Home Disasters & Resilience: SciPub Q&A on 'Home Diagnosis' Season 3

Join Grace and Corbett Lunsford, creators of 'Home Diagnosis' on PBS, at a SciPub live audience discussion led by Nancy Scales-Coddington about disasters and resilience in homes at Cornell University. Season 3 of the series is called 'Accidents Happen', and explores disasters both natural and human-made (like adding ozone generators, skipping air sealing, putting plastic vapor barriers in the wrong places), and dives into the science behind them in physics, chemistry, and microbiology. Learn more from WSKG's SciPub series at: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkEiFS5w2pdm-95WA4ak2xXsFMxF2NWIm

Thanks again to Wise Home Energy's Jeff Flaherty who came out and demonstrated tools and answered questions for the crowd too: https://www.wisehomeenergy.com/

Learn more at: https://HomeDiagnosis.tv

Support the making of 'Home Diagnosis' and our YouTube channel for as little as $5/month at: https://Patreon.com/HomeDiagnosisTV

'Home Diagnosis' Ep202: BIG PICTURE (Home Performance vs. Energy Efficiency)

Grace and Corbett Lunsford break ground on their forever home, and the project immediately becomes bigger than they’d planned. Indoor Air Quality requires understanding ventilation and air tightness targets, and with low income weatherization and government programs pushing for energy efficiency, the origin of the ‘energy audit’ is exposed as good at heart but inconsistent with building codes, and possibly harmful for the home’s occupants.

Featuring the Intermountain Weatherization Training Center with Utah weatherization experts Wade Thompson, Matt Dalton, Matt Turner, Jesse Waite, Zack Mitchell, Jordan Evans, and many more who didn’t get as much time on camera.

TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome to Home Diagnosis. My parents like to say we make unusual choices like living in 200 square feet with two kids and two cats.

Or hosting a YouTube channel about home performance and building our own houses. Home performance goals and metrics are still unusual choices, but believe it or not, the science is as old as I am.

In today's episode, we're starting at the very beginning how the science of homes developed, and why you don't see it on other home shows, and what you've been missing in your own home projects.

We'll be specific so you can know the secret stuff to ask for, and learn the number one way to really be the master of your own home.

For all the scientific approaches that we're trying to take with this home, we realize that it's all based on total nonsense, magic mojo- because it's all based on dirt.

And where we wanted to put our house, there was actually a foundation, so we had to tear up the foundation, and under that we found another house buried.

We have a septic tank, which we didn't know about. We're going to build our house right on top of this thing. Not!

We're finding trash buried all over this property. And that's rude. But burying trash where somebody would want to build a house is especially not nice. So we had to obviously take that all out.

We dug way down past where we wanted to, and so we found lots of huge rocks in the way. So part of the house is going to be built on the rock, which is what the wise people do, right?

Build your house upon the rock.

So what we want to do is make sure that the house doesn't settle unevenly. So we had to turn the rest of the dirt that was not rock into, basically, rock.

By compacting it and compacting and compacting it and only bringing in this much at a time and then compacting that.

So we literally had three dump trucks of the old house removed and then several dump trucks of new dirt added. And we had a geotechnical engineer come out and confirm it.

So first day of construction on the house and we go $10,000 over budget and several weeks behind schedule. You know when the suffering is that good, you must be on to something wonderful.

They say renovating a home is like trying to build a home, with another home in the way.

Let me introduce you to some experts at tuning the performance of older homes.

So here is a house that's about to get a performance upgrade that is funded by tax dollars. This is a really exciting program that has helped income challenged people for decades.

Let's go see what they're about to do.

So Jesse is in charge of today's activities, and we've got holes in the wall behind us. Can you describe what exactly we're seeing here?

These holes are to dense-pack wall insulation. We'll use a chair rail to cover the holes.

The chair rail is pretty fancy, because normally we're just patching over this stuff. Which is why normally this doesn't happen from the inside, unless you've got somebody who's classy who can figure out how to make it look nice.

So this is how we're going to be shooting this in here. We're spearing this up into the wall. We have a very high tech filter fabric to keep it from getting out of the wall at us, right? How long does it take to do this entire house?

If we had all the holes and everything prepped, it'd be blown in probably two hours.

That's awesome.

There you go, you're in there and then you start pulling it out, you're coming along and it's filling up and you're like, Oh crap, and big ol burst when get it right there! We can get a blow out and blow everywhere and make a mess and get in people's hair.

It's reality, it's not like it's perfect every time- you're going to make a mess.

That's why we've got the plastic.

Yep, and the dry vac to clean up. Of course, the other main thing I'd be careful about is not blowing apart the wall. Because there's been cases where you start blowing a wall, and if it's not strong enough, you'll start seeing the sheet rock almost starting to bounce.

You have to be careful about not ripping a whole sheetrock off the wall. It's get scary.

Darren and. Paula, you guys have lived. Here. For how. Long?

30 years.

OK- and have you done anything like this to it?

No.

No. They went around and identified that there is no insulation in any of the outside walls of this house.

When I'd get dishes out of the cupboard, the dishes were always cold.

And the walls get very, very cold in the winter. Yeah, extremely cold.

Have you known other people who have put their houses through this? No- OK, cool. Well, it's a fun experiment! So welcome to the High-Performance Club. We're going to go see what they're doing on the outside of the house.

Do you guys ever get scared you're going to pop to the other side of the plaster? Every time- haha!

Dense-packing cavities is a really interesting application. It is elegant. It is an art.

