HERS Ratings

"We Don't Live In A Barn!"

Summer or winter, I heard those words everytime I ran out of the house without carefully pulling the front door closed behind me. I don't know where you grew up, but I'm pretty confident that you heard the same thing.

Air conditioning was expensive. Heat was expensive. It is common sense (and courtesy) to shut the door. The inside air was cooled or heated to whatever level my mother preferred. The outside air wasn't.

That opened door -an obvious opening in the enclosed volume of space she was trying to condition represented a loss of control. It would take a little while to get the inside air back to whatever her comfort level was before.

But there were lots of non-obvious holes too. Every window slightly cracked, every pipe drilled through the siding, every wire to every light in the middle of every ceiling needed a hole to pass through. The basement door was undercut by an inch or so and you could see daylight around the oil-tank pipes used to fill the drum during the winter.

In the attic, the top of every wall that intersected the second floor ceiling had holes from where the wires were run and the framing below wasn't quite covered by plaster- like the ceiling in my closet.

I know there was a hole behind the tub where the drywall ended and where the drain hole was cut through the floor, that explains why it was always cold in the space where we tended to be wearing less clothes.

So the reasons to shut the door I knew about then, comfort and efficiency, were also reasons for whoever was creating those holes in my old house to seal them. But there were some more important reasons to seal them:

• Health - Indoor Air Quality? Mice and rats coming and going, living and dying in those spaces
• Safety - We lived right off an alleyway and I remember the diesel and other smells pouring in from the oil truck and the garbage truck
• Durability - Our air conditioner sat inside a window in our kitchen - there wasn't any ductwork. But I've seen the condensation that drips off of ductwork and the subsequent damage to the framing, the ceilings from the mold that begins to grow there and the rot that sets in afterwards

How Did We Get Here?

The house that I lived in as a kid was built in the 19th century, after the Industrial Revolution, in a New England mill town where the demand for housing for textile factory workers was huge. This was a demand controlled by the factories that bought the town in the first place, so, prices were somewhat controlled, it was just that the land was tiny. So, houses were put up as quickly and cheaply as possible.

Then we invented cars and planes, had a world war, a pandemic, the Roaring 20's, a Great Depression, another world war and the demand again spiked for housing to supply the men coming home from the second war who needed to start families and again take up jobs in those same factories that were feeding the United States all the goods it could sell to the world. Fast and cheap housing. Boom town.

At least until the next generation started entering the workforce. Fast and cheap was all they'd ever known and was generally what the the companies hiring them were looking for.

Same As It Ever Was?

Those days of fast and cheap are gone. Factories are gone. Mills are now luxury loft apartments. My house and the surrounding tenements sold as a block during 2020 for $1.2m. That's "m" for million. Tenements will become condos.

Today, people can't buy cheap housing. It hasn't been cheap for a long time. The utilities to heat and cool these houses aren't cheap either. As a result of that, energy codes were developed that REQUIRED us to seal off all those same holes that were left open before.

That's just where we are. If you are a builder and you are reading this, you already know all of that and have made the choice to meet the demand from the good people that will buy your housing.

You Build Tight.

That brings up a few questions:

Don't our houses need to breathe? That's already been covered, but the short answer is no. But we need to breathe. Since we need to breathe and we now build tight, don't we need to ventilate? You already know the answer to that is yes. Rather than breathe through those holes, gaps and cracks, we now deliver fresh, filtered and hopefully pre-conditioned air into our houses at a rate that minimizes the potential effects we were dealing with before.

We also control the sources of moisture. We have exhaust fans in our bathrooms ("We don't live in a barn!") and range hoods above where we cook. Our appliances get the air they need to combust, not from our conditioned air, but from sealed chambers that have a pipe in from outside and a pipe out to the outside.

You Ventilate Right.

Build Tight - Ventilate Right is what you've been doing and now you need someone to come along who will certify it so you can get the inspectors to sign off on it. That's where we come in.

If you are in New England, we will confirm that you have complied with the energy codes that now require ANSI/RESNET/ICC Standard 301-2019 & 380-2019 and give the house you built a HERS Rating. This includes the walls, ceilings and floors, windows and doors all work together as a building enclosure to keep air leaks from drafts to a minimum, control condensation and insulate. We are inspecting and using a blower door to test for air leakage.

It also ensures that any of the appliances or lighting installed aren't taking away from the house you've built because of inefficiencies and that the comfort equipment is ready to condition the enclosure that your eventual homeowners will live in.

We are using duct testing equipment to make sure we aren't losing air to outside or otherwise where we don't need it and that the ductwork and equipment also meets an airtight standard.

If you are looking for tax rebates, we will confirm that you have complied with ANSI/RESNET/ACCA Standard 310-2020 for grading the rest of the installation of HVAC systems.