>> Coming up on "Home Diagnosis."

>> Homeowners, like Ava, often think that the problems are something that they aren't.

>> It's so cold here, but if I jack up the heat, it's hot everywhere else.

>> The windows are actually sweating.

>> I mean, we just may have to get new windows.

>> That looks like there's not even insulation right there.

>> We can assume that all of them are leaking.

>> Oh, wow.

>> We renovated this.

>> And when you get a renovation, it's not a 100% guarantee that it's actually awesome.

>> That is a problem.

That kills me.

This whole room is really gonna tell a story.

[ music ] >> Welcome to "Home Diagnosis."

>> A lot of people are afraid that when they buy a renovation, it's going to be all lipstick and not holistic.

>> Luckily, you don't have to worry.

There are tools and techniques to test and find out what to do in those cases.

>> In Chicago, we found a beautiful renovation that exemplified a lot of these problems, but also created a lot of opportunity.

>> Hi, I'm Corbett.

>> And I'm Grace.

>> Since we met, we've been partners in everything.

>> In work, in life, and in love.

>> Fast forward to now, we've created careers in home testing, building science... >> And started a family.

>> We also built the Tiny Lab.

>> To get people thinking about their home's problems dynamically.

>> We use scientific testing to diagnose a house's problems.

>> Because more than comfort, energy, or safety, it's about gaining control of your home.

>> And with two cats, two kids, and two hundred square feet-- >> We know this intimately.

Wow, it's a beautiful house.

>> On tour, we have home owners reach out to us because they know that we're coming and can help them with their problems.

Ava reached out to us because she had problems with her newly renovated, remodeled home.

>> Love the copper gutters.

Ava lives in a really nice part of northern Chicago and she's got a family with kids, and when you get a renovation, it's not a 100% guarantee that it's actually awesome.

>> All right, so some into the kitchen because that's where I'm having my major problem.

As beautiful as it is, it gets so cold.

I mean, even when there's steam coming in my face from the spaghetti and what not, it's so cold here.

But if I jack up the heat, it's hot everywhere else.

That is a problem and we did all of these beautiful restorations, as you can see.

>> Performance really is all about tuning a home.

So the home owners who feel like their house might be out of tune, feel like the air is stuffy, or feels bad, or there might be moisture problems or comfort.

You have to put on a sweater to go into this room or, you know, take off clothes to go into that room.

And essentially, what we're trying to do is make sure that everything in the home works exactly the way that you want it to.

Not just the inventory of what's statically there when you look at it, but also the invisible dynamics behind everything.

>> Starting about a month ago, the window's started fogging up.

And I don't know what that has to do with because just last year, we got a brand new furnace and a new air conditioner so... >> The windows are actually sweating.

>> You know, I'm a little worried about that because as beautiful as the windows are, I really wanted to keep those old windows intact.

>> Yeah, I can see almost in the corner there's a little bit of condensation still.

>> I mean, we just may have to get new windows.

>> We hear that a lot, all over the States, and I'm glad you didn't replace them before you called us, because generally it's actually not the windows.

>> Homeowners, like Ava, often think that the problems are something that they aren't.

For example, she felt that the windows might be causing some of these big moisture problems and comfort issues.

>> Which becomes an issue for window professionals because they might get blamed for something that's a system problem.

>> All right, so let's go to the bedroom.

>> We'll go upstairs, why don't we?

Oh, wow.

Corbett, do you feel it?

>> Yeah, it's a temperature change, right here.

>> Of yeah, if you were hot.

>> Now you're cold.

>> Now you're cold, exactly.

>> Okay.

>> All right, now this is momma's room.

It used to be the attic, but we built it so that my mom could stay in a nice comfortable place.

>> It's cute.

>> Uh, yes.

It's a great concept, but unfortunately, I can not get a comfortable temperature in here.

We renovated this.

I mean, we have done all of this work to the entire house.

>> Great.

It's really cute.

Um, magical tiny room.

This remodeled home in Chicago is beautiful.

There's multiple floors, gables, bump outs.

>> But the more pretty stuff, and the prettier the shape of the house, the more there might be hiding inside of the structure and luckily, you can't hide anything in construction anymore.

There are tools and techniques for finding out exactly what happened in any renovation or home build so that we can absolutely pinpoint the problem and then prescribe specific steps to actually solve them.

>> This adjoins to the attic.

But you can feel it, if you want to come over here.

You can actually feel that it's cold.

>> Uh-huh.

Cute room.

You did a good job.

>> Thank you, I appreciate that.