Of course, I hope you'll remember that the main ingredient of that insulation is air bubbles. That is what really you're paying for, and that is what is going to trap the heat.

So if you imagine that we're going to shove this in here, and we're going to pack a bunch of this cellulose insulation into this wall cavity. What we're doing, technically, is squeezing the air bubbles out, and that is reducing the insulation value of this.

But what we're getting in return if we do it in the right ratio, is air tightness. It's not the same as air sealing with something that's going to really stop air, it's just slowing down the air leakage enough so that we can really affect the performance of this house on just the walls alone.

So this whole injecting requires you to feel and listen and have kind of a sixth sense with what's going on in this wall cavity behind where I can't see anything.

And you want to be especially careful as they're working from outside so as not to, as Zack mentioned, blow out the wall inside- that can be both messy and expensive.

So Wade, I know that your crews really know what they're doing there by this point. So let's just play a little game for a second...

What if we do such a good job air sealing it that we make it 'too tight'? What happens at that point?

So we're going to start having VOC build up. You're going to have indoor air quality problems, you're going to have moisture issues. So we need to address Ventilation. So our mantra is: 'make it tight, ventilate it right.'

OK, so now, though, we've stepped out of the realm of energy efficiency, and we're now going to cost energy because we're going to plug in a ventilation system.

How has the program evolved to include performance stuff that has to do with moisture and air quality? That doesn't actually save us energy at all. How do you justify that to the people who fund this?

It's health and safety. Yeah, you make a house nice and energy efficient, but you can also make a house a dangerous if you don't address the health and safety side of it. We want to make it as energy efficient as possible, but it's also got to be safe.

Because, what's the good of an energy efficient home if it kills you?

Exactly. OK. You said we need to ventilate, right? What does that mean when we're talking about a program that has a very tight budget, and we want to make sure that every dollar goes as long as it can? What are the strategies that you guys use?

We want a known, controlled rate of ventilation. Not wild card ventilation, which would just be opening a window or whatever.

And this is where this gets so important. Normal contractors should be incorporating the techniques that these guys have been using for decades, which is that you do something, and then you test. And you make sure that you have not created side effects, which you always do.

We now know that we've predicted the side effects. And they've started installing the ventilation system before they even know how tight they're going to get, right?

Yep, installing it now.

That's the best way to do it- you know exactly what the crews can do, because the crews have worked there for a little while. If you have a lot of turnover, then you've got to constantly be training, and you don't know what kind of work they do, which is another problem we have in the construction industry in general.

But here we have a vent that's coming in from outside. Right?

And it's going to go straight into the return on the furnace.

The magic of this system is that it uses a fan that you already have in your house: the fan that's built into your furnace or air conditioner.

The other benefit of this system is the outside air that we're bringing in is also filtered through the existing filtration system, and they've installed a really nice, highly efficient MERV 11 filtration system into this. So the outside air coming in, is filtered and then also conditioned, assuming that the furnace is running.

So Jordan, we're in there upgrading this home. What is your background that brought you into performance upgrades?

So I left the restoration business, where I used to do in-home assessments for damages, things like that- water, floods, fires.

So what's the learning curve like? Do you think that anybody could do this job?

First of all... yes and no. It takes a lot of training. These guys have been doing it for a while. It can be learned, but you know, it's fun. It's it's an awesome field. I'm very new to it and I've loved it so far.

Everything in Home Diagnosis centers on the invisible dynamics of physics and chemistry at work in your home all day, every day. A lot of people are trained to think it's all about energy efficiency. Here's why it's about so much more.

We like to break home performance down into the 4-3-2-1 approach we talk so much about. If you're a fan of this show, you know the 1 goal we're after is control, over the 2 systems: skin and circulatory.

And we use the 3 recommendations to get there: air sealing, Insulation and HVAC upgrades.

The 4 elements we're trying to control at the end of the day are pretty straightforward: the flow of heat, air, moisture, and toxins. Heat is probably pretty obvious to you- it bleeds out of your home in the winter, and bleeds in during the summer

Airflow is a much more subtle dynamic, and it leads to pressure imbalances- especially in today's more airtight homes. We need to be more aware of this element, because it's easy to detune a home by putting in new fans or changing ducts. And it's also simple to avoid that by testing for it.

Moisture is a big deal, and if you don't already know, too little and we get cracks in the walls and our sinuses ache. But if we have too much, we grow green fuzz in corners and things start to disintegrate.

And the final and most important element is air quality, which is influenced by all the other elements. The air your family breathes at home is made of chemicals (some good for you and some toxic) and laden with life forms (again, some good and some bad for you).

When you look at home performance using these four elements, it's clear that only two of them affect energy efficiency, and they're the two least critical ones to your family's health. To control moisture and indoor pollution, we need machines that use energy, and that's not technically efficient.

And, as we try to make homes more energy efficient by controlling heat and air, we are absolutely causing side effects in moisture and toxins- because the home is a system.

So the next time you're thinking of building or doing surgery on your home, remember the 4-3-2-1 approach.

Welcome to where today's weatherization crew gets trained. Now, any good home performance training center will have things that look like this- props that demonstrate how construction works and how things can be fixed and tuned.

But there's only one place as far as I know, in the world, where you will find this. This is a house that is a shape shifter. It can basically change its performance based on what we want to show today.

So the weatherization professionals in Utah, here at the Intermountain Weatherization Training Center, are getting to see, just like you are about to, how the invisible dynamics of home performance can be changed to make a building fail and to tune it to work properly. Let's go inside.

