Methods of Measurement
As many of our contractor customers will know, FM Insulation Supplies holds the archives of the Thermal Insulation Contractors Association of Australia . It could be said that it is the depository of all knowledge or, as our Prime Minister might say, the suppository of such knowledge.
In my forty years in the insulation industry I have seen many disputes about how quantities of applied insulation are measured, with obvious financial consequences for all concerned. Being able to provide credible measurement calculations is therefore essential.
There is, to my knowledge, no Australian Standard covering this. The closest we get is the Australian Standard which covers pipelines installed by plumbers, but this doesn’t really translate to industrial pipe lines and has no relevance to the calculation of insulation quantities applied to vessels, boilers, tanks & turbines etc.
Recently, during a recent search through the history records I came across two very interesting documents. The two documents discovered in the TICAA archives are :
“Standard Method of Measurement for Thermal Insulation” issued by TICA UK December 1973 (download)
and
“A Standard Method of Measuring Quantity for Industrial Insulation. The James S Denis formula” issued by : Thermal Insulation Association of Canada. (download)
(this document is undated but is thought to have been published in the early 1970s).
Since these documents were published, at least one more method of measurement has been published in Europe.
As we look further into the TICAA archives, I will add any other interesting documents in this section of our website.