FAQ - Home Performance Diagnostics
A Home Performance Diagnostic is an analysis of your homes safety, comfort, durability, and energy consumption. Our BPI certified staff will use their thermal imaging camera, blower door, and experience to analyze your house and create a report explaining your homes issues and recommended solutions.
After the Home Performance Diagnostic you'll get a report detailing your home's leakiness, insulations issues, and heating efficiency (if selected), plus any safety or durability concerns, and outlining recommended steps to improve your comfort, while lowering your utility bill!
Short answer: Not very. We've equipped our Diagnostic Specialists with tools to get around those challenging home obstacles. No worries if you are in the middle of moving or your house is just a little messy, we'll work around it.
Although, we do ask that any children be fully supervised and pets be properly contained, as much for their safety as ours and our equipment.
That's not a problem at all! The Home Performance Diagnostic has no obligations, so you can feel free to pick and choose which work you would like to get done, or to not get any work done at all. The more work done will help improve your comfort and save more, but you are free to choose not to do any upgrades.
It's easy to look at the large sticker price of an upgraded heating system and say, "maybe not today," but all of our recommendations are aimed at your safety, comfort and saving you money.
Plus, with rebates, it's easier and cheaper than ever to upgrade..
- There are 3 reasons that you want to have the diagnostic testing done:
- We can help point the way to hidden faults within your house that you can not see, but are major paths of air leakage or insulation voids.
- If you don't test before and after - you will not know if the airsealing was effective or even required.
- Our combustion testing may show that you have a back-drafting problem and airsealing, without first correcting the back-drafting issue, can actually make it worse.
No! We are and independent Home Performance Diagnostic company. We are not trying to sell you any modifications to your house, thus we are only going to present solutions based on what your house REALLY needs.
- The benefits of an Home Performance Diagnostic for your home are numerous and here are a few of them:
- Actually spending your money on improvements your home needs. Not simply guessing what needs to be fixed or applying a band-aid fix to the issues at hand. Thus saving you money and from doing the guesswork.
- Inspected, tested and documented results specifically pertaining to the issues you're experiencing with your home. Not a laundry list of general items to fix.
- Post improvement visit - at low cost to you- to verify results of the effectiveness, quality and performance of the improvements made.
- Cash back for some of the improvements you may have completed. See your power and gas companies for their latest rebates
- Verification that the improvements you made didn't actually cause additional problems with indoor air quality, moisture related issues or combustion safety.
- Potentially higher selling price for your home due to the additional features your home has and because of the reduced energy consumption - although individual results may vary.
- Infrared pictures of your home are cool!
The typical Home Performance Diagnostic takes between 3-6 hours depending on the size of the house and the types of issues we find. Additionally, the questions you have or any additional testing and/or investigations could add some more time.
It is really about the improved Comfort and it is hard to put a real price on your Comfort. Of course, the payback on the cost of a typical Home Performance Diagnostic depends on how soon and how many improvements are made.
Keep in mind that energy efficient improvements continually pay you back over the life of the home, and this payback increases as energy costs increase.
The Home Performance Diagnostic allows you to spend your money on what really needs to be fixed without the trial & error and cost of doing things with the hope that it will fix the problem. In most cases the diagnostics performed during a typical Home Performance Diagnostic are plenty enough testing to help you find out what your homes issues are. Ask yourself what you're looking to find out and if it's worth the extra cost of more in depth testing. We can perform additional diagnostics if need be, or if you decide you want them - for an additional cost. This additional diagnostic testing may add an additional 1-3 hours to the length of time to complete the inspection.
We don't usually spend a lot of time looking at your doors and windows; we concentrate on the issues we find to be lacking in the performance of your home based off of the diagnostic testing we perform. Not opinions. If warranted we'll address issues or concerns you have with the windows and doors while conducting our testing, so whether your windows are bad or better than you thought -you'll be able to see that for your self during testing.
Because it's in your best interest. We take the "Whole House approach", to making home improvements. What this means is that when you make a change to one part of the home such as airsealing, adding insulation, weather-stripping etc. Those changes affect the performance of other parts of your home relating to indoor air quality, your furnace and water heater, moisture, and comfort. By performing the tests on the whole house we can make solid recommendations that will make a difference in the issues you're trying to resolve, and reduce the potential for health, safety, or comfort issues to arise as a result. Additionally, we do not want you to spend your money on something that really does not need to be fix or doing repairs in the wrong order, which will cost you more in the long run. For example, if you add insulation without airsealing first, the new insulation is not going to perform as it should. This because the air leaking through the insulation prevents the insulation from doing its' job properly.
No. We can conduct testing on your home during any time of the year. According to the infrared camera manufacturer, in order for the infrared scan to work best we need at least a ten-degree difference in temperature between the inside and outside of the home. Regardless of the time of year. We can perform this part of the test by creating a temperature difference by running your heating or cooling system, or by accepting a smaller temperature difference, but the infrared pictures you'll see won't be as defined.
LEDs are a better alternative now that that technology has matured. To achieve the best results with the bulbs compare and match the amount of Lumens of the bulb you normally buy to the energy efficient bulb you're going to buy to ensure you're getting a bulb that's giving off the same amount of light. Around 800 lumens equates to a 60 watt incandescent bulb. Different brands may have different colors of light, referred to as the warmness of the light, available which will also have an effect on your regard for the new light bulbs. Some packages will say things like "Daylight" or "Soft white", others may give a number with a K, this refers to a temperature in degrees Kelvin. Home improvement stores usually have a display so you can see the light that a bulb will put out and you can chose the light that you like the best. I generally recommend bulbs with a temperature color rating of 2700K, these closely mimic the look of incandescent.
All florescence bulbs/tubes contain some mercury. However the amount is significantly less than older fluorescence tubes. ENERGY STAR rated CFL bulbs usually have around 5 milligrams of mercury in them where as the circular thermostat you may have on the wall has about 3 grams! A thermometer may have anywhere from 500 milligrams to 2 grams of mercury in them. When they finally fail, you should recycle them - many of the large home improvement stores have recycle bins for CFL bulbs. On the other hand, LEDs do not have this problem, nor do they have the start up problems of CFL. Therefore, I recommend LEDs over CFLs.
- The answer is both No and a qualified Yes. People need clean fresh air to breath, otherwise we can become sick from the pollutants in the air. Leaving the windows open or just being outside usually provides us with the freshest & cleanest air, but we would not like the temperature variations over the year. The energy crisis of the 1970's started the process of tightening building. Unfortunately, some homes were over tightened, without adding fresh air ventilation, and some people got sick. Ventilation requirements have since been added. The current motto is Build it tight and Ventilate right. This means that by ensuring there is adequate ventilation, you can make the house as tight as you are able.
- Mechanical ventilation is added to ensure the proper ventilation, but people wonder why we do not just leave the house somewhat leaky to get the ventilation. That because there are 2 problems with a leaky house:
- We do not know where the incoming air is coming from - it could be polluted air from the garage or crawlspace.
- There is no control of the amount of ventilation. Some days we get more then enough ventilation, to the point that we are wasting our heating/cooling dollars. Other days we get too little ventilation and our health can suffer.