One of the things that any home performance contractor is going to want to be able to figure out is what is behind the wall. Normally, you can't see into the wall because of the sheet rock. So what we have here is the ability to look into the wall.

We can put a blank on this, so that looks like the sheet rock, basically. And then the way you figure out what's in there is you could use an infrared camera, or you can use something as simple as this, just a coat hanger.

You would drill a hole in the wall- now, we've had some holes conveniently made, so we don't have to keep drilling holes- and I can reach in here and determine depth of the wall. I can also visually look in there and see that the cavity has no insulation.

If we had a cavity that did have insulation, I can go in with my little hook and pull it out and go, Oh, OK, I've got cellulose in this wall, three and a half inches deep, and now I know what kind of R-value is inside of that wall.

In the last episode, we talked about the shape of the house making a big difference for performance. Here is one of the features that we talked about, which is where the upper floor juts out over the lower floor.

And this can be a big problem for the performance in a home, which is why in this training center we can open this up and see what's behind it.

You've typically got insulation, you possibly could have duct work in this area, and you can see back in there that there's no blocking. So air can move from the cantilever back into the home and vice versa. Whereas we want to make sure there is blocking like in this bay right here that will stop the airflow.

So in weatherization, we actually use this tool a lot: the blower door. It's a fantastic way to measure a lot of things in the house. The thing that we measure first is just how leaky the whole entire house is.

But then once we've done that, we can actually use this tool in conjunction with some other tools and we can look at different rooms in the house. We call those 'zones.'

This is just an example where we can actually look at the pressure as it changes in each of the rooms throughout the house. And we can see which rooms have more leakage and which have less.

OK. So right now we're in your mechanical room and your mechanical room probably has one of these. This is a water heater, what we call a 'natural draft' or 'atmospheric vented' water heater has this great big draft hood on it, which is a hole.

And if everything's working right, all of the toxic flue gases will go past this hole through this pipe and to the outside. But if things are working wrong, all the toxic flue gases will spill out of this hole into your house.

So we're going to go ahead and test that right now and see what happens. The way we have the house configured, the flue gases should be spilling out into the house.

So the water heater is on. I know this is spilling because I can feel it, but since you guys on TV can't feel it, we'll go ahead and show you. We can see all the flue gases that are coming back into the house. And they'll continue to do that as long as I let this run.

So another way we can tell is, I can stick this piece of glass up here and as the hot, moist flue gas has hit the glass, you see the condensation building up on the glass. We can see that condensation was built up on there from all those hot flue gases full of carbon monoxide spilling into the house. So the simple fix for this is to add what we call 'combustion air' to the equation.

And I can do that simply by opening this door. And now the water heater, instead of spilling, you can see the smoke is now being sucked up and out of the flue, where it should go. And if we put the glass back up there, we're going to see there is no condensation building up on the glass.

So here we can see that with just a very small difference in the situation in the house we can make something as big as the stuff in the chimney is coming into the house versus the stuff in the chimney is going outside happen. And almost nothing just happened- we just opened a door.

So think about how many doors there are in your house, and all the different scenarios that you can create like this kind of a scenario. Show us more!

Your heating and cooling system creates pressure in the ductwork, and the higher that pressure, it becomes a problem. We call it 'high static pressure,' and if you get extremely high static pressure on a system, that can start to cause issues with efficiency and airflow.

So right now, I've got the system running. We've got our measurements for static pressure here, and what I'm going to do is simply simulate a clogged up filter and we're going to watch that static pressure start to rise up.

OK, you can see my static pressure, or my blood pressure, is starting to skyrocket. You can hear the blower motor is working much harder, which is not good. It's consuming much more electricity as our static pressure is getting into a very scary zone where it can actually cause damage to the system.

So before the system explodes, I'm going to go ahead and fix that. You can hear the blower motor ramp down and you can see the static pressure start to come back down.

So the high pressure that you just created by simulating a clogged filter, which a lot of us have, you can actually hear that if I'm correct, if your furnace in the basement goes 'Wham' when it starts up.

That is the sound of your ductwork deforming to try and deal with the fact that it's now being sucked on by this giant fan. So this is a problem that plagues lots of houses, I've found- have you found the same thing?

We find it all the time.

I would say about 90% of the places I've tested, it's obvious that no one has tested this before. So this is always something that I'm trying to, and Wade is trying to, get every contractor to just test. Just to know- if it's high, you should know it.

So as far as the airflow goes, what else can ducts being badly designed, or badly installed, or being clogged, what can that do to the house? Can we affect the pressures in the rest of the house?

Yes, absolutely. We can cause all kinds of weird pressure imbalances in the house.

Which is why we have a control panel- show us your control panel!

So we can control the dynamics of the house. We can cause high static pressure. We can cause weird pressure imbalances in the house. We can make things bad and then make them better again. That way, our technicians can actually see the problems.

So we do this all hands-on and very visual, because it's super hard to believe in something you can't see. With this, and all the other goodies we have in the house, we can show it to you.

One way Home Diagnosis aims to change your relationship with home improvements and construction is by giving you new language to describe what you want from your home.

Most people are already trained to try and save money or time by making improvements quick and inexpensive, and to shop for home size, or amenities, or location.

But whether you're building, buying, or improving a home, you can ask for performance. Look- being able to prove how healthy or comfortable your family will be in your home, and predict how durable and low maintenance it will be in the long run, is totally possible with today's test tools and techniques.

