Residential energy compliance for every project type

Prescriptive or performance — whichever serves the design

There are two ways to demonstrate residential compliance, and choosing badly costs money.

The prescriptive path is a checklist: meet every listed requirement for your climate zone and you comply. It is fast and cheap, and it is inflexible — miss one item and the whole path fails.

The performance path models the whole building against a standard-design baseline. It costs more to produce and it lets you trade: more glazing here in exchange for better envelope there, a different HVAC configuration, a design the prescriptive path would simply reject.

We run the numbers both ways where it is close, and tell you which one your design actually wants rather than defaulting to whichever is quicker for us.

What triggers ECC verification

These are the residential measures that most often require field verification. If your compliance depends on one, a certified rater has to test and register it before final sign-off:

• Ducts located outside conditioned space — leakage testing
• Refrigerant charge on split-system air conditioning
• Quality Insulation Installation (QII)
• High-performance attics and high-performance walls
• Whole-house fans and various ventilation measures
• Building envelope air leakage, where the model relies on it