More about Energy Audits and Home Efficiency Checkups
Home construction is regulated and policed through a system of building codes and inspections, but nevertheless, homes exist today with costly defects. The age of a home, corners cut during construction, simple mistakes by builders or inspectors, or serious inefficiencies can all exist and lead to unnecessarily high energy bills. In a manner very similar to seeing your family doctor for a routine physical, a routine home physicals can help you detect problems in your homes’ health.
Trained professionals using state of the art equipment can show you these inefficiencies backed with hard facts that, if corrected, can save you as much as hundreds of dollars each month.
There are a wide variety of audits and checkups available. Working with our affiliate network, we helped design and now recommend three service packages.
1. Home Efficiency Checkup. This service typically includes a comprehensive check list and up to a two hour walk through with a home specialist. Homeowners should have on hand one or more recent utility bills and at least an hour of time to field questions and hear the recommendations. Each homeowner receives a Green Home Performance Guide that is tailored to the property. The guide serves as the foundation list to prioritize upgrades that can be performed by the homeowner or a independent party. Each recommendation will be accompanied by expected cost, expected savings and return on investment calculations. In most cases the Home Efficiency Consultant can find $500 or more in savings within the first hour. Depending on the size of the home, this level of service will typically costs between $200 and $400.
2. Energy Audit - Advanced Home Physical. This service package typically includes additional instrumentation. When you add a Blower Door test and have your house surveyed with Infrared cameras, inspectors will be able to identify airflow and insulation deficiencies not visible to the human eye. Depending on the size of the home, this level of service will typically costs between $300 and $600.
3. Complete Home Wellness Exam. This service typically includes the Home Efficiency Checkup and the Energy Audit, but also adds air, water and solid contaminate checks. In addition to saving money on energy, this service includes reports on the air quality in you home checking for Radon, Carbon-dioxide, water and even paint contaminates. Depending on the size of the home, this level of service will typically costs between $500 and $850.
All levels of service typically include detailed written guides and reports, so that homeowner can make cost-effective decisions concerning future repairs. Homeowners can use these reports to get bids from independent contractors, as well as pricing from the auditors or their contacts. After tune-ups and/or repairs are completed, we recommend monitoring your utility bills or even considering a follow up inspection.
Your Return on Investment (ROI)
For services costing between $300 and $500, the savings are typically over $500 per year, so... the payback comes within the first year and then extends for years forward. Spend $300 to save $3,000 over five or six years! Since the Complete Home Wellness Exam is more expensive, the payback typically comes within closer to two years.