Price verse Safety: When a Shed is not just a Shed

Price verse Safety: When a Shed is not just a Shed

The good old price verse safety debate! At what point do we as consumers stop putting price before safety? Understandably, the average Australia consumer needs to be price conscious, but to what extent? We’re not going to argue, the cost of living in Australia is astronomical, and part of the privilege of living in one of the most beautiful countries in the world is that we must pay to do so.

Big brands such as Aldi and Kmart have turned their businesses around by simply offering consumables at bargain basement prices. But we’re talking about small ticket items such as clothing, toys and books. Hardly life threatening!

A steel structure on the other hand, while a big investment, could potentially be life threatening. The Australian climate can be extremely fierce, just look at the damage caused in recent weather events such as Cyclone Yassi and Larry.

So why as consumers, do we so easily dismiss the structural integrity of a building in order to save a few bucks? At the end of the day, a shed is simply not just a shed, it’s a building built to secure your $50k car or your hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of machinery. It’s a structure that is likely to be built close to where your loved ones sleep at night.

Are you really willing to put a price on that? 

The issue for many shed buyers is unlike the purchase of a car there is no 5-star ANCAP rating system or road worthy certifications to help customers know the building they are being quoted is compliant to the actual wind pressure of their site location.  So, what can you look for to have confidence you are dealing with a credible shed company that will quote and supply a building that is code compliant? 

For the last few years many companies touted site specific engineering but in reality, the process was not much more than a best guess from a salesperson motivated to make a sale. 

Unfortunately, many still operate to this standard or worse many customers are being quoted under specification sheds from companies who either deliberately or in ignorance make significant and misleading estimates of sites, and you the customer can be none the wiser until it is too late.  As a result, you will be charged additional costs later in upgrades to engineering or worse left with a building that simply doesn’t comply to the standards.

A credible shed company will supply you at quote stage. As a bare minimum an independently auto generated site specification report that will have the site shed location pinned and a calculated site wind speed. If you aren’t supplied this documentation at quote, then Caveat Emptor, the principle that the buyer alone is responsible for checking the quality and suitability of goods before a purchase is made.

I would love to say that the shed industry was abound with credible and ethical companies motivated to do the right thing by customers but, unfortunately there are many who simply are not.

Doing you due diligence and even paying a slightly more premium price now, could quite possibly save you thousands in the future.