Home Energy Audit – What’s It All About?

Welcome to another installment of our Sustainable Home Remodeling Series where we are documenting our efforts to “green update” our dated 1970 split-level home .  In this post, we’ll show you key elements of a home energy audit and talk about the general value of having one performed for your home.

We worked with Energy Logic who sent out one of their Professional Energy Raters, Byron Burns, to evaluate our home’s energy performance. 

Byron started his audit by conducting a general inspection of the home’s exterior, interior and mechanicals to look for obvious energy efficiency issues and opportunities to improve home performance.

Next, Byron performed a blower door test to determine where the house leaks hot air in the winter and cool air in the summer.

Then he tested the performance of our furnace and duct work.

The cost of a home energy audit can vary quite a bit depending upon the specific scope of services and size of your home.  We paid $325 for Energy Logic’s audit of our home and believe this to be money very well spent.  We now have a detailed report that provides clear, prioritized guidance for our efforts to make our home more energy efficient, which we know will decrease our operational costs and increase our comfort while we own the home.  We are also confident that having solid documentation of improvements to our home’s energy efficiency will increase its resale value when we put it on the market in a few years.

Watch for future posts on this topic.  We’ll be digging deeper into the Energy Logic report and discussing the HERS^® score for our home in its current state, tracking our implementation of energy efficiency improvement projects, and conducting follow-up testing to determine our post-improvements HERS^® score.