Description
A home energy assessment, also known as a home energy audit, is the first step to assess how much energy your home consumes and to evaluate what measures you can take to make your home more energy efficient. An assessment will show you problems that may, when corrected, save you significant amounts of money over time. This video shows some of the ways that a contractor may test your home during an assessment, and helps you understand how an assessment can help you move toward energy savings.
Speakers
Jason Dispenza
Duration
1:44
Credit
Energy Department Video
MR. : Core to any energy audit, you’ve got a blower door test; an infrared camera scan; combustion safety testing for homes with gas appliances – a gas water heater, a gas furnace; a building walk-through from the basement to the four corners of the attic; and a survey of all the appliances and the lighting. And you talk to the homeowner about how they’re using the house.
You assimilate all this data together into a report that a homeowner can use to prioritize different projects within that. Identifying the source of the problem is what the audit will do. Once you’ve fixed the home and you want to retest the house, you can benchmark those items that were identified in the source of the energy audit.
How this is applied within each individual house is important. And the standards to – which your auditor applied on the home is what gives the industry some sort of normalization. So if one energy auditor does an audit on your home and he uses a BPI or a HERS standard, then another company that’s a home performance contractor can come in and use that auditor’s data to fix those items that were identified in the source of the energy audit.
