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Home Performance Coalition National Conference
What is the Home Performance Coalition?
The Home Performance Coalition (HPC) is a 501(C)(3) nonprofit organization that works with industry leaders in the home performance and weatherization industries. HPC collaborates with like-minded organizations to ensure all homes are healthy, comfortable, and energy-efficient. Through projects, policy, publication, online communities, and regional and national conferences, HPC brings together industry leaders to exchange ideas, solve problems and build momentum for the rapidly-growing residential energy efficiency industry.
HPC has more than 30 years of experience providing the industry’s premier educational events, trainings, and trade shows in partnership with the nation’s leading experts in home performance and weatherization. Commenting on, researching, writing, presenting and promoting several policy reports each year, HPC advances access to healthy homes and builds a stronger community. Continuing the legacy of HPC's collaborative work, Home Energy Pros Forum became a division of HPC in 2017. By continuing this great work, HPC is able to catalog the great discussions of the past and become the gathering place for information exchanges of tomorrow and beyond.
HPC has several funders, more than 25 sponsors, nearly 100 exhibitors, more than 3,000 attendees and more than 6,000 forum members that annually support the industry through HPC’s activities.
What is Home Performance?
Home performance describes how all aspects of a home work together as one comprehensive system with the goal of creating the most comfortable, healthy, and resource-efficient place in which to live.
Why Is Home Performance Important?
We design, build and renovate homes to be a shelter from the elements, and to reflect the owner’s personal sense of style and living. Often more thought goes into selecting the kitchen cabinets or the flooring than into what is needed to make the home comfortable, healthy and durable. With rising energy costs, we know it’s important to insulate the building envelope, install high energy efficient equipment or even use “green” materials, but are surprised when the residents aren’t warm or cool enough, or when they have excess moisture or poor air quality.
From its founding in 1986, the Home Performance Coalition has looked beyond the basics of weatherizing a house or apartment to the building science of what happens when you air seal and insulate a building, upgrade the HVAC equipment, or do any work. This approach is known as house-as-a-system or whole-house treatment.
In 20 years, we’ve identified many factors that affect how a building performs, including such key elements as moisture and combustion gases. As a contractor or technician, you can cause serious structural and comfort problems if you ignore how moisture could be entering or transferred in a building. Or cause a furnace or water heater to backdraft if you install a high powered kitchen fan without checking or sealing off the heater.
We understand much more about how all elements in a home are connected, including the activities of the homeowner or renter. We also know that it makes good business sense to adopt the whole house approach, to avoid or reduce costly callbacks or liability claims. Unfortunately, many homes are still built or remodeled, or have HVAC equipment installed without a thought to all the elements.
Home performance is based on building science and astute observation, not “legends” to determine what is happening or will happen in a building. Home performance contractors use diagnostic equipment to assess what needs to be done and verify their work. They don’t know every single detail of how everything works in the house, but they understand how things interact, and they know who to call for specific problems. They explain what they have done and how equipment works, so the residents become active partners in home performance.
Buildings are no longer just four walls, a roof and a stove. They’ve evolved into tightly sealed, comfort chambers, with tricky equipment and some toxic materials. You can probably get by as a contractor with just the “basics,” but why not think “outside the box” and move up to home performance? You may save a life, or a building, and you can certainly grow your business.
Insight Property Services, Inc. believes in the house-as-a-system, which is why we provide our clients extremely detailed Home Performance Audits and HERs Ratings.
View a Home Performance Audit Sample Report.
State Outreach
The Home Performance Coalition is actively working to support growth in the home performance and weatherization industries by researching and analyzing market conditions, programs, and policies that enhance and accelerate investments in residential energy efficiency. The economic opportunity available through investments in energy efficient retrofits of U.S. buildings is enormous. For example, a March 2012 Rockefeller Foundation/Deutsche Bank Report concluded that a $279 billion investment in U.S. residential, commercial and institutional building efficiency could yield more than $1 trillion of energy savings over 10 years, create 3.3 million jobs and reduce total U.S. carbon emissions by 10%. The same Rockefeller/DB Report noted that more than half of these financial returns, jobs and carbon reductions could be realized in the U.S. residential building market.
The Home Performance Coalition works with a variety of state partners and stakeholders to simplify, reform and streamline state and local regulations and outdated utility rules that present barriers to investments in residential energy efficiency. The Rockefeller/DB Report indicated that, because the U.S. residential building stock is very diverse, located in a variety of climates and subject to a confusing mix of state and local regulatory jurisdictions, current investment levels are unnecessarily low. The Home Performance Coalition works with the Building Performance Institute (BPI), Efficiency First, the Home Performance Magazine and a broad array of state and local partners to reform and streamline state and local laws, regulations and rules governing residential energy efficiency.
In addition to regulatory and legislative reforms, the Home Performance Coalition works at the state level on a variety of issues including:
- Increasing consumer awareness of energy efficiency and new technologies (such as smart grid and smart home performance management)
- Improving access to energy efficiency financing (for example, Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) programs and/or On-Bill Financing for Energy Efficiency Improvement programs).
-Improving the quantification and measurability of energy savings
-Reforming cost-effectiveness testing and screening for utilities
-Educating state leadership on the role that residential energy efficiency can play in carbon reduction strategies in compliance with Section 111(d) of the federal Clean Air Act.
The Home Performance Coalition wants to hear from you about the important policy issues that are impacting the growth of residential energy efficiency investments in your state. Please contact Joe Cullen, the HPC Director of Policy and State Outreach if there is a current policy issue in your state that we should know about.
For more information about the Home Performance Coalition visit http://www.homeperformance.org/