What if your grandmother had never had a check-up? Chances are good, she’d be experiencing lots of symptoms, but have no idea what was causing them. The same goes for America’s aging housing stock.

Think of the similarities. The house is a complex system with interrelated components, as is the human body. Altering one area of the system, whether in the house or in a body, can impact the performance of all other systems. Treating the symptoms without first making a diagnosis can compound problems. And in both the construction trades and the medical profession, if we get it wrong, we can make people sick. We can even bring about someone’s death.

This isn’t melodrama, it’s the truth. To carry the analogy, America’s existing housing stock is suffering from a health crisis. An epidemic of poor performance, brought about by sub-par original design and construction, lack of attention to detail, well-intentioned but poorly executed alterations and old age. Forget the baby boomers, more than 30 percent of America’s 130 million existing homes are more than 45 years old – built before the advent of modern building materials and codes – and another 30 percent are between 25 and 45 years old. They are reaching the end of their designed service life.

The symptoms
The symptom that’s garnering the most attention from policy makers and thought leaders in the industry is the housing stock’s insatiable thirst for fossil fuels. The fact that homes account for about 20 percent of annual energy use in the United States and are responsible for about 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) is an obvious problem that needs to be rectified.

Other symptoms of the illness afflicting existing homes involve occupant comfort. Drafts, rooms that seem impossible to heat or cool, uncontrollable humidity levels, and cold floors are all primary complaints that send homeowners to the Yellow Pages™ or their local home improvement big box store on the quest for a cure – long before they consider their impact on the polar bears or whether or not their utility bills are too high.

Then we have the structural problems, many of which appear long before they should be expected to manifest as the result of simple old age. The ice dams. The rotting beams, mushy roof decks, collapsing basements and crumbling crawlspaces. The windows with leaky frames and enough condensation to block the view. The soggy insulation, warped doors, peeling paint and creaking floors.

And then there are the really dangerous symptoms. The ones that should raise a red flag and prompt the immediate attention of a top diagnostician, but instead seem to rarely be connected with their cause – performance problems in the home. These are the symptoms like mold and mildew infestations (the only thing anyone could consider ‘green’ about a lot of homes), allergies, asthma and environmental sensitivities that make people sick. The headaches, nausea, weakness, shortness of breath – and sometimes death – suffered by families exposed to unsafe levels of carbon monoxide (CO).

We can’t allow these problems to continue, but nor can we bulldoze 130 million homes and start from scratch. The only viable course of action is home performance retrofits on a grand scale.

The cure
Home performance contracting uses the applied knowledge of the global building science community to carry out house-as-a-system diagnostics and improvements tailored to each specific home’s unique array of performance problems. Each project begins with a comprehensive whole-home performance assessment that goes well beyond an energy audit. Specialist diagnostic tools are brought to bear to measure air exchanges and locate the migration paths of uncontrolled air leakage, find hidden moisture problems within wall cavities, find unbalanced mechanical systems, hunt down mold, and measure CO levels in both normal living conditions and under ‘worst case pressurization’ conditions.

This initial assessment helps isolate root causes of the problems responsible for the symptoms. From it, an itemized and prioritized scope of work is developed. After the improvements are installed, a second comprehensive, whole-home assessment is conducted to ensure the house is now performing at expected levels and that the project has not adversely affected – but hopefully has enhanced where applicable – occupant health and safety.

Anything less exposes occupants to undue risk, and can create adverse consequences for contractors, manufacturers, program managers and anyone and everyone connected with the project, however distantly.

That is why the home performance industry has its own nationally accepted and recognized standards, personnel certifications, company accreditations and quality assurance program, developed and administered by the Building Performance Institute, Inc. (BPI), a not-for-profit organization and ANSI accredited standards development body founded in the mid-1990s for this sole purpose. Think of it as a medical board for contractors.

The accountability
The quality assurance program sets the niche home performance industry apart from other aspects of the design and build construction industry at-large. It exists – first and foremost – to protect homeowners. Consumers who hire accredited contractors that participate in this program can feel confident that standards are followed and workmanship on the project is detailed and carried out conscientiously. The monetary investment they make in improving their single-greatest asset – their home – is protected, as is the health and welfare of the occupant family as it relates to the home performance project.