Your job is to be as specific as you can about your performance goals, so that the contractors you hire have targets they're aiming for. If you don't have a target clear in your head, and spelled out in the contract, how can you know when the job is done?

For example, making a home airtight is the #1 way to achieve more control over performance. Know what blower door number you're after? If you want to future proof your home, the magic blower door metric is 3 Air Changes at 50 Pascals.

You don't have to know exactly how that's calculated, but it's a specific goal that's measurable. And that's the secret.

If you're aiming for comfort control, aim for all the rooms in your home to be within 3 degrees F of your thermostat set point. If you want proof of quality installation of your new furnace, aim for airflow out of each duct tested within 5% of what was designed in the computer's heat load calculation.

Some contractors will run away if you ask for targets like these, and that's good- they're not for you. There are absolutely building professionals out there who can and do deliver measured performance using testing. And they'll be happy that you value it enough to tell them exactly what you want.

When we first got this property, which we love, it had a giant workshop on it, which had started out in the 1930s as a stable and then became a blacksmith shop and then became a junk shop where they basically just kept all the stuff that they didn't want to have to look at anymore.

So when we got here, of course, it's an existing building, it's about to go through another renovation that's going to change the purpose of it. It was clad in rotting plywood and sheet metal. The skin of a building, as you know, is very important to us. So what we did behind us is to reskin it (it had good bones).

We put translucent skin on it, so it allows light in. And we also took all the junk out from inside, because the space inside of this has become critical for our build. We need to be able to keep things in there to be able to make up for my lack of scheduling know-how, because I just need to get things and then I'll use them whenever.

Over here, there was a speedboat. Inside, there was a Cadillac on all four flat tires, that we had to drag out and up the hill.

And we spent a long time smashing the pianos and the guitars that were rotting inside, that needed to be put into piles to be taken away. I could not watch that part. So let me take you inside and show you what it looks like now.

As you can see, beautiful light in here- we do some filmmaking in this space as well. And obviously, we're using it to keep it quite a bit of the building materials.

But the lighting that was here when we arrived was fluorescent lights- which is more energy efficient than some other kinds. But what is more energy efficient than fluorescent lighting- no lighting at all.

We ripped out all the lighting because no one when it's daytime both the walls and the roof are translucent, and it's going to be well lit. And also, when it gets dark at night, my goal is to be at home hanging out with my family.

Now that being said, this is an outdoor workshop, meaning it's going to be moist in here, humid, it's warm right now, the sun is out.

I have an uncle who has an outdoor workshop. And his tools tend to rust over time.

My dad has a woodworking workshop that is totally indoors, and it's air conditioned and heated, and it's dust controlled.

And I didn't really want to be that crazy with my first workshop, so we decided to build this room behind me, which we call the Dry Vault.

It's the world's highest performance tool shed, and you'll see that it is super airtight and insulated, and it's not air conditioned and heated. We have a very simple machine that controls this.

Now, listen to how airtight this is. Perfect. So the control we get over this space is: #1, it's not going to get outdoor dust coming in here a lot. That's one of the benefits of having an airtight space. #2, it's insulated at the roof and the walls, but the slab is not insulated.

This is the same slab that's outside, so this space is always going to be about 60 degrees, which is nice. But even if it does get colder or warmer, it's OK because we have a dehumidifier that runs all the time that keeps this space at the humidity levels that we want.

Therefore, it doesn't matter how hot or cold it gets, as long as it's dry. All of our tools that we use for the diagnostics, and our film equipment that we use for the youtube channel will not rust out and rot.

This is our concept of marrying the energy efficient space with the high performance space, and getting something that really achieves the goals you're after.

On Home Diagnosis, you won't hear us talking much about energy efficiency, but we do know a couple of secrets about it. Want to know the secret to powering my TinyLab? Here it is. If I came to visit you, you could unplug your toaster and plug in my entire house.

I could then run everything at the same time off that plug. Energy efficiency wasn't our main goal with the TinyLab- we set out to make the world's highest performance tiny house on wheels. But by controlling performance, we get energy efficiency as a fantastic byproduct. Seems like you can have it both ways.

While we may be the first to tell this story on TV, before today you probably had heard of energy efficiency, 'going green,' maybe even noticed certain building certifications. But now we hope you understand why those goals only tell part of the story.

On the next episode, we'll dig into the spookiest part of every home in my opinion: water. How it can get in your home, why you really want to control it, and also how mold is only the tip of the iceberg.

To learn more about any of these topics and the science you learned today, go to HomeDiagnosis.tv- We'll see you next time.

Home Diagnosis is made possible by support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,

by Fantech, 'Breathe easy,'

by Broan-NuTone, 'Come home to fresh air,'

by Aprilaire, 'Everyone deserves healthy air,'

by AirCycler, Retrotec, and Santa Fe Dehumidifiers,

by generous support from these underwriters

and by viewers like you.

'Home Diagnosis' Episode 201: Form vs. Function

Grace and Corbett reflect on their origin story and what has motivated them to take this next big step into designing and building their own home, with tuned performance as the driving factor. Visit a finished high performance home, to see what it can look and feel like. Selection of materials is explored here, as well as the ways geometry, layout, and aesthetics affect performance.

Featuring architects Chris and Jodi Laumer-Giddens, savvy homeowner Amel Korjenic, Michigan Habitat for Humanity Director Thom Phillips, and Matt Risinger of The Build Show.

TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome back to Home Diagnosis. If you watched Season One, you saw us travel around the US in the TinyLab, helping homeowners diagnose mystery problems in their homes and prescribe proven solutions to fix them.

In this second season, we're going much bigger. Right over there we'll be building our forever home, a 3000 square foot high performance house tuned to perform exactly like our family wants. Like the TinyLab, we're designing and building it ourselves with my parents, and we'll be showing you the whole fascinating process.

We heard from hundreds of our season one viewers from all over the world wanting to understand more. So in season two, we're going to dig deep into the science of home performance and introduce you to some groundbreaking new indoor chemistry and microbiology research.

Let's start at the beginning. Every home starts out as an idea which becomes a design. Having a plan is essential, but most plans today don't design for control of heat, air moisture and indoor pollution, which is why this show was created: to help you make more informed decisions about your home as a system.

Of course, as we plan for our new home, we're incorporating systems thinking. Here's how the plan started…

So, because we've been designing this house for the past several years while we were even building this thing and touring it, we were dreaming of what this house was going to be like because obviously this was always a finite living situation.

So after coming up with all the ideas and building the 3D model, that is what we have got laid out in the plans here. So this is what we're submitting for permit.

So Corbett and I worked on this for months in 3D modeling and just dreaming what we could do. And eventually we got it down onto paper. But then we had to hire an architect to come in and really kind of move and place the walls and space everything out the way that it should be for typical flow.

We're not thinking about interior design, really.

Yeah, I mean, when you're dreaming up your own house and you've never built them before, aside from a 200 square foot, sometimes you're like, Yeah, this feels good for a hallway.

And so the architect, Jodi, made a bunch of good suggestions. She moved our front door. She moved the laundry room. She changed the stair layout was pretty cool. She rearranged the master suite to and all those changes, we just accepted whole hog and said, Yep, that's it.

Quite right in our designs, we have some functional goals that were really important to us. Both Corbett and I are musicians and we've always dreamed of having a proper recording space. But we also live very close to an airport.

So we wanted it to be quiet and we happened to notice when we built this (TinyLab), it was amazing to us how quiet it was when you built something airtight. Aside from the dust control and all the other benefits that you already know that we get out of this, the air tightness can be achieved a lot easier

since we're building this ourselves if we keep the shape simple. We knew that I'm not a very good builder, so we wanted to keep it reasonable for me to be able to tackle, especially with our parents being some of our laborers.

So the shape was always very simple, and what we did is kind of change the shape over the couple of years that we were working on it. Sometimes it was two houses with a studio and a living space.

We finally melded it because of permits and a whole bunch of reasons. But once we put it together, we realized that there was a type of building that resembled this. It's called a monitor barn. So now we just call it a monitor barn shape, even though it was something that kind of came out of the organic workaround with the way the house was laid out.

And then, of course, we also had to think about our landscaping and how we wanted the house to actually fit on the property and and it naturally fit if we just kind of shifted one part back and one part forward on the monitor barn.

And again, it ends up creating a more interesting dynamic to the house, but still keeps a really simple shape which gets us back to our functional goals.

And one thing that was really important to us, we wanted to work with the land. So where the trees are, where the driveway already is, where the woods are located, that all kind of spoke to us, that we didn't want to bring in a plan and just say, Plop.

This is where the house goes. We wanted to be able to look at it and kind of shift things around and change things about the house layout, the decks, et cetera, so that it would make sense with what was already here because we didn't want to go around chopping down all the trees.

So in virtual reality, we can build this house, and the simplest thing we can do is show everybody what it's going to look like. And so we can spin it around, and that's all wonderful, yay. What we're really interested in now is this part of it, which is where we can really start to look at the implications of

changing stuff about the house so we can see the volume of the space. We can split the house up into the living space in the music studio, which is going to be separate. We can break up the rooms and see how much space there is going to be per room so that we know how many BTUs of heat or cool need to be supplied to each of those rooms.

I mean, when you're putting it all together, this really is your worksheet, your math worksheet, basically, when you're trying to understand the science of a home.

And especially for people who are pretty novice at this home building stuff, this is your chance to do a rough draft of a house and buy a bunch of plywood and install it and say, Nope, that doesn't work.

We need to turn it a different way to make sure to maximize the efficiency of the materials that we're buying. So we've built all the walls. We know how many sheets of plywood need to be there, what kind of cuts are going to be there.

We're also building the framing plan inside the computer so that every cut made on the actual wood of the walls and the ceiling and the floors are going to be computer generated cuts.

So here is the spinal cord of our house.

We can see that it's big enough, that it's going to be laid out the right way, before we start pulling the trigger and spending money and time actually trying to build this thing.

And the great thing about this technology is it's so accessible. There's so many different ways to do it, even, that are free and fun. Most people are familiar with home inspections and inspectors job is to investigate the static parts of the building, things built into the home: construction details, HVAC equipment, type and age, shape and condition of the structure.

And even when an inspection points out all the safety or durability hazards that should be improved, it can only go so far because it's all about the static stuff that can be seen. Home performance is about dynamics, things that change flow to investigate those things, how the house feels, smells and sounds when it's dynamically working, you need performance testing.

Every home is a system just like a body. You can't see your heart, but you know it's there and a doctor can use a blood pressure cuff and a stethoscope to measure your heart's performance. The diagnostic tools we use in Home Diagnosis help us find the invisible heat, the invisible air, the invisible moisture and pollutants that define your home's performance.

So look around you. What might seem like a hodgepodge of furniture and products is actually an interacting, interdependent system of invisible dynamics that can be tested and tuned. Stop guessing. Proof is possible. Ask for it.

The planning for any build is the most critical element, right? If you want certain outcomes, you can't start with a plan and then say, Hey, we're going to as we go along, we're going to do this, this and this. First of all, it's outrageously expensive because the minute you change something, you start getting change orders and nobody's

going to do anything extra for free. It drags out the build schedule. We've talked many times about the house being a system. Any time you change one part of that system, you could be affecting so many other parts of that system, right?

And so really, the only way to to build a house well is to think about all those things before you put a hole in the ground. You think about all those things before you put pencil to paper, even.

You cannot take a standard house plan and make it a High-Performance house on the job site because it's got, you know, everybody's going to do it the way they've always done it. So you're also not going to be able to train every one of those trades on how you want it done.

What I do is I engineer that opportunity to mess things up out of the plan. I give enough detail so that, you know, you're going to get kind of the objective you want, almost regardless of who's there.

Of course, we wanted to see a house that had turned out exactly as great as it was on paper, and had the right team to design and build it. Chris and Jodi!

Hey.

This is a beautiful house.

Thank you very much.

Thanks for having us.

So, Jodi, to us, performance means the control of physics and chemistry. We gave our plans to you to make it High Performance in a different way. What does performance mean to you?

That has more to do with the how are you going to use the space and that it serves all your needs as far as circulation, access to the outside, relationships of different spaces. So for your house, we didn't change the footprint.

You guys already knew how big you wanted it to be, where you're going to put it on the property. But the inside was just kind of big open spaces, and that might look good on paper, but you needed to find spaces a little bit more than that.

That doesn't necessarily have to be with walls. Yours didn't really have an entry. You just open the door and you were in a big open space and you want to have some transition spaces as you move through the house.

So we aim to organize the space so that it works the best for your family.

So this home is not only beautiful, it's located in a beautiful, historic district here in Atlanta. Did that pose any problems? I know a lot of historic communities have certain rules.

Well, this is one of the largest historic districts in Atlanta, and they have some pretty specific guidelines to follow. They're really trying hard to maintain the feel of the neighborhood- that's really important. But of course, lifestyles and expectations have changed over the years.

There are so many opportunities when you're when you're faced with all of these restrictions and they're saying, Well, we want to design it like it was back in the day, and their lifestyles back then were front porch and big, huge chimneys and fireplaces that just

isn't now. This family, especially, is not from that time, they're not from this place. This is consistent with that. But we're living in the 2000s now.

Can we go inside and take a look?

Yeah, let's go meet Ella and Amel.

All right.

This is a beautiful house. You guys did a really good job of hiding all the high performance stuff that I know that you did on this house because it looks like just a house. You would never know that it was different.

Yeah. Incorporating the performance and the efficiency is just as important as making it feel just like a normal place and not like a spaceship.

Let's go and check out the kitchen. You go find your favorite room.

All right, sounds good.

So, Jodi, you know, I am super excited that my new kitchen will literally be the size of the current house I live in. But something that's very important in a tiny lab is our vent hood. And here we've got a gorgeous one.

It's on an outside wall. So it vents directly out. So the shorter the run on that, the more efficient it is. But the other thing most range hoods are undersized. Usually a range hood is in here somewhere, and only comes out about two thirds of the way.

Yeah. Well, what does that do for the front burners?

And the open shelving design here in the kitchen? That's something that I really want to do too, and somebody the other day said, Well, I hope you're ready to clean all up on the top because you're going to get grease all over your plates and cups.

But I think we forget to turn it on every single time, every time cook, right? I'm not interested in cleaning...

Cleaning the dishes after they've been cleaned? That's right. All that should be captured and taken out. And then you don't have the particulates landing inside the kitchen.

So we do all these HVAC design calculations in the computer. We come up with a design and a plan and everything, and then the HVAC guy shows up on site. They're supposed to put stuff in and the plan is changed because the architect gave the plans to a builder and where the furnace was supposed to go has been reclaimed into the master closet. And so where are we supposed to put this stuff? So you solved that here.

We did. We've framed out a hole in the structure just like you would with a stair. And then put little two by fours really close together above it to create the floor above. And then the eight inch tall air handler that serves this floor sits right up in there.

And now we have access to it. We can get to it, we can clean the filter, we can make sure you're maintaining all that stuff. And also it's running right now.

It is running right now. They're very quiet systems.

And because it's a louvered closet door essentially, it is also the return grill where the air is getting sucked up into the system, correct? So I can't shove a couch up against it like you would in a normal house and screw up the system.

Yeah, that's amazing. Nice work.

Thank you.

Grace, meet the homeowner. This is Amel. Ella couldn't make it because she's taking the kids to school.

Oh, that's too bad. OK, so you and Ella have been here for three years. How do you feel about it?

We love it. We love it. We love the neighborhood. We wanted to build a house that's going to be fitting within the neighborhood. But also we wanted the pleasures of living in an efficient house that's also a healthier home for the homeowner and also for our two small kids that we have.

You grew up in Bosnia, right?

Yeah. So one of the big things we did when we first came in over here is honestly, you have that concept in your head of, I'm going to huff and puff and blow it away. Kind of felt like it's built like a stick house

and there's no way it can be as good as building with reinforced concrete. Let's do a really socialist kind of a way of constructing it then and make sure that nobody can hear you and it just gets really solid. But then again, there's drawbacks of both.

It's hard to change concrete buildings...

