CHiP Home Program

The CHiP Home Program is a flexible yet powerful way for building industry professionals to attain a high-performance certification on their projects. Each home must be built to the program and a third-party verifier must visit each home to check that the builder did what they said they would do, or the home will not… Continue reading Welcome Piedmont Home Energy to the CHiP Home Program!

With so many appliances constantly at work in your home, it is hard to know whether gas or electric is more efficient. You may not think about it when you are cooking your favorite meal or using your dryer, but there are certainly pros and cons to each option. If you are considering how to… Continue reading Gas or Electric? Eco-Friendly Appliances Examined

Ever wonder why your home has those persistently hot or cold rooms that seem impossible to cool down or heat up? The building science answer is Heat Transfer. Heat transfer in a home all boils down to the two laws of thermodynamics, which is an area of science that looks at the relationship between heat… Continue reading Technically Speaking: Principles of Heat Transfer

In his first two articles, Matt Anderson of BPI has discussed some diagnostics and summarized the “house-as-a-system” and home performance concept. In this article, he addresses the heart of the entire equation: home performance contractors. Since we have established that houses are complex and interact in ways you probably never thought about before, we can now harness this… Continue reading BPI Phrase of the Month: Home Performance Contractors

If we covered every suitable rooftop in the U.S. with solar panels, how much energy could we generate? The answer is pretty astounding: Enough to meet 39% of total demand, says a U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory report. The new report employs new methods and data to update NREL’s estimate of rooftop potential. Its previous… Continue reading Rooftop Solar Panels Could Supply A Really Huge Portion Of Our Electricity Needs

Every aspect of your house interacts with every other part. You close a door: you change the pressure in another room. Turn on an exhaust fan: you pull conditioned tempered air out of the house and it must be made up somewhere else… and it will be. The question is, from where? Air is lazy.… Continue reading BPI Phrase of the Month: Home Performance and “House as a System”

While contractors and others in the home performance industry know all there is to know about our technical language, we realize that homeowners might not! This post is from the BPI blog series – BPI Phrase of the Day, and it explains the Blower Door Test. Read the full article here: http://www.bpihomeowner.org/blog/bpi-phrase-day-blower-door-testing#sthash.rMu0w3wp.dpuf See videos from our… Continue reading What is a Blower Door Test?

So, you’re getting ready to build a new home.  There’s lots of decisions to make along the way, and many of them have to be made right at the beginning. The choice to make an environmentally-responsible and forward-thinking home is one you can make right now by building to the CHiP Home Program. Here’s how to… Continue reading Building to CHiP in 5 Steps

Washington, D.C. (October 22, 2015)—Homebuyers are not only increasingly interested in high-performance homes, or homes incorporating green features, but they are also willing to pay more for them, according to a new study released today by the Institute for Market Transformation (IMT) and the District of Columbia’s Department of Energy and Environment (DOEE). “What is… Continue reading New Report Finds Green Homes Sell for a Premium