How Making a Product "Better" Destroyed a House

A new house was built for clients who intended to rent out the property for ten years and then move in themselves. The design called for triple pane windows, extra insulation and an air-to-air heat exchanger to provide fresh air and control humidity.

The various tenants who lived in the house over the years routinely turned off the heat exchanger because, in their mind, it cost too much to run, as the fans were running continuously and they didn't want to pay for the electricity. As a result, the house was always very humid inside in the winter. Well within the ten years, the entire house had to be gutted and disinfected right down to the studs due to moisture, condensation, rot and mildew.

The company that builds the heat exchanger systems include controls that allow the user to switch it on and off, set the fan speed to high or low, and set the desired humidity level. These are all features intended to make the product better.

If the customer is a homeowner, who lives in the property and cares about the condition of the property, the flexible controls add great value. For a rented property, where the tenant cares only about how much they're paying for utilities, the flexible controls are terrible - the tenant shuts off the system to save money on electricity. They don't care if the building rots; they're only there for a few months or a few years - it's not their problem. In this particular case, the better control system, with additional features and flexibility, ended up costing the property owner almost $230,000 in unwanted, unexpected home repairs. The heat exchanger company wasn't held legally responsible, because the occupants failed to use the system correctly.

However, if the company truly cared to understand their customer and the uses of their product, they would realize that in a rental property situation, the luxury of being able to switch off the unit (to save electricity) is not a feature, it's a weakness. By making the product "better" in their minds, they made it worse for this property owner, and did costly damage to the property.

The customer who specified the unit was an architectural draftsman at the construction company, on the recommendation of a Mechanical Engineer. The customer who bought the unit was a purchaser at the construction company. The customer who paid for the unit was the property owner. The customer who actually used the unit was the tenant who rented the property.

Do you really understand who your customers are and what they truly need?