Updates
Current
The BESS Helpdesk will be closed from Monday 23 December (5PM AEDT), reopening on Monday 6 January 2025 (9AM AEDT).
BESS remains available to create, edit or view projects with Tool Notes to assist you.
We wish everyone in the BESS user community all the very best for the holiday season, and we look forward to working with you again in 2025.
Closed
Since 13 October, the BESS-3 and BESS-4 engines are no longer be supported.
BESS-3 and BESS-4 projects have not been deleted. These are still be able to be opened and viewed as read-only projects. Edits to BESS-3 and BESS-4 projects require the project to be upgraded to the latest version of BESS.
The BESS-3 engine has been in use since June 2016, and was superseded by BESS-4 in August 2019.
The BESS-4 engine was superseded by BESS-5 in May 2020.
The current versions of the BESS engine are BESS-8 (BESS Classic) and BESS-9 (beta Release 2).
The BESS-4 engine was superseded by BESS-5 in May 2020.
- A bug affecting projects with gas heating to dwellings that were created or modified since July 2023 created calculation errors for the gas consumption and related greenhouse emissions. A small percentage of projects were affected. A fix has been implemented.
- A bug affecting some projects caused the average NatHERS rating to be incorrectly calculated 0.1 stars lower due to floating point math that software coding languages use. A small number of projects were affected. A fix has been implemented.
Information contained in published BESS revisions (pdf reports) including scores, remain unchanged. These reports represent a snapshot of a project in time and are an important record for planning submissions. Projects should always be published before submitting to council.
If you require a revised BESS pdf report (for example to reflect an increase in score), you will need to republish your project.
If you need to amend and republish your BESS assessment (for example as part of an RFI or permit condition), and are having trouble meeting the minimum BESS requirements, you should contact the relevant council.
If you have any questions relating to recent fixes, please contact us on support@bess.net.au
The BESS Helpdesk will be closed from Thursday 22 December (5PM AEDT), reopening on Monday 9 January 2023 (9AM AEDT).
The BESS website remains available to create, edit or view projects with Tool Notes to assist you.
We wish everyone in the BESS user community all the very best for the holiday season, and we look forward to working with you again in 2023.
While you are always welcome to give us feedback at any time, we'd love it if you could take 5-10 mins to complete our annual user survey.
Your feedback helps us understand your experience of using BESS, and plan ongoing software development work to make the tool as user friendly as possible.
BESS User Survey - Oct / Nov 2022 (surveymonkey.com)
BESS will be unavailable for a short time on Saturday 12 November from 3pm to 7pm while we bring you version 1.7.1 (BESS-7).
- A bug affecting projects with reticulated third pipe connections that were created by copying other projects. A very small number of projects were affected. A fix has been implemented.
- Projects where rainwater tanks had been entered and then deleted were incorrectly displaying rainwater results. The results for potable water use reduction were correct, but the visuals were confusing. A fix has been implemented.
- A timing bug was introduced when we upgraded one of our supporting technologies. This meant that some data wasn't saved to the database correctly, affecting calculation results and in some cases also scoring. This bug affected around 10% of projects that were edited between April and August 2022. For 80% of these projects, the fix has improved the project score (usually by 1%). It primarily affected credits Energy 3.4 (Clothes Drying) and Water 1.1 (Potable Water Use). A fix has now been implemented.
Information contained in published BESS revisions (pdf reports) including scores, remain unchanged. These reports represent a snapshot of a project in time and are an important record for planning submissions. Projects should always be published before submitting to council.
If you require a revised BESS pdf report (for example to reflect an increase in score), you will need to republish your project.
If you need to amend and republish your BESS assessment (for example as part of an RFI or permit condition), and are having trouble meeting the minimum BESS requirements, you should contact the relevant council.
If you have any questions relating to recent fixes, please contact us on support@bess.net.au
BESS is undergoing scheduled maintenance Sunday 4th September, 5pm-6pm and will be unavailable for use for some or all of this period.
We are migrating to a new helpdesk tool called freshdesk. We expect this will be seamless - please continue to use the form on the Contact page or email us at support@bess.net.au for any enquiries.
Emails to support@bess.zendesk.com will no longer be monitored.
We're excited to annouce a fresh look for BESS Online Training. It's expanded and improved, with 3 new and refreshed packages available.
For the first time, BESS Fundamentals, as a free module is coming next week. Other packages to follow soon.
More details are on the BESS Training page.
BESS is undergoing scheduled maintenance Sunday 10th April, 12pm-3pm and will be unavailable for use for some or all of this period.
BESS is undergoing scheduled maintenance Sunday 10th April, 8am-12pm and will be unavailable for use for some or all of this period.
A recent update to BESS on the 7th of February resulted in a regression of some content on the website. New IEQ credits in Tool Notes were missing and the wording of some credits had regressed. This content has since been restored.
BESS support will be temporarily unavailable during the end of year holiday period. We'll be closed from 23 December 2020 and back for any queries on 4 January 2021.
BESS support will at reduced capacity from 4 January 2021 to 17 January. Thank you in advance for your patience and understanding.
The BESS website will still be available for Planning permit assessments, to create or view projects with Tool notes and FAQ pages to assist you. However the contact form will be closed from 24 December to 4 January.
The BESS Report format has had minor fixes applied to sort an issue where the Non-Potable Water connections for Residential dwellings was not being displayed in the final report.
A minor rendering issue that occured in some reports was also fixed.
Did you know? You can now search projects by Site Type, Council and BESS Engine
We'd love your feedback. Our 2021 BESS user survey is open now until the end of July. Take the survey.