What is Home Performance?

Home performance is a philosophy and a science based on the premise that homes should be safe, healthy, comfortable, durable, and efficient.

After all, the home is probably the biggest investment most of us will ever make...and is one of the few things we purchase that won't come with an instruction manual. Is a home comfortable? Reasonably energy efficient? Safe and healthy? These are all considerations that a homeowner will either take for granted (we would assume, after all, that the air inside a home wouldn't be a potential health hazard), or simply neglect.

These are the considerations that a home performance contractor sets out to address, while taking into account the interconnectedness of a building, 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, home performance is based upon what we call the 5 pillars of home performance:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Comfort: Our home is our refuge... so it should be comfortable. Drafty rooms, cold spots, unpleasant humidity in the summer, poor quality lighting or incandescent lighting that creates unnecessary excess heat in the summer, are all avoidable unpleasantries. A home performance contractor can help identify and address these.
4. Durability: Imperfections within a building, in addition to causing discomfort and raising health concerns, can also have long term repercussions. Some durability concerns that a home performance contractor will pinpoint and then address are moisture problems (that can cause rot in framing) and/or insufficient insulation (that can cause ice dams to form).
5.  Efficiency: Last but not least, home performance is about ensuring that a home is cost effective to live in. 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 does for your house.

Related Pages:

• Learn More
• What is a Whole House Energy Audit?
• Can a Home Be Too Tight?
• What is Infrared Diagnostic Testing?
• The Importance of Air Sealing

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