Home Performance, can be quite puzzling!
Home performance is a unique focus of building science, based on the premise that homes should be safe, healthy, comfortable, durable, and efficiently affordable to heat and cool. Home Performance in most cases becomes a puzzle of interconnected parts that must be considered separately and together as a system in order to achieve the solutions for the home owners concerns. We as a home performance contractor know that leaks are built into the envelope of the home and the HVAC system. When framing crews constructing a home are finished nailing together all the parts that make up the homes shell, other tradesmen then come in and start cutting it apart. The Heating & Cooling , electrical, and pluming contractors all have their necessary installs, for pipes, wire and ducting that are drilled, sawed and hammered into position resulting in intentional holes in the home. The resulting intentional holes, joints, ect. made by the tradesmen compromise the thermal integrity and air barrier of the home.
Our homes are for most us are the biggest investment we will ever make. Unfortunately, our home is one of the few things we purchase that doesn’t come with an instruction manual. Is a home comfortable? Reasonably energy efficient? Safe and healthy? Rodent resistant? These are all considerations that a homeowner will either take for granted , or simply neglect due to being unaware.
These are the considerations that a home performance contractor sets out to address, while taking into account the interconnections of homes, and the relationships between each of the home’s components. In accord with this holistic approach, a home performance contractor will assess, and then address, any of these potential problems within a home.
As mentioned above, these following points are the focus of home performance:
Safety: Assessing the safety of a home is an important part (maybe the most important) of a home performance contractor’s job. Backdrafting appliances that may be sending carbon monoxide into the home, unsafe levels of formaldehyde from building materials, are all potential safety issues that a home performance contractor is trained to address.
Health: Indoor air quality is listed by the EPA as one of the top environmental threats to human health. A home performance contractor’s job is to ensure that your home’s indoor air quality is not a threat to you or your family’s health.
Comfort: Our home is our refuge. It should be comfortable. Drafty rooms, cold spots, unpleasant humidity and heat in the summer, poor quality lighting or incandescent lighting that creates unnecessary excess heat in the summer, are all avoidable unpleasantness. A home performance contractor can help.
Durability: Built – in imperfections in a home are caused by design or construction trade practices. addition to causing discomfort raising health concerns, can also have long term repercussions. Moisture problems causing rot in framing, or insufficient insulation causing ice dams, are among the durability concerns that a home performance contractor will pinpoint, then tackle.
Efficiency: Last but not least, home performance is about ensuring that a home is as cost effective to live in as possible. If a mechanic told you that a few simple improvements could drastically improve the fuel efficiency of your car, that’s something most of us would jump on. That’s what a home performance contractor can do for your home, tune it up.
A home energy audit, also known as a Home Energy Assessment, is the first step to learn how much energy your home consumes and to evaluate what measures you can take to make your home more energy efficient. An assessment will show you problems that may, when corrected, save you money over time.The test includes Blower door testing which measures the air filtration leaving or entering a home and combustion safety testing which tests the combustible appliances in a home for Carbon monoxide.