Well, that's true. And then as time progresses over here, time progresses over there, they're retrofitting. So by nature, I like to go into details of everything. Whatever I do, it doesn't matter, I'm overanalyzing everything.

So of course, biggest decision in your life, you're going to really overanalyze it. So what I did is I went online, tried to do my research, tried to be as informed as I can, and I found a builder that was doing some stuff and contacted that builder.

And at the same time, I found some of the videos and articles on how to do energy efficiency by a different person. Well, it so happened once I contacted this person and they put me in contact the first person as well.

So it was the only two people at that time that were kind of doing energy efficiency in Georgia. So that's how I got to meet Chris and Jodi, and that's how the entire thing got started. Of course, because it's your house you want to be, sky's the limit.

Like, I want it to be the best of the time, nothing less than that. But then, of course, the financials come into play. And then also, to be honest with you, it wasn't as much the financial as it was 'who can do it?'

How did you find a builder who could do what you were asking with the plans?

To be honest, I can't even tell you how many interviews we had with different builders...

How did you know that a builder didn't know how to do it, was maybe BS'ing you?

To be honest with you, it would be very difficult to BS me. I'm not trying to brag, but I have a lot of compiled knowledge through going through everything through the entire experience of researching how the houses work, and how the walls work, and what to do

with the envelope, what kind of windows, everything else. And then in conversation, you can tell if somebody knows, you know. And, it is true too, if somebody doesn't know what they're talking about, you can tell, especially when it came to pricing and stuff.

If somebody tries to lowball the estimate on how much it would be, you know they don't know what they're talking about.

What kind of responses were you getting, were people running away? Or would they say, Oh, yeah, totally. No problem.

Well, first of all, they'd be like, why? Why? Why would you do that kind of thing? And then when you were trying to explain it to them, it would be, of course, kind of over their heads.

And they'd be like, Sure, well, we haven't done it before, so it's going to cost extra. And then how much extra? They just throw a number out that you would just say there's no way. Trying to scare you off. That's pretty much it.

I love that you know so much about this. Do you have any advice for some of our viewers who might be starting out on their knowledge about all this stuff? Who want to follow your lead?

Do your research, make sure that you know what your limits are. What what is your goal? Is it the clean air? Is it a low monthly bill? Is it overall comfort in the house? I mean, you just have to know which check boxes are the ones that make the cut,

which ones don't make the cut, and then where do you make those sacrifices? But you just have to know what you're looking for. Main thing again, do your research.

Right.

Do research as much as you can, and then talk to people that know what they're talking about.

Well, thank you so much for letting us be in your house.

And thank you for building this.

Appreciate it. Thanks so much.

Thanks for having us. Thanks.

Home Diagnosis shows that in every home, there's one thing that impacts how it feels, smells and sounds more than anything else: the skin. Just like your own skin, its job is to keep inside stuff inside and keep weather and contaminants out of your home.

Your home's skin is made of the air tightness and insulation layers. That's usually two different things, and they should usually be touching each other. They should certainly never have big holes in them, but often they do, and we're about to show you how to spot some of them yourself.

Since air leaks right through most insulation, pay attention to air leakage first. You know that warm air rises and cool air sinks. So the two most vital places to control air leakage is the top floor ceiling and the bottom most floor.

Your floor is probably pretty flat, which is a simple shape, but the top floor ceiling- not so simple.

Ever felt hot in a top floor room in summer, even if the lower floors are nice and cool? Chances are it has nothing to do with air conditioning. It's because of holes in the skin of the house over your head.

So take a walk around the top floor and keep your eye out for places where the ceiling height changes from room to room. Wherever this happens, there's probably air leakage and insulation issues. Any ducts that plug into the ceiling are even more likely to leak air, since the duct work is now in the highest point in the home.

The more recessed lights, tray ceilings, dormers and turrets a home has up top, the more concerned you should be about testing and improving the performance dynamics. Start at the top, and all else follows.

So we're talking a lot about form versus function. And I think it bears mentioning that just because you have one doesn't mean you have the other. So when you're talking about performance and architecture and trying to meld the two, what does that mean to you guys as architects?

You know, a homeowner needs a home for shelter and shelter doesn't just mean from the elements. It means you've got to find a place to live comfortably, live healthy and for a very long time. A lot of times our clients have their list, their sort of wish list of, Hey, I want solar panels, I want this type of insulation.

I want that. And that to them means energy efficiency. And what we always present to them is that we need to design the house to last a really long time. And so we introduce this idea of durability. And with durability comes efficiency in both the floor plan and then the building and the building enclosure.

The systems always come after we've designed the house. You've probably heard of process before products. The process of designing the house to be efficient, to be situated on the lot, with overhangs, to make sure that we're protecting the inside from the heat and the prevailing winds and things like that, all of that comes into play first.

Then we design the assemblies to counter the conditions, the temperatures and the moisture. The result of that is something efficient. And then you design the systems to condition the home to combat whatever heat does get in or or leaves the house.

Efficiency can be as simple as the size of the footprint, so the less house, the less energy it consumes. Yes. So it's a trend, especially in America: more is better.

To build better, we need to build smaller. You know, if you have a a budget of, you know, just throw some number out: $100,000. If you build a small house with $100,000 or a big house that hundred thousand dollars...

You can build either one, but just generally speaking, the small house can be built better with whatever pool of money you have to spend, than the very large house. And I know you guys have lived in smaller before and shockingly, your lifestyle, your happiness probably didn't go dramatically down because you had 50% or 100% less space than the average American has.