>> Yeah, well, you should definitely be comfortable in it.

We will prescribe the right prescription to make this comfortable.

>> Okay.

That would be fantastic.

>> Yeah.

> So we'll run the testing and we'll be able to talk with you in about an hour or two when we've got all of the information.

>> Yeah, I think this whole room is really gonna tell a story.

>> That sounds good.

>> All right.

>> It's a plan.

>> Ava's home had a couple specific problems.

First, her windows were giving her concern because there was moisture gathering on them.

>> She had a comfort problems in the kitchen, she had a comfort problems in the mother-in-law suite upstairs, and what's interesting about all of that is the home is, like we said, so sprawling and big, but also it's tall.

This is a four story home.

So we've got that mother-in-law suite on the very top floor connected with this side attic.

On the upper floor, we've got the bedroom, which is a little cold.

On the first floor, we have the kitchen, having comfort problems.

In the basement, we've got the HVAC system heart located there and so we're going to want to test that, too.

>> Most homes are going to put up with at least two seasons.

Heating season and cooling season.

And in either one of those, you're creating a rising or a falling of air because warm air rises and cool air sinks.

So in the summer time, you're going to have all this cool air coming down and getting out of the house, pressing against the bottom of the house.

At which point, the house creates a vacuum at the top.

And then in the winter months, in the bottom of the house, you're gonna have that same vacuum created when all the warm air is trying to get out of the top.

And then additionally, the entire home as a system, needs to be tested.

>> So the short of it, was this house had problems on every single level, which is why you want to do the dynamic, holistic testing to really identify your source.

All right.

So right here, what this is, it's a combustible gas sniffer and the important thing here is we want to make sure there's no gas leaking and this thing would start screaming if there was gas leaking from any of these joints, which it's not so that's a good thing.

>> We've also got a combustion analysis going on so we can tell how much carbon monoxide is coming from the system, and what the efficiencies of combustion, all that stuff is.

Monitoring some temperatures and some pressures and we're also going to be able to do a duct leakage test here so to see how much air that is being pumped into the ducts is actually coming out not where we want it to.

So we can tell that there's some duct leakage in the system, but that doesn't necessarily tell us anything about the design of it, so I think that we're going to want to see... this is a five ton air conditioner, and this duct is teeny tiny and so I'm just...

I don't think that's built right.

Even when you've tested hundreds of homes, you still have to do the test to actually know what's going on because it will surprise you.

And generally we always some up with about three big things that are going to cause the performance problems for most people.

>> Yeah, the three big things that cause performance problems are air tightness, insulation, and HVAC.

>> That's what we expected to see with this home, and that is in fact what we found.

So now we're testing for duct leakage and we want to know that all of the air that we're sending into the system is actually coming out where we want it to.

So I'm going to throw some fog into this baby and see what happens.

>> What Corbett's doing right now, is he's using a theatrical fogger to create fog to go up into the duct system and see if we have any leakage.

And we're already seeing a little bit of a haze up there so we do know that some of the ducts are leaking.

>> This is not an energy efficiency problem.

This is where you'll have somebody say, the ducts don't need to be sealed, their all inside the house.

If ducts leak inside the house, it's the same as plumbing leaking.

It's plumbing for air.

So if it's leaking out inside the walls and floors and not getting to the bedrooms where it belongs, that's not better.

>> I have to ask you a question.

Are we going to have to replace this?

>> I think the leak is the only thing keeping this thing running at all because the furnace is so big.

>> But then they put a duct work that's too small onto this furnace.

>> Right.

And the duct work could actually stay, I think, the duct work can stay, the furnace can go.

>> That kills me.

I hate that.

I think our first reactions when we saw Ava's home was that's beautiful.

It's a really gorgeous home.

>> And following on the heels of that, is always, uh-oh.

Because the more shapes there are stacked on top of each other, the more ginger bread-y or Victorian a house looks, the more hidden spaces there are going to be, and therefore the more interactions that might not be intended there are going to be between the heat bleed and the air flow, and pressure, and moisture, and air quality in the home to create these performance untunings.

>> It's a lot like an orchestra, right?

The more instruments you put there, the more fine tuned they all have to be to make the song good.

It's not just one person singing and a guitar.

That's easy to tune, right?

But a whole orchestra, you have to take a little bit more time to test and really understand the dynamics.

>> We're not gonna make it.

So we go to ring A instead.

>> Okay.

Switching to ring A.

>> So this is the blower door.

It is the most important tool to use on any home.

This is the center piece of our tool kit.

