With the winter months approaching and cold weather just around the corner, a lot of people will be considering ways to “button up” their homes. Caulking air leaks and improving insulation is an important step but it’s even more important to start with an accurate home energy audit.

Home energy audits let you determine where your house is losing energy, the efficiency of your home’s heating and cooling systems and even ways to conserve hot water and electricity. Home energy audits are the best way to  identify home efficiency problems.

DIY Home Energy Audits

If you search around online, you’ll quickly find the ENERGY STAR, Assess Your Home site. This site takes basic information and provides a simple assessment, comparing your home to others in the area. It’s a great first step but barely scratches the surface. To really make an impact, you need specific information about your home, not just a simple comparison from your bills.

Unfortunately, the equipment to perform a true energy audit is prohibitively expensive. It’s just not realistic for home-owners and DIYers to make that kind of purchase, even if you intend to test several times. You’ll never recover the $1000s of dollars, making it a poor investment.

Professional Home Energy Audits

Professional auditors will come to your home and perform several test, making use of equipment like blower doors and infrared cameras. They’ll detect air leaks, improper insulation and the presence of any hazardous gases. After you have all the facts, you can take the right steps to eliminate problems.

Professional auditors provide an accurate documented assessment so that you can make a truly informed decision about how to improve your homes energy efficiency.

To find the right professional auditor, follow the process you would before hiring any contractor. Make sure you have a strong understanding of the work to be done and it’s well detailed in a written contract. Take the time to get multiple bids and always check references.

Get the ball rolling using Service Magic to locate three professionals in your area. Just enter “Home Energy Auditor” in their search bar.

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Home Energy Audit Equipment and Techniques

Even though homeowners and DIYers aren’t able to perform their own energy audit, it’s important that we understand the tests that professionals will run. The rest of this post will focus on an overview of several specific efficiency tests.

Blower Door Test The blower door test is used to measure the air tightness of a house and is a critical benchmark in determining if a home qualifies for the Energy Star Certification program. It begins by setting up an adjustable door with an integrated fan and a device to measure air pressure. The fan is turned on and used to create negative air pressure inside the home.

The blower door test not only gives you a tightness score but also reveals specific air leaks often found in weatherstripping around windows and doors.

PFT Air Infiltration The PerFluorocarbon tracer gas (PFT) test is another measure of airtightness in a home. This test is carried out by setting up an emitter and a receiver. The emitter gives off a small amount of harmless gas while the receiver measures the concentration in the room. A tighter house results in a higher concentration.

This technique is worth mentioning because it’s much better at revealing long-term, air infiltration problems and it can be used to detect other harmful gases such as radon.

Infrared Camera IR cameras allow energy auditors to measure thermal variations of a home, detecting heat loss and air leaks. Thermograms determine if additional insulation is needed or if existing insulation has been disturbed. It can even detect wet insulation indicating leaks.

What do you think? Ever had an energy audit? What did they find?

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