!Energy, Lose it or Use it Wisely
Home Energy Audits
A home energy audit is the first step to assess how much energy your home consumes and to evaluate what measures you can take to make your home more energy efficient. An audit will show you problems that may, when corrected, save you significant amounts of money over time. During the audit, we can pinpoint where your house is losing energy. Audits also determine the efficiency of your home’s heating and cooling systems. An audit may also show you ways to conserve hot water and electricity. A professional auditor uses a variety of techniques and equipment to determine the energy efficiency of a structure. Thorough audits often use equipment such as blower doors, which measure the extent of leaks in the building envelope, and infrared cameras, which reveal hard-to-detect areas of air infiltration and missing insulation.
A Comprehensive Energy Audit is designed to produce the following:
- Increase the energy efficiency of homes
- Increase the comfort of homes
- Increase the durability of homes
- Ensure that energy improvement recommendations are portrayed with reasonable and consistent projections of energy savings
- Reduce the risk that energy improvement recommendations will contribute to health, safety, or building durability problems
- Reduce waste and pollution, protecting the environment
Leak Investigation
Are you feeling a draft somewhere or is one room of the house always colder than the rest? Not all homes need a full Comprehensive Energy Audit. We can help locate the source of those drafts or help determine why certain areas of the home might be colder than others. For a nominal hourly rate, we may be able to solve many of those issues allowing you to be happier and more comfortable.
Moisture Investigation
After a water related incident, how do you know that wall or carpet is dry? Do you just hate it when you hire someone to dry out your carpet and then you have to call them back days later because you are still experiencing moisture in your carpet? Your answer is a third party independent tester. We provide this service! Peace of mind for about $60.00.
Insurance Companies and Homeowners
We can dramatically minimize your claim time by pinpointing moisture behind walls and in flooring and, in some cases, we can locate moisture trapped in roof decking. Our infrared camera records 19000 separate temperature differences at once.
The Blower Door
Air flow through a building can have a powerful impact on comfort, expense, and air quality. Blower doors provide a way to quantify air flow and the resulting heat loss, along with a way to pinpoint specific leaks. Their use in retrofit work allows both instantaneous feedback and quantitative inspections. The benefits of their use have been understood and documented enough that most professionals now consider them essential for effective (and cost-effective) air sealing. New construction projects also make use of blower doors for quality control and retrofit contractors sometimes use them for customer education and sales.
Blower doors are highly useful and reliable diagnostic tools that are fairly simple to understand. Their use in retrofit work can greatly improve productivity, and their use is easily justified on a cost/benefit basis. A “blower door” consists of a powerful variable-speed fan, mounted in an adjustable panel that temporarily fits in a doorway, that is used to move air through the building in a controlled fashion. Pressure gauges connected to the fan measure the rate of airflow required to maintain the building at a certain pressure. This controlled airflow is used to find specific leaks.
Developed as a research instrument in the early 1970s, the blower door has evolved into a field tool. Blower doors are now more accurate, more portable, easier to use, and less expensive than in the past. Some of the first blower doors, weighed about 200 pounds and required one-third the space of a full-sized van. It cost more than $6,000 and needed 240 volt power. To unload, set up, run a test, and return the unit to the truck took about one hour. Today’s most popular blower door weighs about 50 pounds, carries easily in a small trunk, costs about one-quarter as much, and can be set up, used, and returned to the vehicle in about half the time.
Preparing for an Energy Audit
Please make a list of any existing problems such as condensation and uncomfortable or drafty rooms. Have copies of at least one year’s energy bills. We use this information to establish what to look for during the audit. Click here to print a copy of the fuel release form. We first examine the outside of the home to determine the size of the house and its features (i.e., wall area, number and size of windows) , as well as analyze the residents’ life style:
- Is anyone home during working hours?
- What is the average thermostat setting for summer and winter?
- How many people live here?
- Is every room in use?
- Any large pet(s)?
Your answers may help uncover some simple ways to reduce your household’s energy consumption. Walk through your home with the auditors as they work, and ask questions. They may use equipment to detect sources of energy loss, such as blower doors, infrared cameras, furnace efficiency meters, and surface thermometers.
