Computer program can determine your house's expiration date

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Oct 18, 2003 | by Sandra Fleishman, Washington Post

DOESN'T it always seem that as soon as you get one thing fixed in your house, something else falls apart?

Order a new toilet because the plumber says they just don't make those parts anymore, then find out the tile floor underneath is shot. Replace a stove, then the refrigerator conks out. Then, when you're hoping to get a breather, the roof gives up the ghost.

Maybe the bigger problem is that some of us just do not have a good idea how long the parts of our houses last, and what we should do to maintain them.

The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) says Americans spend $65 billion to $75 billion annually on maintenance, repair and replacement, often because of the premature failure of a material exposed to weather.

But information on durability is hard to come by. Some manufacturers offer estimates for particular products, and some trade associations provide life expectancies for building materials or appliances. Consumer Reports magazine provides special reports on appliances and a "Fix It or Forget It" survey of consumers, updated last in 2001. The NAHB published the most comprehensive guide on structural materials and appliances in 1993. That also drew on consumer surveys and manufacturers' data rather than an independent evaluation.

The Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers has another list of life expectancies for a variety of items, based on manufacturers' data. It came out in 2001 and the next is scheduled for 2006.

The problem with these durability guides is that they take time and money to pull together, so they have not been undertaken independently. And none of them offers a picture of your particular house, with your particular weather conditions.

Now, a new game in town could help. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed a computer software package on durability and cost-effectiveness.

The computer program is part of a decade-long effort on durability by NIST, the research and standard-setting unit of the Commerce Department, and a group that also goes by an acronym, PATH. That is the Partnership for Advancing Technology in Housing, a coalition of government agencies and housing industry players whose goal is to promote new technologies that would improve the affordability and value of new and existing homes.

The durability software, available on the www.PATHnet.org Web site, not only lets a user see how long his current roof, windows, garage and doors should last but also calculates, by ZIP code, what it should cost to replace them with the same materials or with other options.

NIST software designer and economist Laura Schultz said the approach "comes from the Mr. Potato Head Web site" maintained by toy manufacturer Hasbro. If you click on the Making Faces game for Mr. Potato Head, you can change the way the spud looks by substituting parts. "The idea is the same, of having a frame that resembles your house and then letting you colorize and texturize it," Schultz said.

In the NIST program, you first build a rough picture of what your house looks like, then you play around with replacements to weigh the costs against the expected service life.

The program also spits out for those four categories of building parts a rundown of the most durable option, the lowest upfront-cost option and the lowest life-cycle or annual-cost options. And you can plug in your own bids for comparison purposes.

It is the first attempt at helping homeowners understand how the choice of materials can play out economically, according to NIST's team of economists and researchers.

It will help homeowners process tough decisions such as what kind of new roof to buy, they said. Sure, slate roofs can last 50 to 100 years, but they cost a bundle. Should you invest in slate to avoid having to replace the roof again in your lifetime; go with the cheapest alternative, asphalt shingles that last 20 years; or look for something in the middle?

"There's no convenient way currently to understand the trade-off between a longer service life and a higher installation cost," said Stephen Weber, one of three NIST economists on the project.

Weber said "the hardest thing to model" in assessing durability is the value of a roof or building product that lasts longer than a homeowner anticipates living in the house. "That's why durable products don't sell," he said, "because of lack of information about their longer service life."

Homeowners "don't have a way to quantify the value of durability, so they don't value it," he said. And in turn, they do not clamor for it from builders. So builders tend to offer the lowest-cost options.

Builders will take heed, however, if customers want more durability, said Christopher White, a NIST research chemist developing independent durability estimates for building products. The estimates will be plugged into the computer program as they are available.

"Builders are very, very responsive to their customers," White said. "As the customers understand the value of durability, then the builders will recognize and offer more durable products."