I am not one who gets very excited about trade shows. Mainly because most of the time the information the product representative is telling me I already know due to my own research. So typically I just walk on through and stop at the booths that have something I have not seen before or new company that I have not heard of. However, when I leave the trade show I felt as I at least learned a couple of things and found some new and interesting products.
However year after year my wife and I torture ourselves and attend the local home and garden show. Now if you want to experience high pressure sales and be steered into the cheapest way to do things, you must attend a home and garden show. Now don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of good home builders and remodeling contractors out there, but I seriously doubt you will find one at one of these shows. Because the good ones out there don’t need to attend because they get work through referrals.
With the exception of a new home energy auditing company and few insulation contractors, I couldn’t even tell you the headache I had after I left. So many of us out there are trying to do good quality work and try and reduce our footprint on this earth. But I couldn’t believe a conversation that I had with a remodeling contractor. I asked if they had any experience installing fiber cement siding over 2-4 inches of foam. Now I will give you a second to think about what his response was……. They actually remove the foam board insulation. Can you freaking believe it?! My wife walked away when she saw my jaw drop. I mean seriously? So we hopefully improved the look of the home, but we just removed at least 20% of the wall insulation and increased the home owners utility bills. He continued the conversation that if you install the siding over furring strips, the siding will snap. So I politely took his business card and told my wife, this goes in the do not hire pile.
So where does it start? Do we continue our efforts and try and educate the home owner or do we need push harder to get people in our industry on board and bring them up to date on today’s building practices?
The third week was the first of solo audits. Expecting new employees to take a little bit longer at first as they get use to what is expected in an audit, as well as the program, our first week consisted of one audit a day to get our time down to 4 hours to conduct the audit. The audit includes everything in a full comprehensive BPI audit as well as a report generated at the customers house and discuss it with them. Let me tell you that first week was a trial by fire. All the homes I audited my first week ranged anywhere from 1,500 to 4,000 square feet and all were built anywhere between 1910 and 1960, all with older systems and little to no insulation. Most were very complicated houses. So let’s just say my first week of audits was taking 5-6 hours to complete. So I was getting nervous by the end of the week knowing that the next week I would be doing two audits a day.
Thankfully by the beginning of the fourth week something just clicked. And that is when they started to fail. Water heaters were failing the worst case draft testing left and right. A few were not even drafting is quite conditions. Now with some of these larger homes that have multiple exhaust fans, it is my opinion that we are creating un-natural conditions that the home owner would never create. However that is the BPI standard that we work by, to turn on all exhaust fans to create the greatest negative pressure in the home.
