Too many contractors default to easy, band-aid fixes. This leaves homeowners’ pockets lighter while they continue to struggle with home comfort, health, or energy efficiency issues.
Building science training leaves contractors better equipped to find and fix the underlying causes of your home’s problems. It creates a better process and results in higher quality work.
At All Things Good, our building science-training is one of our biggest differentiators. Here’s how our expertise benefits you.
How Building Science Training Changes the Process
Building science is the study of how homes perform as systems. Heat, air, and moisture interact constantly, and travel through a house in predictable ways.
As building science-trained contractors, we understand how heat flows through walls and roofs, how air moves in and out of a home, and how moisture behaves in different conditions. That knowledge shapes how we think about your home from the moment we pull up to it.
For most comfort, efficiency, and air quality problems, the cause isn’t always where the symptom shows up. A room that won’t stay warm might have more to do with air leaks in the attic than with the heating system itself. A building-science trained contractor understands how those forces work together and looks at the full picture before deciding what needs to be done. That’s what creates a more thorough process and work that actually addresses the root cause.
What This Looks Like in Your Home
The difference shows up in how a building-science trained contractor responds to the problems you describe.
For example, if your upstairs is always too hot in summer, we don’t just look at your AC. We investigate how heat is getting into that part of the house and where the cooled air is going. This involves a thorough check of multiple factors:
- Insulation levels in the attic
- How air moves through the house
- Whether the duct system is properly delivering cooling
A standard contractor might miss that any one of these factors (or often a combination of them) is really the issue. Our whole home expertise means we identify all contributing factors and account for them.
This comprehensive understanding leads to solutions that often go beyond just the equipment itself. Depending on your home’s actual needs, the work might include insulation and air sealing improvements and duct repairs in addition to heat pump upgrades or heat pump water heater installation. In some cases, this involves work across multiple systems; in others, it’s more targeted. Either way, the approach starts with a thorough home understanding and leads to lasting results.
What to Look For When Evaluating a Contractor
Building science training comes from a number of recognized programs and certifications. When you’re evaluating contractors, it’s worth asking directly whether they have this kind of training and how they typically assess a home before starting any work.
Good questions to ask:
- How do you evaluate a home before you start?
- What do you look for beyond the equipment itself?
- Do you have building science training or certification?
A contractor who takes this seriously will be comfortable answering all of them. They’ll be able to describe how they approach a home, what they look for, and why. That conversation, even before any work begins, tells you a lot about how thorough their process is likely to be.
At All Things Good, building science is a part of how we approach every East Bay home we work on. As a BPI Gold Star Contractor, we meet rigorous standards that verify our work meets the highest national standards in building science. If you’re looking for a contractor who takes a thorough, whole-home, all-electric approach, with a friendly team that respects your home and your time, we’re here to talk with you about your home.