Essentially what it does is move air from once place to another.

We're moving air from the house to outside.

So we started out expecting to only move that much air, but it turned out that we needed to remove this ring and move more air and finally move as much air as this fan could possibly move.

In the meantime, while we're moving the air, and that's that the loud sound is, we're monitoring it with this tiny computer which is called a manometer.

So this is measuring the pressure in the house and the flow through the fan and it can do all kinds of calculations and things like that.

Super cool.

So this is, kind of, uh, one of the sexy pieces of gear that we use to help diagnose homes.

[ whirring ] Yeah, baby.

>> Yeah, it's kicking out.

>> So the blower door is essentially a scientifically calibrated fan that we use to test the overall air leakage as just one giant number.

So if you were to add up all of the gaps and cracks in the house into one big hole, we can know exactly how big that hole is.

That's measured in CFM, cubic feet per minute.

We can also test in the square inches of hole size and we can do things like test how many times per hour all of the air in the house is being exchanged when we run the test.

>> So at 4400, we're seeing eight air changes per hour.

>> Right and we want it to be five instead, which would mean that all of the air in the house gets replaced five times if we were to run this for a full hour.

>> Got it.

So we're going to go grab the thermal camera and find the air leakage now.

>> Bingo.

>> All right.

Let's go.

>> All right, so we got the infrared camera.

We're going to figure out where we're having these issues that we made on our crunch list.

>> To address the comfort issue that she was also having up in the bedroom.

>> Exactly, yeah.

So, and the garage is right next to this so we're seeing a little bit of air leakage right there.

>> Typical leakage from the corner.

>> Right there, yeah, Where it's colder.

>> The blower door has just run for a good long time so now we're go the air in all of these cavities.

>> Right, so we've activated all of the dynamic stuff and all that.

>> So right there, we can see some air leakage coming into the inside of that wall.

>> Yeah.

>> Where you couldn't see it necessarily.

There is a little bit of something going on.

We could use the moisture meter on that, too.

>> Oh my gosh.

That looks like there's not even insulation right there.

>> Right here, there's a whole big missing, uninsulated, unair-sealed section right there.

>> That's plain as day.

And look at that light.

>> You see this signature on the recessed light?

>> Yeah, why are the can lights, which are normally circular, showing up as a square?

>> Right, and that's because they didn't insulate around them.

Which tells us, just forensics wise, that light fixture that's recessed up into the ceiling is not air tight and they were all installed at the same time during the renovation.

We can assume that all of them are leaking, so they'll have air leakage through them all the time.

And up on the top floor, what that means, we've got that major issue with comfort.

>> And now we're thinking, quite possibly, all these brand new cans that could have been in contact with insulation, aren't.

So we've got air leaking straight out of the attic.

>> Which is causing a draft, some of the comfort problems that she thinks is either windows, or the air conditioning, or the furnace.

>> And which is also why the condensation's gonna be happening.

>> Yeah.

>> Okay.

>> In a lot of homes, recessed lighting is easy because you can put it exactly where you want it and get it right over a picture or couch or whatever.

But the problem is, there are two different kinds of recessed lights.

There are ones that can be put in contact with insulation and there are ones that cannot touch insulation.

>> Recessed lights are especially a problem in renovations, because everybody loves recessed lighting.

We don't want to see stuff.

That's the same reason people try to put things into soffits so that they don't have exposed duct work.

Things like that.

So every time you are trying to hide something, it-- there's a trade off, right.

You can't get everything you want without any side effects.

So the recessed lighting side effect is air leakage and insulation issues, generally, unless you pay attention to this and plan for it from the get go.

>> And then you can get what you want.

>> So yeah, you can see it along the wall, too, there's just a little bit.

I'm going to check it out a little bit further from that angle.

>> Definitely.

So what Corbett's doing is after we ran the blower door, we actually put a 20 mile per hour wind on every single side of the house basically to push the warm air in against the cold air, which lights up the thermography camera.

So we can see that right there, there's a whole missing batt of insulation and over on this side, we have that whole full square which is going to cause a lot of air leakage up into the bedroom that she was complaining about.

These are those simple things.

This is a renovation, and it should have been fixed the first time.

>> What the metrics showed us is that the contractor's thought that Ava wanted exactly what every body else wants.

Cheap, fast, and easy.

And that's not really what everybody wants, especially when you're buying a multi- million dollar home.

You want it done right, and you want to make sure that it's proven to work.

>> All right.

So mark down 60.1 CFM and 52.2 degree wet bulb and 57.4 degree dry bulb.

