What is Home Performance?

Home Performance is based on both science and a fundamental philosophy that homes should be safe, healthy, comfortable, durable, and efficient.

After all, your home is probably the biggest investment you will ever make. Plus, it is one of the few things we purchase that does not come with an instruction manual. Is the home comfortable? Safe and healthy? Will the home last? Reasonably energy efficient? These are all considerations that a typical homeowner might either take for granted (we assume that the air inside our home wouldn't be a potential health hazard), or simply neglect because the house looks so good (can you say "granite counter tops").

Home Performance is based upon 5 areas of concern:

Safety - Assessing the safety of a home is an important part (maybe the most important) of a home performance analyst's job. Back-drafting appliances that may be sending carbon monoxide into the home, gas leaks near the furnace or water heater, stored items that create a fire hazard, inoperative or out of date smoke detectors, are all potential safety issues that a home performance analyst can locate for you.
Health - Indoor air quality is listed by the EPA as one of the top environmental threats to human health. A home performance analyst's job is to help ensure that your home's ventilation systems are working correctly and to help educate you on their use. A properly operating systems used correctly means your homes indoor air quality will not be a threat to you or your family's health.
Comfort - Our home is our refuge. It should be comfortable. It should be free of drafty rooms, cold spots in the winter, unpleasant humidity, excessive heat in the summer, poor quality lighting, or stale air. A home performance analyst can come up with solutions to help resolve these issues.
Durability - Imperfections within a building, besides possibly causing discomfort and raising health concerns, can have other long term repercussions. Moisture problems causing rot in framing, or insufficient insulation or airsealing can result in ice dams forming leading to roof leaks, are among the durability concerns that a home performance analyst will pinpoint.
Efficiency - Lastly, home performance is about ensuring that a home is cost-effective to live in. This is mostly a result of fixing the air and heat leakage issues and getting the HVAC system to work properly, plus a few more items. 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 analyst does for your house. However, it is always a balancing act between energy efficiency, comfort, and health. As such, we do not push energy efficiency over the health or comfort like an energy auditor would do.

These are the considerations that a home performance analyst sets out to find, while taking into account the interconnectedness of the home, and the relationships between each of the home's components (this is referred to as "The House as a System" approach). In accord with this holistic approach, a home performance analyst will assess any and all of these potential problems within a home and come up with solutions to resolve your home's issues. Once you implement the recommendations, your home will be more comfortable, safer, healthier, more durable, and possibly save energy (and thus some money) too.

The Balancing Act

Safety and Durability concerns are often items that can be dealt without significantly affecting the other three concerns in a negative way. The remaining three concerns (health, comfort, and efficiency) are interconnected, meaning they all affect each other significantly and not always in a good way. We can view these three as being on a three way teeter totter, putting too much emphasis on one concern will outweigh and negatively impact the others. It is only when you balance the three can you get the best solution. This can be illustrated with the following examples:

Houses built before the mid-1970's tended to be very leaky. This resulted in lots of fresh air constantly entering the house and thus better indoor Air Quality, but poor energy efficiency and not so comfortable. Raising the temperature (assuming it is wintertime), will give better comfort, but will further reduced the energy efficiency.
The oil embargo of 1970's brought energy dependence and costs to the fore front of people's thinking and thus the energy efficiency movement was borne. Houses were tightened up without fully understanding the consequences. Some houses were tighten up so much that the indoor Air Quality got really bad and people got sick. As for Comfort, it might be better, worse, or unchanged - it was not even a consideration.
Today, energy efficiency is still the dominate force (because it is easiest to measure), but the need for fresh air is better understood and is sometimes properly implemented. Comfort is still not a consideration among energy auditors. Therefore, the typical homeowner, who wants to be comfortable, disregards a lot of the advice on how to make their house more energy efficient. This results in them actually consuming more energy trying to make their house more comfortable, but not really getting it fully comfortable.

The right way is to take into account the health and comfort concerns first, while also giving some energy efficiency. In other words, a balance between these three concerns. This can be done by looking at the 'House as a System', not just in words as energy auditors regularly do, but by really looking into all the interactions (this specifically includes the HVAC system). The result is a more comfortable home that is healthier and saves some energy and thus some money too.

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