John Porterfield was tracing an air leak through a Chicago attic the other day when his cell phone rang. “I need you to come over and give me some help with my attic,” the caller said. “Not right now,” he replied. “I’m in someone else’s.”
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Porterfield and Kidd are firm believers in “building science,” a still-accumulating body of knowledge based on thousands of obscure studies of how buildings use energy. David Richmond, a Waukegan-based colleague and sometime collaborator of Kidd and Porterfield, teaches it to contractors: “They say, ‘We’ve been building that way for 20 years,’ and I say, ‘Then you’ve been building wrong for 20 years.’ This is basic physics applied to buildings. You can build any way you want, but you can’t reverse gravity or the laws of thermodynamics and moisture.”
“Something can look leaky and not be, and something can look tight and not be,” says Kidd. “That’s our favorite slogan for our customers: stop guessing.”
Porterfield and Kidd would rather see developers stretch to meet the two main voluntary standards in the field: the federal Energy Star standard, developed in the early 90s by the EPA and the Department of Energy, and the professional Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program, administered by the U.S. Green Building Council, of which the two are members. For builders and energy consultants, these standards serve as checklists and benchmarks. For consumers lost in the jargon, they’re a seal of approval. Anyone interested in an allegedly green home that doesn’t have an Energy Star or LEED certificate had better ask the seller a lot of questions.
It educates, trains, and works with builders and home owners, and people who consult energy raters can get the program to pay part of the fee.
They’re pleased to see the changes. A few years ago they were trying to stop an epidemic of inefficiency one building at a time; now they can vaccinate before it hits. They used to be limited to proposing often costly retrofits; now they can make a building efficient in the most cost-effective way–before it’s built. (One example: insulation that costs 34 cents a square foot to install during construction will cost about five times as much to put in later.) If nothing else, working farther upstream in the construction process cuts down on the frustrations of seeing seemingly well-informed clients procrastinate and fall back into old habits.
