FAQ
Home Efficiency Checkup FAQ's
- What is a Home Efficiency Checkup (HEC)?
- Why should I get a Home Efficiency Checkup?
- What are the health benefits of a Home Efficiency Checkup?
- How does a home become more efficient?
- Who performs the Home Efficiency Checkup?
- How long does it take?
- What does the inspection involve?
- What happens after the inspection?
- How can I be sure that the recommended repairs or improvements I am making will actually save me money?
- Will the Home Efficiency Consultant be performing any physical work on my home?
- How much does it cost?
- What should I do in preparation of my Home Efficiency Checkup?
- Can I do an Energy Audit by myself?
- Are there tax breaks or subsidies available?
- How do Thermographic Inspections Work?
- How Do I Prepare for a Thermographic Inspection?
- What is a Blower Door Test?
- How Does a Blower Door Work?
- How do I Prepare for a Blower Door Test?
- What is a Home Efficiency Checkup (HEC)?
An HEC is one of the most cost effective ways to save money on your utility bills and also create a healthier home environment. A trained consultant will come to your home and, after inspection, make recommendations as to how you can most efficiently spend your money to lower utility bills while increasing the overall health of your home.
- Why should I get a Home Efficiency Checkup?
Over 40% of a home’s utility costs come from heating and air conditioning. The findings from your HEC will show you how to improve the energy efficiency of your house, as well as save on other utilities like water. It will also aim to make your home a healthier living environment, from what you eat, to the overall air quality. Lastly, and most importantly, a Home Efficiency Checkup is guaranteed to save you money!
- What are the health benefits of a Home Efficiency Checkup?
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, for many households, air quality is even worse indoors than it is outdoors, mostly due to the toxins used in construction, carpeting and even furniture. A Home Efficiency Checkup can help you improve the air quality in your home and identify harmful chemicals that could create long-term problems for your family’s health.
- How does a home become more efficient?
The “efficiency” comes in better management of the electric, air and water systems. Since an “eco-system” consists of plants and animals functioning together with non-living factors, think of your home as an integrated system with a few plants, perhaps a pet, plus water and climate controls. If you start to think of your home as an organism, and not an object, you will understand that being more efficient means using less water, electricity, and overall energy to sustain the same comfort that your home now provides, but for much cheaper.
- Who performs the Home Efficiency Checkup?
A trained professional will come to survey the current energy use of your home, find potential areas for savings, and finally makes recommendations on ways to increase the overall health of your house while lowering your utility bills. This person will have completed the GREENandSAVE Eco Academy course, including ten practice HEC’s, before being certified to inspect the efficiency of homes.
- How long does it take?
While actual times may vary, it is safe to say that your Home Efficiency Checkup will last about 2 to 3 hours.
- What does the inspection involve?
During the walk-through session, the Home Efficiency Consultant will use a comprehensive checklist to identify problem areas that waste utilities.
There will be a portion of the HEC where the Consultant will inspect the outside of the home, noting the number of windows (most energy used to heat or cool homes goes right out the window, even when it’s closed), the orientation of the home (south is best for natural light and heating in the winter, while limiting summer heat gain), and the layout of trees on the property (deciduous trees in the north will help block winter winds), among other things.
The Consultant will also inspect the inside of the home, checking the basement and attic for unnecessary heat loss, monitoring insulation levels, and getting a general feel for how utilities are used in your home.
- What happens after the inspection?
After the trained professional surveys the energy usage and overall health of your home, they will provide you with a highly detailed report highlighting any trouble spots and savings opportunities that may have been discovered. The Consultant will make some recommendations for repairs or improvements that will make the biggest difference where it matters most, your monthly utility bills.
- How can I be sure that the recommended repairs or improvements I am making will actually save me money?
- Will the Home Efficiency Consultant be performing any physical work on my home?
No, that is not their function. The Consultant is simply there to make your options clear. After getting an understanding of where money is spent in a home for utilities, the Consultant is prepared to make suggestions and recommend certain projects that will save you money in the long run. GREENandSAVE has a trusted network of professionals for every line of home remodeling; whether it be bathrooms, kitchens, basements, or even roofs, there will be a very qualified contractor to fulfill your home remodeling needs.
