This is a novel idea:
What if the dollars spent on asthma and other respiratory/sinus issues are directed at residential indoor air quality? Imagine an asthmatic child who is an emergency room super-utilizer getting a prescription for a home performance retrofit from her doctor and her insurance provider paying for it. A typical day at the ER is around $1250. An asthmatic child will trigger once a month in the "right" conditions. That's $15000 in health care that does not help the child since she goes home to the same unhealthy environment. Let's spend that $15K on a whole house retrofit and remove the asthma triggers from her home.
This is proactive, preventative and long lasting health care that positively affects the whole family by reducing sick school days and missed income from medically related loss of work, not to mention overall improvement in productivity and quality of life. Oh, and by the way, reduced energy costs. ;-)
Friday, August 10, 2018
Thursday, August 2, 2018
2018 IRC - IECC
Of the built environment, a substantial
percentage is residential housing. Based on my experience testing many homes as
a HERS Rater, I know we have created a very unhealthy and inefficient housing
stock through the lack of sensible building standards. 2018 code offers an
excellent opportunity to resolve that problem. Not only does it address
effective standards for health, safety, durability and efficiency in new
construction, 2018 also address existing home retrofits by making renovations
also subject to these new standards.
Further, it seems unnecessarily complicated to have different standards for
Commercial and Residential structures when the building science is essentially
the same. Why force builders, trades, subcontractors and code inspectors to
learn, enforce and comply with 2 sets of rules?
There are (+-) 125,000,000 single family
homes in the US, the majority of them constructed without any building code.
Roughly ½ of the State of Tennessee has no building code. (See attached maps
link) The resultant health and infrastructure costs due to mold, rot, poor air
quality and resulting respiratory ailments is staggering. Homes retrofit to
2018 standards would reduce energy loads by 50% and cut recurring medical costs
for the life of the building, given reasonable upkeep.
In the world of building science, we are
very close to the path of diminishing returns, R values, fenestration, ducts
and mechanical equipment, air tightness levels and ventilation standards are at
a level that is affordable and technically achievable. I suggest a blanket
adoption of 2018 codes and a 6-9 year moratorium on code upgrades to give all
parties sufficient time to get it right.
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