The second purpose of the quality assurance program is to provide a mechanism for continuous improvement for participating contractors. The feedback loop that is fundamental to any robust quality assurance program in this case helps contractors identify strengths and weaknesses, allowing them to pinpoint areas in their performance where they can improve efficiencies in operation. Which frequently leads to increased profitability.

The third purpose of the program is to protect energy efficiency incentive and weatherization assistance programs from undue risk, as these programs are the driver and often primary funder of most of the home performance work conducted in today’s marketplace.  Knowing that contractors participating in the quality assurance program hold recognized credentials and will be held accountable for the quality of their work by an independent, third-party quality assurance protocol allows incentive and assistance program managers to make investments of tax-payer dollars at a lower risk of liability.

As a result, BPI credentials or their equivalent are cited in the Home Performance with ENERGY STAR^® program guidelines, as well as most state and local low-income weatherization assistance programs in the country. BPI accreditation for contracting  companies  or an equivalent credential is specified for conducting work under the GOLD STAR portion of the proposed federal Home Star program (a.k.a. ‘Cash for Caulkers’) that is currently in the Senate, having passed the House of Representatives earlier this year.

So how does the quality assurance program work to provide these layers of protection?

The first phase requires BPI Accredited Contracting Companies to develop internal quality control organizational and operational procedures. The quality management system procedures include the use of manuals and field guides, project specification, training and certification of staff to BPI standards and organizational management procedures, testing of key parameters before and at the end of each project and accurate documentation on every project. The company’s quality management system must also include procedures for resolving customer disputes in a timely, effective and professional manner.

The second phase involves documentation. Each project performed by the accredited company under BPI standards is fully documented – from initial assessment, through the installation of improvement measures, to final test-out assessment – including final sign-off from the customer that the work was performed to his or her satisfaction. This documentation is submitted to BPI and is subjected to a complete audit at least once a year.

The third phase is perhaps the most valuable to all stakeholders – consumer, contractor and program manager.  Depending on the volume of work completed by the accredited contracting company, no less than five percent of completed projects undergo a complete field verification audit each year. In this portion of the quality assurance program, an independent, third-party visits the site of a completed project and conducts a comprehensive, whole-home assessment following BPI standards for test-out protocols.

Results are shared with the accredited contractor, providing valuable feedback on performance. If any aspect of the home performance project is found by the independent field verifier to be in non-conformance with BPI standards, the contractor is notified. In most cases, the contractor then returns to the home to rectify the error or omission identified by the field inspection.

And just as physicians are bound by the requirements of state medical boards, BPI Accredited Contracting Companies are bound by the requirements of the quality assurance program, and repeated non-conformance may result in loss of accreditation.

Solving the epidemic
When you’re sick, you visit your doctor. You put your trust in that medical professional who has undergone years of training and rigorous examinations, followed by taking a pledge to ‘do no harm’ and abide by certain codes of ethics and standards imposed by a governing body.

America’s housing stock may show symptoms of illness, but homeowners no longer need to place their trust in the dubious care of fly-by-night contractors or resort to ‘self-medicating’ with do-it-yourself attempts to improve comfort, durability and energy efficiency.

We have a cure for what ails our housing stock – home performance contracting, backed by rigorous training and examinations, a pledge to ‘first, do no harm’ and a commitment to abide by codes and standards, with full accountability provided by a robust quality assurance program.

The next step is to increase the availability of these skilled home performance professionals – to bring them to every community in the country. The home performance industry is undergoing rapid growth, with a more than 300 percent increase in professional certifications over the last three years. This is despite an unemployment rate that still hovers around 20 percent in the overall construction industry.

Yet we’re still struggling to keep pace with the epidemic of performance problems. In fact, at the current rate, it will take 10,000 years to retrofit all 130 million existing homes in America. The proposed Home Star legislation hopes to create 168,000 home performance and related retail and manufacturing jobs in local communities, but it only scratches the surface with a projected 2 million homes receiving much-needed retrofits.

To reverse the tide, we need more skilled professionals willing to make a commitment to improving the performance of homes. We need a greater understanding of building science. We need to use our diagnostic tools. We need to find the root causes and fix them right – the first time. We need to design and build new homes for better performance to stop the spread of the epidemic. And we need to embrace accountability at all levels.