What Can You Expect From a Professional Home Energy Audit?

You may think your home is relatively energy efficient, but chances are there are still a number of areas where more energy can be saved. But how do you know where? A comprehensive home energy audit will quantify the amount of energy you’re losing and pinpoint where it’s happening. Armed with a professional’s recommendations on how to weatherize your entire home, you can hire a trusted contractor to do the work.

If you have some handyman chops, you can undertake some parts of a home energy audit on your own. Typically, this might include looking for air leaks in your home’s outer envelope, inspecting insulation in accessible areas, and ensuring you’ve switched out incandescent bulbs with energy-saving CFLs and LEDs.

As you can see, this is a limited audit that will miss a lot. A professional energy auditor will employ his knowledge and experience, plus high-tech instruments and gauges, to get a much bigger picture of where your home is wasting energy.

What’s Done in a Home Energy Audit?

• The auditor will tour your entire home as a first step, focusing especially on your heating and cooling systems and ductwork. He will ask to look at a year or two’s worth of energy/utility bills.
• A blower door test likely will be performed, during which a powerful fan is placed in the frame of an exterior door. The fan, positioned to blow outside, will suck the air out of the house as a gauge measures how quickly interior air pressure returns to normal. This quantifies your home’s airtightness. In tandem with the blower door test, a thermographic scan will be performed to identify where air is leaking.
• Thermographic imaging will show where insulation is missing or inadequate in your home’s outer envelope.

When these and other tasks included in the home energy audit are complete, your contractor will submit a report, identifying a plan of action to tighten up your home and improve its energy efficiency.

To schedule a home energy audit for your Northwest Arkansas house, contact the HVAC professionals at Paschal Heat, Air & Geothermal.

Our goal is to help educate our customers in Springdale, Arkansas about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). For more information about energy audits and other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Resource guide.

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