PROOF IS POSSIBLE TOUR Coming to 20 US Cities in 2016!

Our crowdsource funding campaign is wrapped up! The final tally is:

• 20 Cities will get a weeklong visit from Corbett, Grace, a baby, and two cats in the Tiny Lab
• 78 incredible supporters gave $71,490 for the Tour
• The Tiny Lab is now fully framed and will receive skin this weekend

Stay tuned for videos of the build and the Tour on our YouTube channel, our Facebook page, and at ProofIsPossible.com! Here's the map of where we'll be in 2016- hope to see you out there!

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The Pro's Guide to City Sponsorship for the Proof Is Possible Tour

Because nothing like the Proof Is Possible Tour has ever been done before, we get a LOT of questions about it. Which we LOVE answering, so keep them coming! But we thought we'd take the bull by the horns and answer some of the HARD questions about what it is, why we're doing it, how City Sponsors work, and why YOU should participate!

FIRST CITIES ON THE TOUR MAP:
San Diego, CA (City Sponsor: United Infrared/Thermal Imaging Conference)
Atlantic City, NJ (City Sponsor: GreenLife Energy Solutions)
Chicago, IL (City Sponsor: Advanced Energy Services)
Dallas/Plano, TX (City Sponsor: Advanced Energy Solutions)
~CLICK HERE TO ADD YOURS NOW!~

OK, here's an 8-minute crash course in putting your city on the map:

Proof Is Possible Tour to Visit 16 Cities in 2016

A full week of workshops for homeowners, building pros, and real estate pros show the path to worry-free construction

The launch of the Proof Is Possible U.S. Tour is unusual for several reasons, the biggest being that ‘energy efficiency’ is not central to any of the workshops. Instead, what the homeowners, Realtors, mortgage lenders, appraisers, and building pros absorb is the need for quality control, pure and simple. Proof Is Possible for everyone involved: proof that you do better work than the competition, that you got what you paid for, and that a home is worth more.

The tour had a sponsored kickoff event in Tampa way back in 2014, and that got participants hands-on with state of the art tools like testing fans and infrared cameras thanks to TruTech Tools and Retrotec.  While the help from exclusive sponsor Dow Building Solutions on that original event was awesome, it made the process of replicating the tour in other cities very slow.  Corbett and Grace ultimately decided to streamline the tour, do it all at once in sequence, and spend a whole week at each location, instead of just two days!  Find out more about the 2016 tour at http://ProofIsPossible.com.

The Building Performance Workshop team makes ‘Proof’ both educational and entertaining, showing homeowners and homebuyers that they should expect nothing less. Whereas most marketing for home performance is of a ‘macro’ nature intended for huge swaths of people in different areas, the Proof Tour takes a markedly ‘micro’ approach and simply gets everyone who needs to be involved in a local market in one room together.

“I attended the first Proof is Possible in Tampa, and it was the most informative class I have ever been to. Corbett took a very involved subject and in 2 days made me understand things about Home Performance that I hadn’t known in 5 years of testing and 30 years of contracting. It is worth every penny and a lot more to spend this time with the man who wrote the book on the subject while he breaks it down and shows you how it works,” reported Mike Bowman of Dunedin Refrigeration. Adds Cate Hammer of Building Insight, “It’s exciting to have an exuberant and nationally-respected expert like Corbett help us connect the top local contractors with the homeowners and real estate pros who’re looking for what they can deliver- proven results.”

The tour aims to also deepen the real estate community’s understanding of the value of performance. Out of 850 total MLS databases in the U.S., a surprising 185 incorporate ‘green’ features- but few Realtors understand how to use them. The National Association of Realtors found in 2012 that 87% of surveyed homebuyers believe cooling and heating costs are “important” or “very important”. High performance home certifications such as ENERGY STAR and Passive House can add a 10% premium to a home’s selling price, according to several studies surveying millions of home sales throughout the nation. Punta Gorda-based home appraiser Sandra Adomatis adds, “There’s a huge misunderstanding about the cost- a new high performance home will only cost 2-7% more than a code-built home, but then it works for you, instead of you working for it.”

The Proof Is Possible Tour is coming to a city near you, with dinner workshops for anyone who owns or plans to own a home, a breakfast workshop for real estate professionals, mortgage brokers, and appraisers, all free of charge thanks to sponsorship. Additionally there’s a full day of training ($200) for building professionals, who’ll be equipped to turn around and prove they did the job right the first time, and find the mistakes competitors have made. And on Day Two a Duct and Envelope Tightness certification course is be held for a limited number of participants.

For a list of upcoming cities, information and registration visit: http://ProofIsPossible.com

'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!

