ACI History
ACI - Twenty Years of Progress in Building Science
ACI (Affordable Comfort, Inc.) is a non-profit organization, founded on an assembly of people who gathered in Pittsburgh, PA in 1986. They had a common interest in sharing what they understood about making homes energy efficient, comfortable and affordable, without risk to the residents and building structure. This approach to weatherizing, remodeling or building came to be known as “House as a System.”
Since 1986, ACI has trained more than 12,000 people at our annual and regional conferences. The number of companies in the field of home performance has grown from just a handful to more than 500. Many government, utility and environmental groups have adopted these principles in their own programs. Several other partner organizations have evolved to serve specific applications. While we can’t take sole credit for this growth, ACI can claim to be the driving force that made it work – and we remain an organization where all are welcome.
ACI is recognized as the forum for sharing and learning new approaches – for raising the bar on how to make the homes and their HVAC equipment work at their optimum levels. This more rigorous method of using building science, testing and diagnostics has become known as Home Performance or building performance
ACI embraces all the excellent state weatherization agencies that are the backbone of the industry, and we also seek to bring home performance skills to all the other building professionals, inspectors and technicians who work in homes.
ACI’s ultimate audience in all its work is the consumer – the residents of the homes we work in. A critical part of our progress will be measured by the moment when the average consumer can trust that his or her home is built, remodeled and conditioned by a technician who is trained and certified in home performance – and when the consumer understands why this is important.
Conference History
The first Affordable Comfort conference was held March 19 -20, 1986 as a regional event in Pittsburgh, PA. Over 300 people attended the first conference, mostly from weatherization, government and utility agencies. ACTION Housing, Inc. of Pittsburgh was the host, with funding from the Pennsylvania Energy Center program. Rick Diamond was the first keynote speaker on the topic, “The House as a System.” Lydia Gill-Polley, Jim Fitzgerald and John Tooley were among the first presenters.
The annual conference was held in Pittsburgh for two more years and then alternated between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh until the move to Chicago, IL in 1996, with the support of the Illinois Dept. of Commerce and Economic Opportunity. Various locations in the Midwest have worked really well to attract new partners and attendees. Attendance at the annual conference quickly grew to 1,000, with a record 1,369 people onsite in Minneapolis, MN in 2004. The 2006 conference in Austin, TX was ACI’s first venture into the Southwest, and was a success with more than 1,150 people on hand.
As awareness and demand for the house as a system approach grew, regional events were added to the schedule. The first regional conference was in San Ramon, CA in October 1994 with the support of Pacific Gas & Electric. More than 20 regional conferences have been held in the past twelve years, including eight in California, six in New York and three in Massachusetts.
Partners
ACI has always been a cooperative endeavor of diverse groups and individuals from the United States and Canada. In 1986, no one imagined that the seed money from Action Housing and the Pennsylvania Energy Office for the first conference would blossom into a network of more than 1,000 partners. They represent the full range of groups with an interest in home performance, including federal, state, and local government agencies, utilities, private sector companies, non-profit groups, trade associations, and other training groups.
