Home Energy Audits
A home energy audit is often the first step in making your home more efficient. An audit can help you assess how much energy your home uses and evaluate what measures you can take to improve efficiency. But remember, audits alone don't save energy. You need to 
implement the recommended improvements. Energy Wise Homes uses proven methods and the nationally set standards regulated by the Building Performance Institute (BPI). In other words we have the know-how and equipment to do it right. We can enhance the energy efficiency of your home, lower utility bills, and increase comfort.
Our whole-house approach
The first step in taking a whole-house energy efficiency approach is to find out which parts of your house use the most energy. A home energy audit will pinpoint those areas and suggest the most effective measures for cutting your energy costs.
Information You can use
The information gathered during the energy audit is analyzed using specialized software to produce a comprehensive Home Energy Report. The Report shows which energy-efficiency improvements would reduce energy costs and make the home more comfortable. The analysis takes into account regional variables such as local weather, implementation costs, and fuel prices. The Report contains estimates of the savings, costs and payback for each energy efficiency recommendation.
Formulating Your Plan 
After we have identified where your home is losing energy, we will work with you and your budget and help assign priorities that will give you the best return on your energy saving dollars. (Go for the best buys first) Often it will be the cheapest, easiest projects that make the biggest dents in you utility bills.
Some guiding questions are:
- How much money do you spend on energy?
- Where are your greatest energy losses?
- How long will it take for an investment in energy efficiency to pay for itself in energy cost savings?
- Do the energy saving measures provide additional benefits that are important to you (for example), increased comfort from simple weatherization of your windows and doors.
How long do you plan to own your current home?
- Tools of the trade
Blower Door Tests
Professional energy auditors use blower door tests to help determine a home's airtightness.
These are some reasons for establishing the proper building tightness:
- Reducing energy consumption due to air leakage
- Avoiding moisture condensation problems
- Avoiding uncomfortable drafts caused by cold air leaking in from the outdoors
- Making sure the home's air quality is not too contaminated by indoor air pollution.
How They Work
A blower door is a powerful fan that mounts into the frame of an exterior door. The fan pulls air out of the house, lowering the air pressure inside. The higher outside air pressure then flows in through all unsealed cracks and openings. The auditors may use a smoke pencil to detect air leaks. These tests determine the air infiltration rate of a building.
Blower doors consist of a frame and flexible panel that you can place in a doorway, a variable-speed fan, a pressure gauge to measure the pressure differences inside and outside the home, and a manometer for measuring airflow.
There are two types of blower doors: calibrated and uncalibrated. It is important that auditors use a calibrated blower door. This type of blower door has several gauges that measure the amount of air pulled out of the house by the fan. Uncalibrated blower doors can only locate leaks in homes. They provide no method for determining the overall tightness of a building. The calibrated blower door's data allows the auditor to quantify the amount of air leakage and the effectiveness of any air-sealing job.
Infrared Scans
An infrared scanner will display differences in temperature when pointed at a surface. The scans work best when there is a difference of 20 degrees or more from the interior to the outdoors. This is why the winter is the ideal time to conduct an energy audit of your home. An infrared scan conducted from inside the house will reveal not only the areas of cold air infiltration, but areas of walls and floors that are warmer or colder than adjoining areas. We can see heat ducts, water pipes, even the studs in the wall. The infrared scan will most importantly also reveal areas of inadequate or nonexistent insulation.
How They Work
The infrared camera measures light that is in the heat spectrum. Images on the film record the temperature variations of the building's skin, ranging from white for warm regions to black for cooler areas. The resulting images help the auditor determine whether insulation is needed. They also serve as a quality control tool ensuring that insulation has been installed correctly.
A thermographic inspection is either an interior or exterior survey
. The energy auditor decides which method would give the best results under certain weather conditions. Interior scans are more common because warm air escaping from a building does not always move through the walls in a straight line. Heat loss detected in one area of the outside wall might originate at some other location on the inside of the wall. Also, it is harder to detect temperature differences on the outside surface of the building during windy weather. Because of this difficulty, interior surveys are generally more accurate because they benefit from reduced air movement.
Thermographic scans are also commonly used with a blower door test running. The blower door helps exaggerate air leaking through defects in the building shell. Such air leaks appear as black streaks in the infrared camera's viewfinder.
Energy auditors use these images as a tool to help detect heat losses and air leakage in building envelopes. Infrared scanning also allows energy auditors to check the effectiveness of insulation in a building's construction. The resulting thermograms help auditors determine whether a building needs insulation and where in the building it should go. Because wet insulation conducts heat faster than dry insulation, thermographic scans of roofs can often detect roof leaks. 
Notice the cold air infiltration in the picture at right.
So, if you have a particular issue that may require destructive discovery (the removal of wall, ceiling or floor coverings) just to try to find the source of the issue, thermal imaging provided by an Infrared Camera will save you a lot of time searching for an elusive condition, as well as money in unnecessary repairs to walls and ceilings. Give us a call and let’s see if we can find a solution to your problem at hand.
Energy Wise Homes, give us a call today! #877-866-1116
info@energy-wise-homes.com
