Accessibility Equipment near you

Part H8 of Volume Two applies to new Class 1a dwellings and is satisfied by complying with the ABCB Standard for Livable Housing Design. The Australian Building Codes Board describes livable housing as housing with features that enable use by people with a disability or transitioning through their life stages, and says the provisions are based on the Livable Housing Design Guidelines silver standards. The board also points readers to their state or territory building jurisdiction, which is the polite way of saying adoption is not uniform.

For everybody in an existing house, the practical consequence is that there is no inspection, no certificate and no approval attached to fitting equipment. Nobody signs off a grabrail. That puts the burden of getting it right on the person specifying and the person fixing, and it is why an occupational therapist's recommendation is worth more here than a catalogue.

A grabrail has to resist a body's full weight applied suddenly and at an angle, which is a much larger load than most people picture. In the typical Australian house that load has to find a stud, a nogging or a deliberately installed backing plate. Plasterboard alone will not hold it, and neither will the fibre cement sheet behind a tiled shower wall; hollow-wall anchors that are perfectly adequate for a towel rail are not adequate for this.

The wall construction changes the answer as you move around the country and around the house. Timber stud walls need the rail set out to land on studs or on noggings added for the purpose. Steel framing needs different fixings again. A double brick wall in an older Perth or Adelaide house will hold anything if the installer uses the right masonry anchor and avoids the perp joints. A tiled wall adds the problem of drilling without cracking the tile and without breaching the waterproofing behind it.

The honest test of an installer is whether they ask about the wall before they quote. If nobody has asked what is behind the tiles, nobody has planned the fixing.

Equipment bought from an Australian supplier comes with the consumer guarantees in the Australian Consumer Law. The ACCC states that a product sold to a consumer must be of acceptable quality, meaning safe, durable and free from defects; that it must be fit for the particular purpose stated when the consumer specifies their intended use or relies on the business's advice; and that any description, written or spoken, must be accurate. Services carry their own guarantees, including that they are carried out with an acceptable level of care and skill and supplied within a reasonable time where no time frame was agreed.

That fit-for-purpose guarantee is the one that matters most here, because accessibility equipment is almost always bought for a stated purpose. If you told the supplier the rail was for a person who needs to take their full weight on it and they sold you a positioning aid, the guarantee is engaged.

A manufacturer's warranty sits on top of those rights rather than replacing them. The ACCC is explicit that a warranty against defects is provided in addition to the consumer guarantees and does not limit or replace them, and that a warranty document must carry a statement to that effect, beginning with the words that the goods come with guarantees that cannot be excluded under the Australian Consumer Law.

Fixed equipment loosens, and it loosens quietly. Once every few months, take hold of each grabrail and pull hard in the direction a falling person would load it, then look at the escutcheon for a ring of cracked paint or grout that says the fixing has been moving. Do the same with stair rails, which take the most cumulative load in the house and are usually the oldest fitting on it.

Wheeled and folding equipment has its own failure mode: brakes that no longer bite, rubber feet worn smooth, a hinge that has developed play. None of it is expensive to fix and all of it is dangerous to ignore. If equipment came through an assessment, tell the assessor when something changes, because the need it was solving may also have changed.