Kettle Harbour Home Performance · Gannet Point · seal tight, ventilate right
Seal the house. Then give it lungs.
Kettle Harbour tightens coastal houses and then ventilates them on purpose — blower-door-guided air sealing, dense-pack walls, attics to R-60, and heat-recovery ventilation that brings the harbour air in without paying to heat it twice. Tight without ventilation is a soggy problem; we do neither job halfway.
Services & rates
Envelope and ventilation, one scope
The 2026 card, quoted line by line after the blower door says which lines your house needs. Every price includes both readings, patching, and the balancing report on the ventilation work.
Blower-door audit$225
CFM50 before-and-after, infrared set, written scope — credited to any work booked
Air-sealing packagefrom $1,150
Top plates, chases, rim joists, penetrations — the holes before the thickness
Attic to R-60$2.30 / sq ft
Dams, baffles, hatch seal, cellulose blown and settled
Dense-pack walls$4.60 / sq ft
3.5 lb/ft³ cellulose through 2-inch holes, plugged and patched same day
HRV installed$2,850–4,200
Heat-recovery ventilator, ducted, commissioned and balanced with a flow hood
ERV for humid summers$3,100–4,600
Energy-recovery core that swaps moisture as well as heat — the coastal fit
The lungs
What a heat-recovery ventilator actually does
An HRV is two airstreams passing through one core: the stale, warm air leaving your house hands up to 92% of its heat to the fresh, cold air coming in, and neither stream ever mixes. You get harbour air all winter at roughly a tenth of the cost of heating it twice — and the moisture that used to fog every window leaves with the exhaust. We size the unit to the rooms, not to the catalogue, and balance every duct with a flow hood so the bedrooms breathe as hard as the kitchen.
Stale air out
Kitchen, bath and utility extracts draw off the air that carries odour, moisture and last night’s cooking.
Fresh air in
Outside air arrives through its own ducts, filtered, to the bedrooms and the living rooms.
Heat handed over
The two streams cross in the core and part company — the warmth stays, the stale air does not.
How it runs
A retrofit, in five moves
Audit to commissioning, eight to twelve working days on the average harbour house — and the house stays lived-in throughout.
Visit 1
The audit
Blower door, infrared, and a ventilation survey — which rooms stink of yesterday, which fog up, where the air wants to go.
Days 2–3
The seal
Every leak the camera named, foamed and caulked. Spillage tests on any combustion appliance the same day.
Days 4–7
The fill
Dense-pack walls, attic to R-60, rim foam — one crew, holes patched as the day advances.
Days 8–9
The lungs
HRV or ERV set, ducted to the rooms that need it, core and filters logged for the service book.
Day 10
The balance
Flow hood on every grille, the blower door out for the test-out, and both readings on the commissioning sheet.
The ledger
Kettle Harbour, metered
Figures off finished harbour jobs, not manufacturer curves — the fuel bills arrive in the spring and we keep the file.
Recent retrofits
Houses that breathe on purpose
Our 1908 house had fogged windows from October to April for thirty years. Kettle Harbour sealed it, packed the walls, and fitted the HRV — and the first cold morning we woke to clear glass and air that felt like a hotel’s. The furnace has run half as much since, and the spring fuel bill is the proof we keep showing people.
The balancing report alone was worth it — every grille measured, every room listed. Two other outfits quoted us a ventilator box; Kettle Harbour quoted us a system, and the house can tell the difference.
They found with the blower door that our “drafty old house” was actually three very specific holes. Nine hundred dollars of sealing did what three window salesmen said needed eleven thousand of windows.
The crew sheeted everything, worked a wall at a time, and the re-test reading beat the number on the scope. Both readings are on the invoice, which is a sentence I never thought I would admire.
Before the audit
Fresh-air questions
My house is old and drafty — why would it need a ventilator?
It does not, yet. The ventilator becomes right the moment we seal the random leaks, because the accidental ventilation you have now is what you are heating twice. We audit first and recommend the unit second; a fifth of the houses we seal genuinely do fine on their remaining air changes.
What does an HRV cost to run?
Roughly a low-watt bulb for the fans, and the filters twice a year — the heat exchange itself is passive, two airstreams crossing a core. Against the air it stops you heating twice, the harbour average runs it at a net saving from the first winter.
HRV or ERV — which one?
HRV recovers heat; ERV also passes some moisture between the streams. On this coast, where summer is humid and winter is wet, the ERV keeps the house from drying to a crackle in heating season — we size to the house and say which, and why, on the scope.
Are they noisy?
Not balanced ones. The noise people remember from cheap installs is unbalanced ductwork. We commission with a flow hood and hold every grille to a whisper — you will hear the harbour before you hear the unit.
Who services it?
We do — filters and cores on an annual visit, logged in the service book that ships with the commissioning sheet. The core is good for fifteen years with two cleanings; the unit tells you when, and so does the sticker we put on it.
Autumn audit calendar opens in September · (555) 026-3910 · hello@kettleharbourhp.example
Start with the audit
Tell us the town, the winter, and whether the windows fog. The $225 audit carries two blower-door readings and an infrared set, and credits in full against any work you book. hello@kettleharbourhp.example