What to Expect
Working with a building performance specialist can run anywhere from $200 to $800 per job. Investing in your own blower door test equipment ($3,000 to $5,000), thermal imaging camera ($900 to $9,000), and cellulose blowing machine ($4,000 to $10,000) costs a lot more.
Ted Kidd, owner of Energy Efficiency Specialists, in Rochester, N.Y., works with homeowners and sometimes acts as a consultant to remodeling contractors. “Most often, though, remodelers call me to fix things when they’ve gone wrong,” he says.
Kidd charges $350 for an energy assessment and is in the home for three to five hours. Afterward, he spends about two hours creating an “energy model,” which he likens to doing a bank reconciliation matching presumptions with actuals. Then he assembles a list of recommended improvements, does a cost-benefit analysis on the improvements, and prioritizes them, he says, based on the homeowners’ problems and budget as he knows them. If he’s working with a remodeler, he discusses labor costs to get the true pricing for the improvements. “It’s like tailoring a suit,” he says. “You need to do it not in a theoretical way, but in a way that people can implement.”
Green builder Hugh Stearns, owner of Stearns Design Build, in College Station, Texas, says that sometimes building scientists overthink things and overload people with data, but that it’s worth catching the low-hanging fruit in simple ways. This will help to educate clients and may lead to more work. “You can do well to get the homeowner to walk around the house and let them feel where the air is coming through the home and explain how it can be inexpensively corrected. You don’t want to sell people more than they’ll ever recoup; for most homeowners it’s about ROI,” he says.
Which goes back to knowing your clients as well as the goals for your business. Kidd believes that, going forward, more homeowners will understand that, just as systems in their cars need regular maintenance, so too do their homes. And, as this understanding grows, they will ask for the attention of a home performance specialist. Right now, it’s still a tricky dance. There’s no critical path for how to work with a home performance pro; you just have to establish a relationship. And, like any relationship, the best are based on mutual trust between equal partners.