Consulting services

cowanhouse offers consulting for any project that has a  focus on healthy, energy efficient, and environmentally conscious home building or renovation. This can be an invaluable service to homeowners, architects, builders and trades professionals.  The fee structure and rate can be negotiated with dependency on location, hours needed, and topic.  Please contact cowanhouse to discuss.

Design – the first and arguably the most critical process of any home build or renovation project.  We offer design consultation for every facet of the project, from the initial concept through operational planning.  Experience has proven that healthy, energy efficient, and environmentally conscious homes must have consideration given at design phase to achieve optimum success.  We have  seen and tested homes without ‘performance design’, but with performance attributes applied as an after thought, post planning procedure.  While these homes are improved over standard homes, it is much more costly and extremely difficult  to overlay performance attributes onto existing home plans.  Even in renovation, the design needs to start with a ‘clean sheet’ (as much as feasible) to enhance the chances for total optimization of the project.

Some of the critical design considerations are:

            Site selection
            Building orientation (facing)
            Window design
            Sun tempering
            Passive exploitation
            Optimized floor design
            Landscaping
            Type of building structure
            Optimized heating ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) design
            Optimized forced air distribution design
            Optimized lighting design
            Optimized water distribution design
            Materials selection
            Optimized materials usage design

Testing and verification – Even with the best materials selection and the most competent professionals completing the building assembly, mistakes can (will) be made.  Often these mistakes are minor, having little impact, but occasionally mistakes are made that can cause critical, catastrophic component or assembly failure.

Verification is done to ensure that the right materials are being used in the right locations and are completed using the correctly defined processes.  This is usually completed with simple visual inspection.

Testing is required, however, for some features that cannot be visually verified as being compliant.  Testing is the absolute way of determining whether the finished project has been assembled as designed for performance.  Two primary testing needs are building shell air infiltration (blower door depressurization) and duct leakage (duct pressurization).

Special requests - cowanhouse services are offered for any other special needs related to healthy, energy efficient, and environmentally conscious home building or renovation.  Again, this can be an invaluable service to homeowners, architects, builders and trades professionals.  The fee structure and rate can be negotiated with dependency on location, hours needed, and topic.  Please contact cowanhouse to discuss.