My friend Cathy is a yoga instructor who has studied the human body for decades. She works with clients to alleviate posture problems, aches and pains. Not long ago, she watched me walk across the living room and yelled out, "You didn't read your operating manual!"
"For what?" I asked.
"Your body." She said. "You've got more than 52 bones in your feet and you walk on them like they're planks." She's right. I treat my body like a beater car I picked up at the junk shop and won't mind running into the ground, because it was such a good deal. Cathy showed me how nuances in my step impacted my back and neck, explained all kinds of stuff about my hands and pressure points and ... lots more I didn't quite follow. She provided an extra dose of humiliation by asking me to perform routine balancing acts that the four children around us easily achieved, rolling around the floor with a book balanced on a foot and giggling when a copy of Horton Hears a Who attacked my head from an errant foot located somewhere near my butt. You get the idea. I promised her I'd try to do better. I also got to thinking about operating instructions, what we get them for, and what we don't.
Take my coffee maker, for example. Here's how it works. You take a filter, fill it with coffee, close it, fill the machine with water, and press go. The coffee maker cost $40.00. Coffee takes eight minutes to make. The instruction manual - in 6 different languages - is about 35 pages long. I read it. These days everything comes with a ton of instructions, warnings, cautions, you name it. Everything, that is, except our bodies and the biggest investment most of us will make: our houses. How could anything so important get handed to us without so much as a "By the way, there's mold in the basement."
A home energy auditor recently explained that he is accustomed to people not having very much information at all about their houses. Sometimes he pulls filters out of air filtration systems that are nearly blackened with sediment. When he shows the filter to homeowners they don't say, "Oh, I should have changed that." Instead, they say, "What is that thing?" When he told that story I winced, remembering ever so vaguely that when we bought this house, there was a filter of some kind in the basement. Why was it there? What did it belong to? Should it be replaced?
It's peculiar, our lack of understanding about our homes. Surveys of home owners consistently reveal that we are compelled to believe that our houses are safe, healthy, and reasonably efficient. If we are lucky, we are right. Chances are, we are off the mark. Consider this: the role of indoor air quality in childhood asthma is sufficiently curious to doctors that asthma guidelines for 2009 recommend house visits. Or this: carbon monoxide poisoning kills hundreds of people every year.
So what does home energy efficiency have to do with knowing your house? Everything. Whole House Home energy auditors have the tools to view your house as an integrated system. They are unlike any other trades person. Chances are that the person who fixes your furnace will pay precious little heed to your dryer or your chimney. An auditor will take into account where air flows, where it stops, where moisture goes, and where it gets trapped. An auditor is the instruction manual you never received. A Cathy, for your house.
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