How to Master the Multi-family Blower Door Test

Hello Corbett,
A need to run a Blower Door test at a 3 house complex here in Greece. The houses are in the row, this means that normally I should have three Blower door devices, in order to measure the house in the middle. But I have only one Blower Door!
Additionally, I will need to hand over a written document (report), in order to certify the construction to the Passive House Institute. Do you have any suggestions?
Best and thanks in advance,
Stefanos

---

Hey Stefanos-
Great question! You do not, in fact, need multiple blower doors, because you actually want to include the unit-to-unit air leakage.  The measurement of all uncontrolled air leakage to outdoors and to other townhouses is a valuable one, and it should be the goal especially when building to Passive House (or PassivHaus) standards.  Watch this video for a visual explanation:

Home Performance Pros: Listen, Smile, and Remember Sometimes You're an Idiot

Listening, smiling, and validating are all skills that any home performance professional must have in order to serve homeowners, architects, developers, and other contractors!  Don't get so full of scientific diagnostic proof that you forget we all have to relate to each other in order to make any home improvements or performance-based building project work.

What Spillage Looks Like from a Water Heater

Testing for "spillage" of combustion gases means making sure the bad stuff that's supposed to go UP the chimney doesn't come back DOWN.  It's a critical part of home performance analysis, according to BPI, RESNET, and everyone else.  If you don't know what it looks like, you might feel a little lost- let your old pal Corbett the diagnostics guy show you the single most awesome example of what you shouldn't see in your clients' homes!

PODCAST #75 REALTORS OF THE FUTURE: Chad Curry on Technology & Real Estate

Today Corbett talks with Chad Curry, managing director of the Center for REALTOR Technology, about how performance metrics are changing the real estate industry. From the Internet of Things to measuring air quality in neighborhoods, Chad's group is on the cutting edge of helping the National Association of REALTORS (NAR) incorporate home performance into the selling and buying of homes everywhere! Sponsored by Fall Fast Track- my 6-week mastermind course in home performance ninja techniques.

To download this episode or hear more, subscribe in iTunes or visit BuildingPerformancePodcast.com

Field Check a Flow Hood Using a Duct Leakage Test Fan

Learn to quickly and easily check the accuracy of a flow hood (in this case, a TSI AccuBalance) using a duct tightness testing fan (in this case, a Retrotec DucTester 200). If your diagnostic equipment isn't giving you accurate readings, no amount of experience will save you!

This is NOT a Roof Leak: What Condensation Can Do

Visit an attic (vicariously) with building performance expert Corbett Lunsford to find a tiny problem that may force us to replace the floor and ceiling of this building- and it might happen to you someday too! Stop guessing- Proof Is Possible. Get up in that attic and have a look!

How Much More Will a High Performance Home Cost?

The answer to this bass-ackwards question is: NEGATIVE DOLLARS AND ZERO CENTS. It costs LESS to build a high performance home, whether that means ENERGY STAR Home, a Passive House, a Zero-Energy Ready home, or any of a number of other green home certifications.  Here's why:

In his first Fall Fast Track week of 2015, home performance guru Corbett Lunsford answers the question "how much more will it cost to build my next home high performance?" The answer to the question is as straightforward as the question is ridiculous!

Engineering a TOURING Tiny House: See the Full Series

Grace and Corbett are building a performance-proven tiny house on wheels called the Tiny Lab! It's going to be built from November to February, and it starts a 16-city US Tour in March of 2016. The Crowd Sourcing Campaign is happening NOW on RocketHub- CLICK HERE TO PARTICIPATE IN THE TOUR! Here's the full series of four webinars from August 2015 detailing the engineering of a super cool tiny house on wheels!

In #1: SHAPE AND LAYOUT, Corbett and Grace show the 3D sketchup model of the Tiny Lab, and bring engineer John Bergman in for some heavy lifting to do with pinpointing the center of gravity on this 24 ft trailer tiny house.

In #2: AIRSEALING, INSULATION, & WEATHER BARRIERS, tour the process of energy modeling the tiny house to determine the optimal R-values and level of airtightness, and hear about vapor barriers, moisture control, and drainage.

In #3: HEATING, COOLING, AND VENTILATION, you get a taste for how wrong a lot of the discussion goes about homes in general, and tiny homes especially. The HVAC design, including Manual J heat load calculations and hourly solar gain curves are analyzed and used for things as straightforward as deciding which direction to park the tiny house.

In #4: BELLS & WHISTLES, see behind the design of the solar PV kit, formaldehyde-free plywood built-ins, composting toilet, off-grid plumbing challenges, and luxury items that just add that quality of life that tiny house occupants are seeking.

We really hope you'll tune in for the videos of construction- you can subscribe to our YouTube channel right now with one click!