Decades of Home-Performance Expertise Await You in Ohio – GreenBuildingAdvisor

Want to be known for your home-performance expertise? Or add to your building-science knowledge and skills? How about connect with others who do home-performance work? There’s one event that is hands down the best place to do those things. And that’s the National Home Performance Conference and Trade Show (NHPC), which is being held in Columbus, Ohio, this year April 13–16.

A couple of vicennials^†

Home performance began in the 1970s and gained momentum in the ’80s and ’90s. The blower door, infrared cameras, and other new tools led to huge gains in our knowledge of how buildings work. It began with the discovery of the thermal bypass by researchers at Princeton University. Then it was the importance of duct leakage and how mechanical systems could interact with other things happening in homes. That led to MAD AIR and zonal pressure diagnostics.

This conference started up in 1986, two vicennials ago (a bivicennial?), as people all over North America were discovering these things. It was THE event to attend just to keep up with all the new stuff going on. Then you could take what you learned back home and help your customers with their home-performance problems. That’s how you develop home-performance expertise.

I first attended this conference back in 2005 at the end of the first vicennial. I had just gotten into the home-performance business a year earlier with my first company (ab3 energy). I was hungry to learn more about home performance and more about the business side of it. I left getting more for my money than I had dreamed possible.

With two vicennials of annual conferences, NHPC is the longest-running, industry-wide event focused on home performance and energy efficiency.

So much learning!

This event is great in so many ways. It brings together people who work in home-performance contracting, low-income weatherization, manufacturing, building-science research, energy-efficiency programs, training, and more. All of these different subsets of the home-performance world interact with and learn from each other.

Then there are the many great sessions. Look at the tracks and presentations at the NHPC website and you’ll see what I mean. Here’s an example: The Nest thermostat was introduced in 2011. Longtime NHPC participant Michael Blasnik consulted on the project and then went to work for Google after the company bought Nest. At the 2015 conference, he gave the world a first glimpse of some of the Nest data he’d been analyzing.

Whatever your interests and whatever home-performance questions you have, you’re likely to find a session that will help you get answers. The amount of home-performance expertise at this conference is astounding. Some of that expertise resides in the folks who’ve been there since the beginning. Many still come to the conference, but that number diminishes a bit each year.

And fun too!

I’ve met some amazing people at this conference and have had a lot of fun too. And if you stay up too late, you might end up having overtime fun, as the folks below did. That kind of fun doesn’t happen every year, though, because not every place is like New Orleans, where you can find a costume shop open after midnight.

But it’s not just late-night partying that makes NHPC fun. You’ll get a chance to meet some of the big names in this field—people whose books you’ve read or whose presentations you’ve watched online—and I think you’ll find them to be friendly, down-to-earth folks who love sharing their passion for home performance with others. A few of those names are Dick Kornbluth, Linda Wigington, Sam Rashkin, Marcy Cleveland, and Brynn Cooksey.

One of the things that makes this conference different from many others is that it is always held downtown. The organizers don’t choose a venue just because it’s near the airport or has lots of parking. They put it where you can really see the city.

My sessions

I certainly have my work cut out for me this year because I’m doing five presentations. I’m doing three of them with other presenters and two solo, and they cover most of my favorite topics:

• What the Duct?! Air Flow and Heat Transfer in Ducts, with Marcus Bianchi, PhD
• A Case of the Vapors: Humidity Control for Comfort and Health, with Nikki Krueger
• Ductless Heat Pumps: Design, Installation, Maintenance, with Eric Kaiser
• Hot Water Is a System, Not Just a Water Heater
• 7 Steps to Good Indoor Air Quality

You can find days, times, and full descriptions by looking for me in the NHPC list of speakers. If this is the kind of stuff you’re looking to learn about, I hope to see you there.

New focus and incentives

NHPC is looking to bring in more people from the market-rate home-performance world. The balance of sessions has tilted a bit more that way this year. And they’re offering a special registration deal of $820 per person for companies that bring four or more of their team members to NHPC in Columbus.

You may think the conference is too expensive, but ask yourself where you want to be in another vicennial. If you want to be seen as a leader, a well of home-performance expertise, NHPC can get you there. In 20 years you’ll be the one writing articles or making videos about it and doing five presentations. Plus, they provide breakfast all four days of the conference and lunch on two.

What are you waiting for? Get over there and register!

^† A vicennial is a period of 20 years, or two decades.

Allison A. Bailes III, PhD is a speaker, writer, building science consultant, and the founder of Energy Vanguard in Decatur, Georgia. He has a doctorate in physics and is the author of a bestselling book on building science. He also writes the Energy Vanguard Blog. For more updates, you can follow Allison on LinkedIn and subscribe to Energy Vanguard’s weekly newsletter and YouTube channel.