Your Home Energy Audit

When you’re ready to take control of your home’s safety, comfort, and energy use, schedule your home energy audit.  We'll use the latest technology to pinpoint problems and diagnose opportunities to stop heat loss, reduce energy consumption, and improve the comfort and safety of your home.

Walk-through: Every energy audit begins with a thorough assessment of your home, inside and out.  We'll look for common problems based on the age and style of your home, and take photos to document these issues as well as your home’s particular conditions.

Infrared thermography: A thermal reader shows temperature differences throughout your home.  We’re looking for any inconsistencies, like warm spots that indicate heat leaking through your home’s foundation, or cold spots that reveal insulation deficiencies.  Audits are usually scheduled in the morning, before the sun warms your home’s shell, to ensure accurate readings.

Blower-Door Test: Indoor air quality depends on a slow, steady exchange of air.  The accepted standard for natural ventilation is one complete air exchange every three hours; any faster than that, and you’re wasting energy by heating air that will soon be outside your home.  In a blower door test, a large calibrated fan blows air out of the house, depressurizing the space and measuring the airflow through leaks in the thermal envelope.  We’ll determine the rate of air exchange in your home and pinpoint the leaks that inflate that rate.

Combustion Appliance Testing: Poisonous carbon monoxide gas is a byproduct of all combustion appliances, including fuel-burning furnaces, boilers, water-heaters, and space heaters.  We’ll test for carbon monoxide in the ambient air and conduct safety tests to ensure that chimneys, flues, exhaust fans are functioning appropriately.

Other Considerations: We’ll evaluate mold and other air quality issues and suggest improvements to temperature and lighting comfort.  This comprehensive assessment of your whole house will take about four hours, and your Energy Advisor will use all of the data to create a computer model of your home’s energy use.   This model allows us to change certain variables - like the level of air sealing in your basement or the amount of insulation in your attic - to predict the energy savings you'll see from your improvement project.