This report is an interim report by Home Innovation Research Labs regarding their quality management activities for new high performance homes from January 2010 through June 2010. It is a summary and an overview of four full individual reports included in the Appendices. The report includes Home Innovation Research Labs’s current quality research products for new home construction.
Historically, the focus of the Building America (BA) program has been the “technical best practices” – specifications, general design and engineering strategies, and construction techniques, that, when implemented properly, lead to high performance homes. As the BA program matured, it became evident that many operational aspects of a building company must be aligned to consistently deliver high‐performance homes on a production scale. This, in turn, led to the development of a five‐year plan to merge high‐performance technical specifications with effective quality management systems (QMS) and resources, customized to the specific needs of high performance home construction. The current quality research agenda within BA is designed to support builders’ and remodelers’ efforts to effectively and efficiently meet the BA energy performance targets.