From energy audits to full-service home performance contracting, we offer a range of services to help you start making your home more comfortable, more affordable, and more environmentally friendly, today.
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Full Service Home Building and Remodeling:
First and foremost, we’re a full service building firm servicing the greater Portland, Maine region. Though based in Portland, much of our work is conducted on the islands of Casco Bay, which we believe has buttressed our business ethic in a unique and positive way: when you're working on an island, it's a prerequisite to survival as much as a business decision to maintain good relationships with clients and trade allies. Islands also impose unique challenges in terms of wind, moisture, and building durability, which has helped to make us the home performance sticklers that we are. While we’ll take on the occasional ground-up new construction project, we specialize in large scale renovations of existing buildings, which we undertake with the utmost respect for the building’s preexisting components and character. And our dedication to quality and craftsmanship is reflected in our happy and loyal client base: most of our clients wind up as return customers, and many wind up as good friends.
Home Performance and Energy Efficiency Retrofits:
Home performance contracting includes looking at everything from lighting to insulation, from the boiler in your basement to the air sealing in your attic, to solve everything from moisture problems to energy waste and beyond. A relatively new field grown out of an increased awareness of the need to address the poor performance of our existing homes, the goal of HP contracting is to fix them. We do so by maximizing energy efficiency and building durability, ensuring the healthiest possible indoor air quality, and evaluating the relationships between your home’s various components to ensure that they’re all functioning as they were designed to. The result is a home that is more durable, more comfortable, more energy efficient and better for the environment and future generations—exactly how a home should be.
Home Energy Audits and Diagnostic Testing:
Chances are, you're spending much more on utility bills than you need to be. A home energy audit gives you the opportunity to fix that. Using the latest technology, including a blower door to assess air leakage and infrared thermography, a comprehensive home energy audit will point out leaks in your home's thermal envelope, deficiencies in insulation, and other opportunities to stop heat loss and reduce energy consumption, while improving the comfort and safety of your home. In addition to recommending fixes to reduce energy, we'll also evaluate carbon monoxide safety, mold and other air quality isssues and improvements to temperature and lighting comfort. Our comprehensive audit report will include a prioritized list of potential improvements, and an estimate of the savings our recommended work will likely lead to. While the company’s focus is remodeling and retrofits, we’re one of Maine’s largest providers of home energy audits, and have a team of certified energy auditors dedicated exclusively to auditing and diagnostic services. Our home energy audit includes, but is not limited to:
Blower Door Testing: Blower door testing is a way to test the "leakiness" of your home. By depressurizing your home and measuring the rate at which air infiltrates through imperfections in the building envelope, we're able to assess how much energy (and money) is escaping through air leaks, and how much you're likely to save by fixing those leaks. As part of this process, we will inspect the house with a vapor stick to pinpoint potentially hidden air leaks (making it much easier to address them when the time comes to get to work). We also offer blower door testing as an isolated service to test the effectiveness of improvements that have been made to a home, and to provide homeowners and contractors with a roadmap to further improve a home's efficiency moving forward.
Infrared Diagnostics: Having your home evaluated with an infrared scanner sheds valuable light on the effectiveness of your home's thermal envelope. An infrared scanner reveals hidden air leaks and areas where insulation isn't performing, and can also yield some interesting surprises -- such as where an uninsulated hot water pipe or recessed lights may be contributing to an ice dam, for an example. It's a valuable part of any good home energy audit, and a step that we guarantee to take with thoroughness and precision (although our experience tells us that it can also be a fun part of the energy audit for homeowners).
