Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2009
To: "Richard Smith - Executive Director" <mha.association(at)yahoo.com>
From: Norbert Senf <mheat(at)heatkit.com>

Informal Technical Committee Report to the MHA Board of Directors

June 29/09
by Norbert Senf, Technical Committee Chair.

The technical committee has had 2 or 3 informal conference call meetings to discuss the progress
of MHA's submission to EPA, via Paul Tiegs, of a proposal for a Voluntary Agreement for EPA heater regulation.

The final details of the draft proposal were worked out during a technical committee meeting at
Wildacres, with Paul Tiegs present. In addition, Paul had presented an overview of the issues
to the entire MHA membership present at a specially organized session at Wildacres. HPBA (Tom
Stroud) had also been invited to present at this session, but cancelled.

The discussion has become mostly political, with HPBA/AMHOP objecting directly to EPA
to MHA's submission and essentially having blocked it. EPA is not interested in dealing with our
small industry if there are internal disputes.

We have posted MHA's draft technical documents on the website for comment, with no technical comments received to date.

Alex Chernov volunteered to attend an HPBA sponsored meeting in Denver, to see if we could
reach some kind of accommodation with AMHOP. He wrote a report to the tech committee, summarizing his observations
and recommendations. I have been forwarding this and some of the other discussions to Glenn, Dick,
and Doug. Three board members sit on the tech committee.

We had been waiting for the results of a June 16 meeting between HPBA and EPA. The result was that Tom
Stroud stated he had negotiated for masonry heaters to be in the NSPS (New Source Performance
Standards). We think this is bad, because it would mean that all heaters will be regulated, even in
areas that don't have air quality problems. Whereas 90% of our membership would have been unaffected
under our voluntary proposal, now 100% of our membership will be affected. It is unclear at this point
how handbuilt heaters would be allowed.

Paul Tiegs has suggested that we try again, at a higher level of EPA, with Greg Green. However, in
order to proceed we would need either agreement from AMHOP, or at least an agreement not to interfere.
Alex Chernov has again stepped forward, and phoned Tim Seaton to discuss this. Tim said that he would
bring Alex's proposal to the AMHOP board and get back to us, roughly mid-July.

There have also been several ASTM conference call meetings, attended by a majority of the tech comm.
members. We don't see much progress there towards finalizing a test fueling protocol, much less addressing handbuilt heaters.

We have also started some informal exploratory discussions among committee members about trying a different
approach, which I call "Plan C". This is to establish an additional, higher certification level that
would be available to certified masons who also want to be able to conduct a field test on a heater for
emissions and efficiency. In other words, we would just go ahead and take control of ensuring clean
burning custom heaters ourselves. We would develop the required competencies as an alternative option to the
ASTM/EPA/HPBA/AMHOP route.