Your Green Life

Getting a professional home energy audit is a major step that you can take to really go green in your home. The audit will determine how much energy your home uses and will help you decide what steps you can take to save energy in your home by making it more efficient. The audit will point out what problems exist in the house and the potential to save money on your utility bills through making changes in weak areas. Although you can conduct a personal home energy audit, a professional audit will produce more thorough results and help find the hard to find areas that you are missing insulation or losing energy in your home. Professional audits will normally conduct a blower door test, thermographic scans, and potentially the PFT air infiltration measurement technique (though this is not common).

How Do You Prepare for a Professional Energy Audit?

Before your professional energy auditor shows at your home, you will want to list all of the known problems in the house with the heat, air conditioning, and condensation. You will also want to have a year’s worth of utility bills for the auditor to use in helping to establish what they should focus on during your home’s audit. If you can’t get this material, the audit can still occur, but you will just pay more money if the auditor has to test everything. Other than that, the only other thing you will need to do to prepare for the audit is make sure you can be home when the auditor visits.

What Will the Professional Home Energy Auditor Do?

The auditor will first collect your old bills and make notes of the pre-existing problems that you point out to him or her. Then, they will conduct a survey of the outside of your home to note the size, number of windows, wall area, etc. The auditor will then take a look at what the behavior is of the people living in your home. These details will consist of how many people are home during the day, your average thermostat settings, are all of the rooms used?, and how many people live in your house. Most auditors will allow you to walk around with them during the survey so you can ask questions.

Choosing an Energy Auditor

Just like choosing a doctor, you will want to find someone that you can trust for inspecting your home. Your electric or gas company may offer a service or refer professionals to you. Also, you can normally find companies that offer auditing services listed under “Energy” in the phone book. Before you hire the auditor, you may want to consider asking for references to see if previous clients were satisfied with the service.

Once the auditor is done with your home energy audit, you will receive a written report making recommendations for improvements you can make in the house to improve its efficiency. Taking these actions with other green home tips will help make your home more efficient and can reduce your monthly cost of living.