Hushfield was set up by two acoustic engineers who were tired of explaining to clients why the figure in a brochure could not be reproduced.
The building on the Rotterdamseweg was a machine hall before it was a laboratory. The reverberation rooms were poured inside it in 1996 and 1997 — two concrete boxes on isolated foundations, built by a contractor who had never made a room deliberately non-parallel and asked three times whether the drawings were correct.
The first accredited report went out in November 1998. The laboratory has been under continuous accreditation since, through four revisions of ISO/IEC 17025.
Nineteen staff: nine acoustic engineers, four technicians who build specimens into the aperture, two on calibration and quality, three in the office, one apprentice on a four-year technical programme. Reports are signed by whichever two engineers measured and checked, and both names appear.
Several of our engineers sit on national standards committees. That is useful for clients mainly because it means the person quoting your test has usually read the argument behind the clause you are worried about.
Three lines: chamber time, engineering time, reporting. Specimen building is charged separately when our technicians do it, and not charged when your fitters do. Nothing is bundled, so you can see that a three-day build on a complex façade element costs more than the measurement itself — which it does.
We do not offer volume discounts on accredited testing. Each report costs what it costs to produce properly, and a laboratory that discounts its tenth report is telling you something about the first nine.
Roughly one week in ten goes to work that nobody is paying for: interlaboratory comparisons, method development, and hosting students from the technical university up the road. The test notes on our reports page come out of that time.