Featured Blog Posts – October 2011 Archive (12)

There's one thing that keeps me from my favorite fast-food indulgence, the Junior Whopper with Cheese.  It's called the Happy Meal.  My kids insist on them.  And our meals are indeed happier if I forgo my trip to Burger King so we can snag Happy Meals at McDonald's instead.

How does this relate to Home Performance?

A big focus among home performance professionals at the moment is driving demand.  To do that…

Das Haus is a traveling pavilion, a North American tour and an ongoing international dialogue about advanced technologies for home construction and solar energy use. The purpose – to share German innovations that have achieved sustainable construction and operational energy…

I love to hear from homeowners on the internet, although it's not always a homeowner from a publication that had work done on the subject of their publication. I always learn something about the homeowners expectations, grievances and the message they want to send about the company. People who share ideas are genius, people who share accomplishments are smart, and people who talk about people are ignorant.

Because this is relatively a new field for a lot of people I'm prone to remind…

Household Energy Consumption and Successful Energy Education

by Don Ames,  www.detectenergy.com

Two homes…

Working at Home Energy would seem to have prepared me for having an energy efficiency retrofit done on my own home, at least to ask all the right questions.  But Murphy’s Law intruded nevertheless, and you may learn from my experience.  We live in the SF Bay Area in a 970-sq ft wood-framed stucco single-family home on one floor over a basement and garage, no air conditioning, with central heat.  Our goal for the audit was to improve comfort, as hot days were hotter inside the house,…

Fortunately for the rest of us, some people missed the message, the one that says we’re in an economic slide so slippery there is no climbing back up.

I had a chance to speak to several of these optimists recently. No, they are not members of the Pollyanna Club; they are green energy entrepreneurs, those who are innovating and growing companies as the rest of the world downsizes. (See …

How much is it worth to a home buyer to invest in energy efficiency improvements? A minimum estimate is that the annual savings on the energy bill pay for the annual cost of the investment when financed. This removes the primary reason for home buyers not to invest in energy efficiency -- lack of money. When faced with a choice of continuing to pay for wasted energy or making improvements that will make the house more comfortable and more valuable, buyers will opt for the…

Home performance is to Apple as standard building practices are to the generic PC industry. We, the adherents to the whole house, high quality approach to assessing and managing the performance of homes, are Apple. The standard, old school, business-as-usual approach to building and renovating homes is the rest of the computer industry.

This idea got seeded after reading James Stewart's article,…

I've been a contractor since 1972 and an accredited appraiser and real estate broker since 1990 and a HERS Rater since 2006. I'd like to know why everyone thinks poking sharp sticks at appraisers will get you more help? If I came to your job and started telling you how to do your business do you think I'd get your cooporation? I think a lump sum line adjustment will be easier to get into the mainstream valuation arena. Appraisals are not Energy Reports. Most appraisers aren't energy raters…

Are Energy Saving Retrofits Cost-Effective?

by Don Ames

Government and Utility based programs that offer weatherization and other energy saving…

EcoHome Magazine provides a great case study on a home builder that takes the extra steps to provide the data points an appraiser needs during a green home appraisal.

Yup, it's too bad we need to take these extra steps right now.  And yup, you'd be crazy not to do the extra work!  The new…

"Money makes the world go 'round," goes the old saying, and it's certainly true in the world of residential energy efficiency.  Many worthy home energy upgrade projects are cancelled or put on hold because the owners feel they won't get their investment back if they should sell soon.  Likewise for new construction, many builders in the speculative home market feel forced to build to the lowest performance standard, because energy upgrades won't "appraise out."

Plainly put,…