Client
In support of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Chicago Contracting Operations Branch, IBTS teamed with Performance Systems Development (PSD), Bevilacqua-Knight, Inc (BKi), and independent consultant Dr. Evan Mills to develop a clear, functional, and practical uniform protocol for assessing and improving the energy-efficiency of existing homes across the United States.
PATH 36 was an effort to solidify and support HUD’s long-term strategy for retrofit home performance. The industry experience of HUD, IBTS and the EPA indicated that remodeling contractors of all types make significant, energy-wasting errors in their work, due to both an incomplete understanding of how a house functions, and the effects of their actions. This results largely from a large gap in contractor education, certification, licensing, and quality assurance. To date, the EPA Home Performance with Energy Star Program is arguably the most significant effort to change this situation. The EPA Home Performance with Energy Star approach seeks to move contractors quickly into full-scale whole-house energy analysis and retrofitting. The Energy Star Program, while exemplary and valuable, is necessarily limited to only those relatively few contractors or "early adopters" willing to make all the financial, educational, and business-practice investments needed to sustain such a radical departure from their former business in conventional home repair and remodeling. This leaves out the vast majority of the 200,000 mainstream remodeling contractors identified in the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies Report.
HUD, by contrast, sought to complement the EPA program by providing relatively easily understood guidance to homeowners, remodelers, contractors, building inspectors, and materials suppliers. HUD sought to allow access to far more contractors by giving them an easier path, with various degrees of rigor and comprehensiveness, into the home performance business. HUD’s strategy thus applied to many contractors, and even homeowners, who could use the PATH protocols to identify the most valuable home energy improvements and to get them completed with acceptable quality. PATH 36 existed to move the remodeling industry to a widespread greater awareness and understanding of the house as an integrated system of air, heat, and water transport and effects, and a steady, gradual improvement in standard practices for remodeling contractors.
In Phase I, Team IBTS assisted HUD in capitalizing on the existence of technically rich protocols, and helped to guide the transformation of the home remodeling industry, with the goal of leading thousands of conventional contractors toward a steady improvement in all their work and a gradual move to more complete and thorough home retrofits, a long-term strategy clearly beneficial to the industry, homeowners, the national economy and the environment.
In Phase II and III, IBTS needed to find a mechanism for understanding what the remodeling industry’s standardized practices were, develop a comprehensive scope and preliminary specifications for applying the energy-efficiency protocol into standardized practices, and test its effectiveness.
IBTS Solutions
- Team IBTS developed an industry survey to establish a baseline of current remodeling practices using model protocols. The model protocols addressed all climate zones, building practices, and user levels.
- Team IBTS developed a Technical Advisory Panel (TAP) made up of representatives from remodeling firms, trade organizations, and expert consultants. TAP provided on-going input for each stage of the development of the draft protocols.
- The results were entered into a database where the information was filtered to develop a best practice process structure specification.
- Conclusions and Recommendations were reported to HUD.
- Team IBTS developed and recommended the use of an information delivery system to HUD. The information system provided users with checklists to help them stay organized and provide a measure of quality assurance. The checklists would be customized to the contractor’s requirements and knowledge level of energy savings practices. The information delivery system could be used via paper, computer, or PDA-based formats. Designed to help improve the remodeling contractor’s education and applications of energy efficiency methods, the information delivery model was set-up on three levels of difficulty tied to three levels of home improvement, from small-scale to full-scale whole-house energy analysis. The contractors were given incentives to move up to the next level by being rewarded with higher energy savings and other abilities, such as home performance tests.
- To gather feedback on reactions and recommendations about the project, three focus groups were developed. Participants viewed a presentation about the protocols and gave feedback.
Benefits
- The Dept. of Housing and Community Development had an effective energy efficiency home improvement information system geared to remodeling contractors nationwide.
- Remodeling contractors had a tool to make better choices and resolve home improvement energy issues quickly and without delays.
- Team IBTS developed detailed industry protocols, focusing on field procedures for assessing building energy use and implementing specific Energy Conservation Measures (ECMs) that would take place during other remodeling work. The protocols address different climate zones, building types and fuel sources, among other variables.
- The synergistic interactions between focus group respondents provided unique insights that enable in-depth understanding of respondent motivations, attitudes, and beliefs.
- Specifications were developed for modeling residential heating and cooling loads.
- The system was customized to meet the needs of customers and home improvement contractors.