Quality Assurance Activities for New Homes

Published Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Introduction to Quality Research for New Homes

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.

Background of Quality Research in Building America

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.

Appendix A: The Economics of Quality

With high performance homes, energy performance and cost savings are quantifiable. Energy performance in the Building America program is estimated in the design phase using energy simulations and verified through testing and monitoring. In addition the economic cost benefits of energy efficiency for both the builder and ultimately the homeowner are also quantifiable. One Building America goal is that for each high performance home the amortized costs of energy efficiency upgrades is less than that of the monthly utility bill savings. The result is a home that is more energy efficient and is cost effective for a homeowner to buy and operate.

To ensure that the homes are built as designed to achieve optimal energy savings, a builder’s quality control and assurance processes are necessary. There are economic costs to a builder for quality management including the costs for prevention, appraisal, and the cost of failure that can directly affect the economics of energy efficiency upgrades in a high performance home. An effective quality management system should create efficiencies and related savings that are greater than the investments in the quality activities required to achieve the savings. However, the costs of quality are difficult to measure due to the fact that the performance metrics have not been fully defined and are often not effectively utilized by builders.

The goal of this paper is to detail the value of quality management in general as well as specifically to new home construction and high performance homes. Therefore, the paper outlines the economics of quality including the cost of quality which breaks down the impact of quality into its component parts, its value, its impact in the construction industry, and its value for high performance homebuilders. In addition, it lays out recommended tools and techniques for the introduction of quality management and the monitoring of its impact based on metrics. Those builders using these tools and techniques have seen dramatic improvements in energy and quality performance, profitability, and customer satisfaction.

Appendix B: A Case Study of Veridian Homes

The cost and energy savings from high performance homes can be quantified through energy simulations in conjunction with testing and monitoring. Similarly, the value of a quality management system can be quantified in new home construction through quality performance metrics. These metrics include schedules, energy performance, costs, training, satisfaction, referrals, productivity, and warranty/defects as outlined in Home Innovation Research Labs’ Economics of Quality Report. There are currently builders constructing high performance homes that have already implemented quality management systems. The goal of this interim report is to detail a builder, Veridian Homes that has already implemented a quality management system and is monitoring the impact of quality and energy efficiency.

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Download Appendix A

Download Appendix B