>> And what does dry bulb mean?

>> So the dry bulb and the wet bulb gives us how many BTUs basically are in this thing 'cause air conditioning delivers both dryness and coldness.

Since the system was ideally designed to deliver a certain number of BTUs out of this register, we can know, on the back end, exactly how many BTUs are actually coming out of this because we've got that exposed ceiling and that window right there so that is evening out these losses right here, so if that is delivering what it's supposed to, then it evens these out perfectly, and the rooms stays completely comfortable without you doing anything at all.

>> So we are technically in an old attic, right?

>> Yeah.

This used to be the attic and then they finished it and what we want to know whether they "finished it, finished it" or whether they kind of finished it and then covered up a bunch of stuff.

All right.

>> Cool.

>> Let's do it.

>> All right.

So looking for the moisture detector in the tiny attic and you really learn to walk like this.

I can spend a lot of my life like this.

>> Home performance problems can also have detrimental effects on your health.

>> We have the mother-in-law suite that is connected with this attic with an interior door.

Now, one thing is you should be careful about any bedroom that is connected with one of these buffer spaces.

These hidden spaces, attics, crawl spaces, garages.

>> You spend a lot of time in that bedroom.

>> You sure do.

And also the person who is spending time in this bedroom, in this case, is an older person.

>> Whose immune system is not as strong and healthy as a 25 year old.

>> Exactly.

The respiratory system, the immune system, everything about this person is not what you would expect from a 35 year old fit athlete, which is what we expect a lot of people to be doing.

So we're putting kids in these rooms, we're putting older people, our parents in these rooms.

We want to make sure that their systems, which are already potentially comprised from other illnesses, are not gonna be exacerbated by these problems we're introducing in our own homes.

>> Ah, you found your favorite room?

>> Yeah, good stuff.

>> All right.

>> So I'm not picking anything up, really.

It's worrisome what this can see.

>> What about where the PVC pipes are exiting the roof?

>> Yeah, that's-that's an air leakage problem for sure.

>> Would we be having any moisture issues over here with the flex stuff?

>> Where it goes up into the attic for sure.

>> Yeah, that's my concern, right there.

Where... and there's a big chunk of dry wall that's cut.

>> Yeah, I don't know what that is.

>> Yeah.

And they should've cut a circle for duct work versus a rectangle but that's any easy fix.

>> That's true.

So what we're looking for up here is we had some moisture problems and the homeowner thought that it was a roof leak.

And a lot of times it's actually not a roof leak at all so we want to know for a fact whether the moisture is coming from outside in or whether it's generated from hot, moist air coming in contact with cold things and we have a giant air conditioning system up here so this is a perfect place where condensation could create little water problems that masquerade as roof leaks and they're actually not.

Yeah, we definitely have got puddling of moisture-- >> Right over there by that duct work.

>> So yeah, it's definitely where the insulation has been pulled away from the duct work.

It's not anything to do with the roof at all, at least in this section over here.

So we'll check the rest of it just to make sure.

>> Why is the insulation pulled away from the duct work?

Do you think that happened when they just were installing and weren't looking carefully?

>> Who comes up here?

>> Everyone except the homeowner.

>> So, what's really wacky about this, though, is we found through pressure testing that that room, which is an attic room and it's really not super clean, is totally inside the house.

It's as inside the house as this bedroom that we're in right now.

So if there's a room that's that filthy inside your house, are you worried about it?

Yeah you should be worried about it.

The problem is that since the insulation is hidden, you're not really aware of whether it's in the floor, which means that that's an outside room, or in the ceiling, which means it's inside, and it's totally in the ceiling.

So the issue is now, are the rooms in your house inside or outside and you want all of them to be either/or.

>> And the only thing blocking that room from this bedroom, is this tiny little door.

So you're breathing this in at night.

Kids develop allergies easily from those dust mites.

It's not a good situation.

>> Welcome to the Tiny Lab, the world's highest performing tiny house on wheels and the home of the Proof is Possible Tour.

Let me take you inside.

>> Some people think you can't have perfect control over home performance.

We designed and built the Tiny Lab to prove that that's wrong.

Now I'll remind you that we have never designed or built a house before, so anybody who has done a bunch of times can do a better job than we can.

This house is the 4-3-2-1 home performance thinking brought to life into physical form.

>> The Tiny Lab is 30 feet long tip to tail, and unlike a lot of tiny houses that you'll see on other TV shows, this one is built to tour.

>> It comes back to the engineering and thinking it through with home performance.