You know, my family, I have a family of six plus a very large Labrador living in 2200 square feet, and it's plenty of space for us.

We hit the road in our TinyLab when my oldest daughter was just six weeks, which meant her car seat was important. And I researched the safety features, of course, but I also started to wonder what these things were made of.

I mean, our daughter was going to spend hours in this car seat, which was going to heat up in a parked truck and release chemicals from that heat. Here I was, swaddling my daughter an organic cotton- so how could I get a car seat without considering the materials?

Now, as we build a bigger house, what we bring into our home is equally important. And so just like choosing a nontoxic car seat, there are lots of ways to educate yourself about these materials. And there are some companies that are even accepting the challenge ahead of regulation to make home furnishings and building materials safe for you and your family.

And if you don't know where to start or what to consider, Home Diagnosis is a great place to begin. As we build, this house will keep coming back to indoor air quality. The important thing to remember is that what you bring into your home is what you'll be living with and breathing every day.

Now you see how we can marry form and function, and design a home that's relatively simple and affordable to build.

Performance-tuned homes are for everyone. But they do not happen by accident, especially in today's fast evolving world of building codes and new materials and technologies. In the next episode, we'll dive into those complexities as we break ground on our new house.

To learn more about how you can tune the performance of your home, new or old, visit HomeDiagnosis.TV.

Home Diagnosis is made possible by support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,

by Fantech, 'Breathe easy,'

by Broan-NuTone, 'Come home to fresh air,'

by Aprilaire, 'Everyone deserves healthy air,'

by AirCycler, Retrotec, and Santa Fe Dehumidifiers,

by generous support from these underwriters

and by viewers like you.

When HGTV Starts Copying 'Home Diagnosis'...

Children Building Homes for No Pay on National Television: Science of Homes for Cable Networks

We shot a pilot episode for the Shark Week version of our show on PBS, and we think this could win awards. Not for science though. For slapstick. Are there awards for that?

Our children ‘design’ and ‘build’ a ‘high performance home’ that we then ‘test’ with ‘scientific diagnostics’ so that we can ‘educate the public’. Including ‘HVAC diagnostics’, ‘comfort analysis’, ‘pressure balancing’, infrared thermal photography, and a ‘blower door test’ that does not bode well.

Preview Screening: 'Home Diagnosis' TV Series Season 2 (National Home Performance Conference 2021)

Watch excerpts and Q&A with Grace and Corbett Lunsford, creators of the first-ever television series about the science of homes (or building science, or high performance, or diagnostic analysis, whatever you may like to call it).

For participants at the National Home Performance Conference in April 2021, 35 minutes of scenes from the upcoming 13-epidode season were aired and explained in the greater context of this very exciting milestone for the high performance building industry.

BECOME A SUPPORTER and help us make this show: http://Patreon.com/HomeDiagnosisTV

See more about the show at: https://HomeDiagnosis.tv

Episode 2 Peek: Home Diagnosis Season 2

Become a member and help make the show! http://www.patreon.com/HomeDiagnosisTV

Grace and Corbett invite you to participate in making history with season 2 of 'Home Diagnosis' the first science-centered home show on television.

Building Science is Evolving: Healthy Indoors Minute #2

Home Diagnosis co-host Corbett Lunsford illustrates the basics of control over indoor air quality and indoor chemistry in the second video collaboration with Healthy Indoors Magazine. Informed by all we're learning from the HOMEChem Experiment. Learn more at:

http://HomeDiagnosis.tv/homechem

'Home Diagnosis' Finally Puts Home Performance Testing on Mainstream TV

Grace and I have been trying to make a TV show about home performance testing for years- we've tried three times so far!  This is how it works traditionally:

1. You get a network executive to want to see you as a couple onscreen because they think you're quirky or weird or otherwise compelling in a I-can't-look-away kind of way
2. You work with a production company and pay out of your own pocket to shoot a 'sizzle reel' that shows off the personality of the hosts
3. You remind yourself and everyone else that your show is about SCIENCE, not about relationship drama and being quirky or weird
4. They remind you that no one cares about the topic in reality TV
5. You feel frustrated and you throw the whole idea in the garbage because you don't want to play their stupid game

So we've decided to make the show ourselves, without asking anyone's permission. We find that works best for us- whether self-publishing a book (Home Performance Diagnostics) or making a feature film (The Other One), it always seems to work perfectly when we don't have someone breathing down our neck to conform to 'the way things get done around here normally.' Here's the show that will actually make it onto mainstream television: HOME DIAGNOSIS.

In 2014, we pushed hard for a show called PRESCRIPTION HOME PERFORMANCE to get made, but it went exactly nowhere. We went to the national RealScreen Summit, a non-fiction television programming conference (yeah, I know!), met with all kinds of networks to pitch the idea, and finally had Science Channel interested until they finally said, "wait, we don't want to compete with HGTV." And that was that. But you can still see what the show was like here:

And way back in 2009, we worked with our friends and client Sandy Gordon to make OUR GREEN COMPANY, which resulted in all of us being told by the Discovery Green channel that 'green' was a fad. Look at these kids- so young, so fresh, and maybe clueless!

Stay tuned for developments on HOME DIAGNOSIS- at the very least, it'll show on PBS just like This Old House does, and at most, it'll be running 24 hours a day on every channel there is.  Probably it'll be somewhere in between!

If you'd like to participate in the making of this show, please reach out to us about it!