- How much does it cost?
The cost of a Home Efficiency Checkup is $395. We are so sure that this service will save you money that if you do not save $500 in the first year after the HEC, we will pay you your money back.
- What should I do in preparation of my Home Efficiency Checkup?
Your Home Efficiency Consultant will ask you to have on hand as many utility bills as possible from the last year. This is in order to see whether you are spending an unusually high amount on a particular utility, which would point to an area of extreme inefficiency.
- Can I do an Energy Audit by myself?
There are several DIY techniques and programs made available by local utility companies. These programs typically use easy to find information about your home like the number of doors, windows, rooms and the year your house was built, then compares your monthly bill to similar homes. While these programs are helpful and can save you money, there is no substitute for having a trained inspector analyze your house.
- Are there tax breaks or subsidies available?
There are income-based Federal programs that do provide subsidies for home energy audits. Some auditors will also credit the cost of the audit toward any repairs that you choose to make to correct any of the energy inefficiencies in your home.
- How do Thermographic Inspections Work?
Thermography measures surface temperatures by using infrared video and still cameras. These tools see light that is in the heat spectrum. Images on the video or film record the temperature variations of the building's skin, ranging from white for warm regions to black for cooler areas. The resulting images help the auditor determine whether insulation is needed. They also serve as a quality control tool, to ensure that insulation has been installed correctly.
A thermographic inspection is either an interior or exterior survey. The energy auditor decides which method would give the best results under certain weather conditions. Interior scans are more common, because warm air escaping from a building does not always move through the walls in a straight line. Heat loss detected in one area of the outside wall might originate at some other location on the inside of the wall. Also, it is harder to detect temperature differences on the outside surface of the building during windy weather. Because of this difficulty, interior surveys are generally more accurate because they benefit from reduced air movement.
Thermographic scans are also commonly used with a blower door test running. The blower door helps exaggerate air leaking through defects in the building shell. Such air leaks appear as black streaks in the infrared camera's viewfinder.
Thermography uses specially designed infrared video or still cameras to make images (called thermograms) that show surface heat variations. This technology has a number of applications. Thermograms of electrical systems can detect abnormally hot electrical connections or components. Thermograms of mechanical systems can detect the heat created by excessive friction. Energy auditors use thermography as a tool to help detect heat losses and air leakage in building envelopes.
Infrared scanning allows energy auditors to check the effectiveness of insulation in a building's construction. The resulting thermograms help auditors determine whether a building needs insulation and where in the building it should go. As you can seen in the image above significant heat is being lost through this homes ceiling and wall. With a temperature drop in excess of 15 degrees, this home is being significantly cooled by attic air. If you were to go into the attic in this house, you would see the exact opposite. Deep holes in the blow-in insulation that are 15 degrees warmer than the rest of the attic alone make up a significant monthly expense. What does this mean? It means part of their monthly heating bill is spent on heating the attic.
In addition to using thermography during an energy audit, you should have a scan done before purchasing a house; even new houses can have defects in their thermal envelopes. You may wish to include a clause in the contract requiring a thermographic scan of the house. A thermographic scan performed by a certified technician is usually accurate enough to use as documentation in court proceedings.
The energy auditor may use one of several types of infrared sensing devices in an on-site inspection. A spot radiometer (also called a point radiometer) is the simplest. It measures radiation one spot at a time, with a simple meter reading showing the temperature of a given spot. The auditor pans the area with the device and notes the differences in temperature. A thermal line scanner shows radiant temperature viewed along a line. The thermogram shows the line scan superimposed over a picture of the panned area. This process shows temperature variations along the line. The most accurate thermographic inspection device is a thermal imaging camera, which produces a 2-dimensional thermal picture of an area showing heat leakage. Spot radiometers and thermal line scanners do not provide the necessary detail for a complete home energy audit. Infrared film used in a conventional camera is not sensitive enough to detect heat loss.
