The metrics that matter.
Your guiding hand in energy code compliance
The Home Energy Rating System—or HERS®—is the national standard for measuring a home’s energy efficiency. This comprehensive report on your home’s energy use is the key to unlocking potential savings, earning tax credits, and gaining eligibility for state and federal rebates.
Nantucket is one of more than 262 municipalities in Massachusetts that have adopted the performance-based Stretch Energy Code, requiring that all new homes meet a HERS® index rating target—the lower the better. The state’s current rating target is 55 for all electric and 52 for those with fossil fuel. We’re proud to be the island’s experienced hand in helping homeowners make the grade.
How we help you get there
The role we play in ensuring that your home meets the HERS® target is extensive, unfolding throughout its construction. Working hand-in-hand with your architect and builder, we serve as consultants at every stage, from its early design to the finishing touches.
Our ability to value-engineer your home starts with a whole-house overview. Using software that allows us to reference its massing and various surface areas, we determine which aspects of the plan will most benefit from specific energy-efficiency strategies.
Our work begins in the design phase and early phases of construction with a preliminary assessment, and continues when we return to verify our initial projections. Throughout this process we employ tools and administer tests which fall into four categories:
Performance Diagnostics The quality of your home’s ventilation and resistance to air leakage is central to energy efficiency and heavily weighted in your HERS® score. Our protocols include blower-door testing, infrared thermography, ductwork inspection and testing, and bath fans and other ventilation systems.
HVAC Analysis The efficiency of your home’s heating and cooling system plays a major role in the HERS® rating. We record and assess the efficiency of furnaces, air conditioners, ventilation systems, and combined systems like heat pumps—plus pipe insulation, hot water distribution, and the smart thermo-stats and control networks that tie it all together.
Appliances and Lighting Also factoring into your HERS® score are the type and efficiency of lights and so-called “minimum rated feature” appliances in your home—things like your oven, dishwasher, refrigerator, and washer and dryer. If necessary, an upgrade in just one of these areas can really move the needle. We help determine your best options.
Building Materials Rounding out the HERS® rating is a complete survey of your home’s structural components and their insulation values. From attic to foundation, this assessment includes everything from framing and roof-system specs to the solar heat gain coefficient (SHGC) of your windows.
Finally, the fun part. Data now in hand, we set to crunching the numbers with specialized HERS® index software, enabling us to mix and match areas of potential for improving that rating—at the lowest possible cost to you, the homeowner.
What more can we tell you about the HERS rating? A whole lot...try us.