Educational Resources For Energy Retrofitting Your Historic Home
There are many important factors to consider when giving your historic or vintage home an energy upgrade. Today, I’m speaking with Mark LaLiberte, an internationally-known building scientist and the co-founder and president of Construction Instruction, to learn about resources for those looking to retrofit their homes here in the Northwest. - Daniel Westbrook
What are some online resources people can use to learn what to look for?
There are a couple of places. The Department of Energy has a website that's called Building America Solution Center, which was put together with years of effort and is actually administered by the Pacific Northwest National Lab in Eastern Washington. You can do a lot of investigation there. You can also look at the EPA and the Energy Star Program—their Indoor airPLUS program tells people about indoor air quality. Both of these offer very good unbiased information that gives you the ability to be more educated when speaking with your contractor.
And how about hands-on resources for those that prefer to learn that way?
We've created a training facility in Phoenix called Ci Live where contractors can come for two days to teach building science. There’s also a company called the Building Science Corporation in Boston. On their website, they have a whole bunch of articles on historic restoration, renovation, and zero-energy retrofits on buildings. You can go read how they took a building in Boston and turned it into a net-zero building. You'll read what someone else did and say, "That's exactly what I'd like to do."
