Under the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Building America program, DOE national laboratories, and building science research teams conduct cost-shared research for and with stakeholders in the home building industry. Researchers work closely with industry partners to develop innovative, real-world solutions that achieve significant energy and cost savings while safeguarding or improving occupant health and safety, indoor air quality, building durability, and comfort. After preliminary research in test houses, whole-house solutions are refined, and through research at the community scale, teams validate the reliability, cost-effectiveness, and marketability of whole-house improvement packages and strategies for new and existing homes (Thomas-Rees et al. 2013; McIlvaine and Sutherland 2013; McIlvaine et al. 2013).

The DOE Challenge Home (CH) program provides a standardized platform for the application of Building America innovations that, when combined, achieve significantly higher-than-code levels of whole-house energy efficiency while also improving durability, quality, affordability, and comfort. Some elements of the CH standard exceed construction methods and specifications of even very high-performance homes such as zero-energy homes built by other Building America Partnership for Improved Residential Construction (BA-PIRC) partners (Thomas-Rees et al. 2013). BA-PIRC, one of the Building America research team leads, has partnered with two builders as they work through the CH certification process in one test home each. Both builders are located in central Florida in the Building America hot-humid climate and International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) climate zone 2 (Baechler et al. 2010).