Home performance is an elusive thing. How do we know what matters and what doesn’t? Look around. Pretty much everything that you can see, matters the least. If you could turn a building inside out, it would reveal what matters the most when it comes to the health, safety, energy efficiency and thermal comfort of our homes. This fact is one thing that makes home performance work so challenging; it’s like performing surgery on a home, as apposed to a face lift. The mere fact that you can’t see most of the work after it’s completed, makes it difficult to know if the work was done well, or if short-cutting, or lack of knowledge has compromised your investment.
For these reasons, having the best guidance with a home performance retrofit is critical to achieving the most out of the work. The guidance begins with the recommendations. Making the proper recommendations is an art that takes experience and an intuitive sense for what the home owner’s goals are. Then, during the work, proper and thorough preparation and coordination will often determine how well many components of the work are installed, ensuring that first things are done first and well, before moving on. For instance, the air tightness of a home can be tested before the insulation is blown in, so that problems or unacceptable quality in the air sealing can be corrected before blowing in the insulation, foreclosing on opportunities to improve the air tightness.
With the best guidance through a home performance retrofit project, satisfaction can be guaranteed and the differences will be noticable. You can expect increased thermal comfort, better air quality, improved durability (resistance to mold, rot and pests) a quieter and overall more enjoyable home to live in.
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