- How Do I Prepare for a Thermographic Inspection?
Make sure to speak with the certified auditor that you choose, specifically about any preparation measures before they arrive. Since infrared imaging is greatly enhanced when simultaneously performed with a blower door test, ask your auditor if they will be performed together.
To prepare for an interior thermal scan, the homeowner should take steps to ensure an accurate result. This may include moving furniture away from exterior walls and removing drapes. The most accurate thermographic images usually occur when there is a large temperature difference (at least 20°F [14°C]) between inside and outside air temperatures. In northern states, thermographic scans are generally done in the winter. In southern states, however, scans are usually conducted during warm weather with the air conditioner on.
- What is a Blower Door Test?
A blower door test is conducted with a powerful fan used in conjunction with a sensitive airflow sensor. The blower door is placed in the opening of your front door and blows out to create a vacuum in your house. By using the airflow sensor and by altering paths for airflow in your house, your auditor can identify air leaks. As the air leaks in or out, your heating and cooling system must make up for these losses by conditioning additional air. By repairing such air leaks, your heating and cooling system will run less, potentially saving you hundreds of dollars or more each season.
Having an air tight home is one of the first steps in improving the efficiency of your heating and air conditioning unit, as long as you have sufficient means with intakes and exhausts to introduce and recirculate outside fresh air into your systems. Opening up windows in the spring and fall for natural ventilation is also key to maintaining a healthy home. Determining if your home leaks and where those leaks are can be a challenging task and will probably require sensitive air flow equipment. Professional energy auditors use blower door tests to help determine a home's air tightness.
These are some reasons for establishing the proper building tightness:
- Reducing energy consumption due to air leakage
- Avoiding moisture condensation problems
- Avoiding uncomfortable drafts caused by cold air leaking in from the outdoors
- Making sure that the home's air quality is not too contaminated by indoor air pollution.
- How Does a Blower Door Work?
A blower door is a powerful fan that mounts into the frame of an exterior door. The fan pulls air out of the house, lowering the air pressure inside. The higher outside air pressure then flows in through all unsealed cracks and openings. At this point, the worst leaks can be seen or felt without the aid of instrumentation. For smaller leaks methods such as smoke sticks or smoldering incense are used to find subtle air flows. Using a combination of these methods and air flow meters an auditor can calculate the air infiltration rate of a building.
Blower doors consist of a frame and flexible panel that you can place in a doorway, a variable-speed fan, a pressure gauge to measure the pressure differences inside and outside the home, and an airflow manometer and hoses for measuring airflow.
There are two types of blower doors: calibrated and uncalibrated. It is important that auditors use a calibrated door. This type of blower door has several gauges that measure the amount of air pulled out of the house by the fan. Uncalibrated blower doors can only locate leaks in homes. They provide no method for determining the overall tightness of a building. The calibrated blower door's data allows the auditor to quantify the amount of air leakage and the effectiveness of any air-sealing job. Using a calibrated door, an auditor will be able to return to your home after any air-tightening repairs have been made and determine the exact effectiveness of those repairs.
- How do I Prepare for a Blower Door Test?
Make sure to speak with the certified auditor that you choose, specifically about any preparation measures before they arrive. Since a blower door test is greatly enhanced when simultaneously performed with infrared imaging, ask your auditor if they will be performed together.
To prepare for a Blower Door Test, essentially shut any known openings to the outside to prevent desired flow rates from combining with undesired flow rates. Take the following steps to prepare your home for a blower door test:
- Close windows and open interior doors.
- Turn down the thermostats on heaters and water heaters.
- Fully clean our or cover ashes in wood stoves and fireplaces with damp newspapers.
- Shut fireplace dampers, fireplace doors, and wood stove air intakes.
In addition to the recommendations, the Consultant will include a cost estimation based on national averages to show you how much that would cost. However, the Consultant will also explain the Return on Investment figure, which actually charts how long it will take for you to save back your initial investment. The Consultant will focus on your long term savings, weighing initial costs against the amount of time it will take for improvements to pay for themselves.
