Healthy Performance Home Analysis

The Healthy Performance Home Analysis is the cowanhouse detailed assessment of your home for air quality, and overall home health and comfort, and energy efficiency. The entire home (accessible areas), including crawl space or basement, attic, and home interior is systematically examined.  This is an interactive service that requires homeowner presence and participation for complete effectiveness.

The Healthy Performance Home Analysis includes the following components:

• Education
• Blower door testing
• Air particle counts
• Central heat and air duct leakage assessment
• Humidity and moisture assessment
• Temperature fluctuation assessment

Education- Most important consideration of service.  Great effort is made to ensure the customer is informed about forces and conditions that effect comfort, health, and performance of their house.  When a home owner is informed the right decisions can be made.

Blower door testing—blower door testing is the state of the art method for finding hidden areas of air leakage in your home.  Further details of blower door here.

Air particle counts— home dust particle counts are measured in each room (or at multiple points in the room depending on size).  Outdoor dust particle counts are also measured to examine the relationship between indoor versus outdoor counts.  This indirectly assesses a component of your air filtration system.   

Central heat and air duct leakage assessment— Most houses have forced air distribution systems for heating and air conditioning.  Often the fans, distribution plenums and distribution ducts are located in unconditioned space, in attic or crawl space. These systems are examined for leakage and a pressure pan is used to help identify leakages while the building is depressurized.

Humidity/Moisture—house relative humidity is measured to determine if within range, and compared to outdoor conditions.

Visible inspection is made for moisture from condensation, leaks, surface runoff, etc. Sustained high humidity and moisture can promote wood rot, insect infestation, and mold growth.
 
Temperature—home air temperature is measured at multiple points to determine if within range and also compared to outdoors. Envelope surface temperatures (wall, ceiling and floor) are also checked for fluctuations and cold/hot spots.
Unusually hot or cold surfaces can negatively effect individual comfort levels because of radiant heat loss/gain from your body to that surface.

Solutions

cowanhouse serves the homeowner, and our services are designed to be objective and independent. cowanhouse recognizes that there is a potential conflict of interest if we both identify problems with the home and are then compensated to fix those problems.  To avoid this potential conflict, cowanhouse does not routinely perform interventions to improve your home’s healthiness and performance.

As the diagnostics are being completed, we discuss identified problems and solutions interactively with the homeowner as issues are detected.  This is an invaluable experience and provides a specific targeted recommendation for every issue detected.  To save cost we provide the homeowner the option to end our service here if so desired.

But, if the homeowner chooses, a report will be provided.  This report is a detailed, written assessment of problems and recommended solutions, along with performance values that are in the cowanhouse acceptable range for existing homes.  Within about a week, when the homeowner receives the report, we will discuss the report and explain our findings and how they impact your home’s Healthiness and Performance. 

For problems found your report will provide a list of recommended interventions to improve your home’s healthiness and performance.  The homeowner can use these recommendations to get contractor follow up and bidding for remediation, or if needed, cowanhouse can assist in locating qualified contractors for you.  In some instances, at the homeowner’s request, cowanhouse may provide solutions directly.

Follow up testing and/or verification to ensure that work was completed to recommended standards may also be provided if requested.

Costs 

* Prices are for homes up to 2500 ft 2 and will increase $25 per additional 500 ft 2 blocks for larger homes.  Subtract $35 for non-crawl space homes. Published prices are subject to change without notice.  Document # 8-10-2007

Follow-up assessments

Once the suggested interventions are completed, we will re-assess your home in previously identified problem areas to ensure that all work has been properly completed to achieve your goal of living in a Healthy Performance Home. Because follow-up assessments vary with the size of the job, follow-up evaluations are billed at our current standard local consulting fee rate of $75 per hour plus travel.

Extended analysis and special problems

Some homeowners contact us after learning of specific home problems not covered in our standard Healthy Home Performance Analysis.  At other times, the Healthy Performance Home Analysis will identify problem areas that need additional specialized testing.  Additional testing is customarily billed at our standard local consulting fee rate plus the costs of additional equipment or supplies.  We will be happy to provide you with an estimate of such work prior to commencing testing.

A partial list of common extended service requests are provided below: