 My name is Nate Adams. I'm the founder of Energy Smart Home Performance and if you're like most people you're asking yourself right now what the heck is home performance. So let me give you a brief description of it. Home performance is basically the practice of making your house perform to the best of its abilities. Home performance is a relatively new term for looking at a house as a whole and as a holistic system. So just like your body is a bunch of different systems, home performance looks at your house as a system and all the different systems in the house and how they interact with each other. Now there are four tenets to home performance. So there's four different things we're trying to accomplish all at the same time. The first one is comfort. The second one is health and safety. The third one is durability and the fourth one is efficiency. So we're going to make your house more comfortable. We're going to improve the indoor air quality. We're going to make it last longer and we're going to make it cost less to run. So those are the four different things. The first tenet of home performance is comfort. So it's important to understand the technical stuff that's behind it. There's two different sides to it. There's keeping the heat in and there's making the heat in the first place. So my job primarily is to keep the heat in which most houses frankly do a pretty crummy job at. Then the second part of it is making the heat in the first place. That's the job of your furnace and your air conditioner. We want to make sure that we don't have too many air leaks in our house. If you have air leaking anywhere it's going to make it uncomfortable. Also if you have temperature differences in the house like you're upstairs is 10 degrees warmer. You're downstairs is 10 degrees cooler. Your basement's an ice cube in the summertime. That's all an indicator that you're going to have comfort problems in your house. So that's one of the things we try to work on. If you can make the temperatures even in the house and you can reduce the drafts you're going to get a comfortable home. Tenet number two of home performance is health and safety. So something we really don't think about is the fact that the air inside of our homes and businesses is actually much dirtier than the air outside our homes and businesses. It's called indoor air quality. So if you have allergies in your house and you notice that they're worse inside the house than they are outside and it's not pet related. The odds are you've got some mold or some sort of other dust that's getting into the house and making you uncomfortable. When we air seal a house we keep the air where it should be. So if it's in the attic it stays there. If it's outside the house it stays there. If it's in the basement it stays down there. So it's very important that all those things get affected. One of the primary things it gets dealt with is too much carbon monoxide in your home. So if your furnace or your water heater or your dryer or your gas stove is not burning well it's actually contributing carbon monoxide into your house. At very low levels it does have some health effects. So it's something that you want to keep an eye on and it's something that almost no one actually checks for. When you get an energy audit this is actually one of the main things that's taken care of. It's called combustion safety testing. Energy audits and home performance measures when working together they can find and fix the health and safety problems in your house. The third tenet of home performance is building durability. If you've ever been driving through the country and noticed an old barn that fell over or you happen to watch it over several years what was it that usually did the trick? Typically it's the roof failed, water started getting into the building and over time it leaned over and fell. The same thing kills houses. We just don't necessarily know that water is in their killing buildings. So home performance measures can actually help mitigate some of the water problems that your house has and actually make it last longer which is why we say that longevity is one of the tenets. One of the great examples of how home performance can actually extend the life of a home is by looking at ice dams and rotting ruffs. If you live in one of the inner ring suburbs or you have an older home you probably notice that you have large icicles hanging off the side of the house right after a winter storm. That's caused by too much heat leaking but more importantly what it does is it actually rots out the bottom couple of feet of your roof. If we can reduce the amount of ice damming that's happening there we can actually extend the life of the house because we're not rotting the bottom part of the roof. The fourth tenet of home performance is efficiency. So this is one everybody thinks of first it's gonna save me money. If you're curious just how much reduction you can expect most homes are capable of anywhere between a 20 and a 50% reduction in their usage. If you're curious how long it's gonna take you to get your money back from this type of improvements it varies on all kinds of different things. It varies on what the measure is that we're doing, what your type of house is. There's a lot of factors that go in but to give you a ballpark idea typically you're gonna see a return on investment somewhere between five and ten years which works out to about 10 or 20 percent simple interest and keep in mind it's gonna vary on what measure it is what type of house you have there's a lot of factors that go into it. This is really pretty cool because it's essentially guaranteed there's there's no risk on it it's just a matter of how long it's gonna take to get the money back and you aren't going to pay taxes on it because you already did it's after tax money that we're working with.