Your Third Skin

 A house essentially acts as your third skin. The second skin is your clothing and the first skin is what you buy all those moisturizers for. Comfort and protection is the name of the game. Your own skin is excellent at this. Your clothing is not so bad and when it doesn’t work you can put on something else. Weirdly, to me, your third skin often does a miserable job at keeping you comfortable. The unfortunate thing is you’re willing to pay so much for it none the less.

Most houses are dysfunctional. This bad deal is brought to you by a housing industry that profits from building homes with the assumption that you don’t know better. They say they will give you oak floors, a big entrance and granite counters and you in return will ignore the larger point of owning one of their buildings; namely your well being and comfort. This is not the definition of a home, but rather a definition of a product. It seems a little crazy that we have trusted the housing industry for so long when what we really did was compromise our health and financial well being. They offered you “upgrades” because they did not want or could not offer you a sound and functional building.

Our recent winter-like weather attests that comfort is not usually easy or cheap. A good home is comfortable by providing us with moderate temperature swings, control of our environment, and abundant light and fresh air. This usually has been attempted not by good design, but by buttons and switches. The switches are connected to equipment often hashed together without the thought of how they will actually work with the house. You pay a lot for comfort but do you really get value?  Your comfort is based on a monthly, subsidized, complex and often poorly functioning bundle of building components. They battle each other like siblings over the last cookie. Your furnace may be too big and make the home’s temperature swing back and forth like a drunken bachelor. Maybe it’s because your home leaks so much air, or you put fancy pants windows where they have no good sense to be. Basements are basket cases in which all comfort is a theoretical notion. An older house means towels under the door, three more layers of threads, and hopefully a little less weather so you may be able to handle the emotion of opening this month’s heating bill.

So you get smart and hire a solar tube guy, insulation guy, furnace guy, ac guy, windows guy, or a solar electric guy. (My apologies to those who do their work well and thoughtfully. You are excused from the rest of this paragraph.) I want to talk about what I see in the field that each of these folks did for your comfort but achieved just the opposite. Solar tube guys need to insulate after they install.  They can make life miserable and uncomfortable by leaving a gaping hole in the thermal envelop. Insulation installers may be the most important person on the job because just a small oversight adds to years of problems. They may be also the lowest paid and the least trained. Furnace and ac guys ignore the duct work quality at their client’s peril. You don’t see it but you get to live with an out-of-whack system. One more thing, they need to read and use the Manual-J and stop over-sizing your equipment.  Some window replacers can smell a sucker a mile away and will put a new window on any problem. New windows look nice but do not often directly translate to comfort and energy savings.

Solar is an emotional purchase. How else do you explain a $30k system on a home that has an old furnace and refrigerator, gravity-vented water heater and little insulation? Our biggest embarrassment is that we deeply subsidize solar electricity which has the longest pay back, no added comfort, and simply feeds a greedy grid. I know, we are emotional beings, but I thought we wanted to save money too? I have seen too many expensive “feel good” mistakes that lead to higher bills, poor comfort, and shameless profits. My wife had a conversation with a solar installer who admitted as much. All the while your third skin is still in intensive care, feeding on gas lines, water lines and power lines.

What you need is a home that actually does what you pay it to do. Your hard earned dollars should reward you with a home that returns the favor by being healthy, comfortable, happy, and environmentally reasonable. I use the analogy of a car that needs repair. If it is leaking gas from the tank (air leaks) then don’t put a turbo charger in it first (solar). If you get poor mileage (utility bills) then don’t just start replacing equipment (windows), you need to get a diagnostic (energy audit). Seems simple but most home owners do not do this.

Before you go back to the returns aisle for a refund there is some good news. We now know why houses are so lousy and we can fix them. Many builders are not going to change their stripes so you cannot count on them, but what you can count on is a new industry of green builders, designers and consultants who are paving the way in shaping a third skin that can function almost as elegantly as your first skin. This is not easy stuff and is why it has been ignored for so long. The reason this newsletter is not full of all the joyous solutions that are available is twofold. First, if you have a problem the best step is to admit it, and second, each solution is based on the whole. We are not talking about swapping car parts, but rather improving the whole design.

Here is a solution. Baosol’s services are developed to make your house work as a home. We think past walls, in terms of systems, and a balanced and methodical approach. This new way of thinking about buildings is a response to the great opportunities that are now available to develop the home you want and not leave you with a host of unintended consequences. People usually call when the problems have already manifested, but we can help improve the building performance at multiple levels before you get to that point. A home is an essential component of a quality life, the aim is not just to reduce the house’s impact but improve its true function; a place that nurtures.

This effort is a long term goal, for you to be successful we have developed a consulting package that helps you get there.  It starts with an $80 Green Homes Audit and uses that as a template to take you step by step through the recommendations at your own pace. This can be the best investment you make if you are remodeling, having quality or comfort issues, or want to make your home an integral part of a sustainable society.  It’s not about the stuff, it’s about how all the stuff works together to make your house feel like home. I knew there would be some good news in this month’s newsletter.

To your comfort,

Andrew Michler, LEED AP

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