Building Performance & Comfort is a full service building performance-consulting company. Our services include diagnosis, testing, remediation plans, training seminars and more. We welcome you to our web site and hope that you find our information and services useful in resolving your problems or answering your questions.

If you are like most people, you have never heard of "building science" or the "building performance industry." Both fields grew out of the tremendous amount of scientific research that has been done over the last fifteen years into how homes and buildings actually function. Most of this research has been conducted or at least funded by the U. S. Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Florida Solar and Energy Center and others.

The issues that spurred this search for the truth about our homes and buildings was the rapid increase in problems like the sick building syndrome. Other concerns arose at the same time like radon, the huge increases in energy costs, a doubling of childhood asthma and the strong public support for concepts like sustainable building and the health home movement.

A review of the research on which our codes and standard building practices we based would be funny if it were not so sad. Little or no building related research was conducted at all in most fields until recently. Therefore, our codes and practices did not account for differences in climate or materials. Since we did not routinely install central heating and cooling equipment until the last twenty years, its impact on how a building worked was unknown.

As is so often the way in life, we found our cherished assumptions about how the house/building system worked were very limited, simplistic and full of misconceptions and outright errors. What we assumed to be a "simple house or building" was shown to be a highly complicated and interactive system with cause and effect relationships that we never imagined.

This field is now known as building science. The application of this research to diagnose and solve or better yet, avoid performance-related problems forms the basis of the building performance industry. I find it challenging, exciting, powerful and a constant learning curve. I believe that you will find that all of the poorly performing buildings and homes you have known in you life can be diagnosed, explained and the failings solved with the right tools, testing protocols knowledge and remediation measures.

Welcome to the multi-disciplinary field of building performance and building science. To be really good in this field one must understand the building or house from the building materials to the insulation, from airflow to heating and cooling design, and much more. A wide range of very accurate testing equipment and knowledge of numerous testing procedures is also required. You will note when you review my experience and qualifications that I am a jack of all trades and a master of only a few. This gives me a great broad base on which to build a holistic understanding of an existing building or to design a family of systems that will function correctly together in a new structure.