>> This cork floor was selected not only for aesthetic beauty, but also because of sound dampening.

We wanted a house to be quiet because essentially what we've built here is a box.

Now, upstairs, you can see the conditioning of the house.

Heating and cooling, very important.

This is called a ductless mini split.

It has no ducts.

The ducts as you'll see in most of the episodes of House Diagnosis are kind of a big issue for a lot of people because they have to be designed properly, they have to be installed properly, they have to be sealed, they have to be matched to the heating and cooling equipment.

If you get rid of the ducts, you get rid of a lot of the potential problems that you have.

So this thing is perfectly quiet.

It even has an infrared camera that is scanning the room at all times and sending the cool air or the warm air to where it's needed most.

>> So as far as lighting goes, you'll see in a lot of the "Home Diagnosis" tests that we're doing, that recessed lighting is an issue.

It's basically little holes in the most important plane of your house, which is the top floor ceiling.

In this case, we have lighting that could be thought of as recessed.

We've built out these soffits, which are basically little kind of cavities that contain them.

That means that I actually have the full depth of insulation in my roof, and I don't have holes in my air ceiling barrier.

I also did not put any electrical wiring or plumbing inside the walls of the exterior.

That's because the walls are built to contain all of the stuff I want inside my house and to keep out all the stuff that I don't in there, so I'm not using them to run a bunch of other things.

Also, as far as lighting goes, LEDs don't create a lot of heat, which is a big thing.

Energy efficiency is a thing.

This whole entire house can be plugged into one outlet in your house.

So this house is designed to be just a grown up version of every house in America so that the performance can be controlled.

>> When we got to Ava's home, we learned that she had some comfort issues and some moisture concerns.

>> So we approached it like we always do with testing first because we want to know what's going on in the home as a system.

So we used the blower door, we used zonal pressure testing, we used the infrared camera, we tested the HVAC with the combustion analyzer and the duct tightness tester, and even ran the theatrical fogger to actually see with our own eyes what was going on.

>> And we used all these tools and techniques to give Ava her own home diagnosis so that now she can have a prescribed solution and know exactly what to do to make her home awesome.

>> Okay, so first off, we have solved your problem.

What we found is two fold.

So one is that you've got some air, ceiling, and insulation issues that will need to be fixed.

And the second thing that's really important to understand is that there's a secret that very few people even in the industry understand, and that's that bigger equipment doesn't always mean the better.

>> And what Corbett means by that is we found that your new furnace and AC is actually twice the size that it needs to be.

>> We're going to prescribe air sealing and some insulation work in the attic.

>> Basically air sealing is kind of like a wind breaker, right?

If you're wearing a sweater, that's fine.

It's going to keep you cozy, but if you step outside that wind's going to come right through it.

Same thing is happening in your attic.

>> And you definitely have wind effects, it's the house's dynamic rate, so the pressure is pushing on things.

>> The air sealing, like a wind breaker, will actually make the insulation work better.

Just like it would make a sweater make you more cozy, if you got that air sealing on it.

>> So good news, though, big picture.

You do not need new windows.

You have saved tens of thousands of dollars.

>> Oh, tens of thousands of dollars, okay.

That is great news.

I love that.

>> So basically we're going to take a team of professionals who know this stuff works up into the attic and we're going take some of the insulation out and air seal back behind that which should have happened at the get go.

>> Finally, we are going to get rid of that furnace, and give you a brand new one that's half the size.

So it doesn't fit your duct work, it never goes through a full cycle, and that's why you're seeing this condensation on the windows.

>> Why?

I just got that last year.

>> Yeah, it's twice as big as it needs to be for the duct work and for the house.

So when we put the new equipment in there it actually fits the house, it's tailored for the house so it's tuned to everything.

So now you can have the quality of life that you actually want to have in every single room of the house.

>> That's awesome.

And Mama's going to be happy.

>> If you're thinking of buying new home or a renovation like Ava, you'll probably work with an inspector, but always be sure to work with a home performance professional so you get the dynamic testing you're looking for so you can have the performance you want, the offer you need, and the comfort you desire.

[ music ] >> "Home Diagnosis" is made possible by CPS products, provider of indoor air quality products and test tools.

Flir, maker of infrared thermal cameras for homeowners and building professionals.

And by Hayward Score and Healthy Indoors Magazine.

And by generous support from these underwriters.

And by viewers like you.

Thank you.

"Home Diagnosis" is all about education.

>> Learn more about your own home's performance with our new online course for homeowners, and our Proof is Possible booklet.

You can find both at homediagnosis.tv.