminent.

SV has prepared a draft PDF user manual for FirstRate5 Whole- of-Home (v1.0.0) that is available on the FirstRate5 website. Users should carefully read through the manual to learn how to import FirstRate5 project files into FR5 WoH (v1.0.0) and complete a valid Whole of Home assessment. SV has released this beta version to assist assessors with familiarising themselves with completing Whole of Home assessments before the NCC 2022 transitions periods come to an end in 2024.

Join the FirstRate5 team and NatHERS technical staff on 26 March 2024 (2pm AEDT) to learn about the capabilities and application of Sustainability Victoria's new FirstRate5 Whole-of-Home tool. FirstRate5 Whole-of-Home (v1.0.0) is a beta version that does not include certificate functionality. Any whole of home assessments that have been created using version 1.0.0 will be deleted when SV releases the updated version of the tool that will include full whole of home certificate functionality, unless SV receives a request to retain the data.