Saving Energy, Saving Money: Why Energy Audits Matter

Intro: 00:00:01

Welcome to Thoughts from the Crawl Space, a podcast where our goal as home inspection experts is to support and serve our community.

Whether you're a homeowner, home buyer, real estate agent or investor, we believe everyone deserves solutions to their homeownership challenges and inspiration along the way.

Jamie: 00:00:17

Your path to success starts here. Hello again, everybody.

Today we're going to talk about energy assessments, more importantly, your house, and how to do an energy assessment on that and how to know what's killing your energy. And actually, so maybe some good things that's going on in your house.

So I did one on my own house a couple of days ago and I like to think that, you know, I'm doing pretty good. I've got good insulation in the walls, got good insulation in the attic, and it came back as 26% energy efficient.

Well, 26 is actually not very good, but there's some things that we can talk about that can help that. So we're going to go over that today, talk about that a little bit.

And an energy assessment is simply a professional evaluation of home's energy use and efficiency. And it can be done really by yourself.

Or if you want to take the next step and do a blower door evaluation, which we'll talk about, you can hire somebody to do that. First of all, why should you care?

Well, an energy assessment can help you save money on utility bills, improve home comfort year round, identify hidden issues like air leaks, insulation gaps, H vac insufficiencies, increased property value, and just generally make things a little better for you. Now you can go to the extreme. There's houses built now that are like 100 considered 100% efficient. And we tend to see other problems with those.

They can be so tight that you don't get proper airflow. You can get mold buildup, things like that. But what we're talking about is just your normal house. What are some things we can do to really help that?

So what happens during an energy audit? If you do a typical energy audit that involves a blower door test, a blower door test measures air leaks and drafts.

Basically, it puts your home under pressure.

It uses a large blower, literally at the, say, front door, and put your home under incredible pressure so that they can go and measure with special tools where the leakages are in your home.

So if you got a wind or high pressure blowing through your house, you're going to be able to tell that with diagnostic tools such as thermal imaging guns and things like that that will, the infrared thermography will identify insulation gaps and Hidden leaks. Even now, if we take a thermal camera and go into any house, even if it's not under a blower door, you can see where all the weak areas are.

If it's colder outside, you can see blue around all the edges or the corners or whatnot. And that's just weaknesses in the insulation. Just to the nature of building. Where wood meets wood, there's no insulation.

And so if you have a ceiling and a wall meeting, there's no insulation right at that joint. And that's going to always show up colder. Not a whole lot you can do about that. But we want to limit what we see with that.

So the H VAC system inspection checks for efficiency and duct leaks. And so, you know, you might have had some, you might have bought some really good H vac equipment. High efficiency furnace.

But if your ductwork is leakage, leakage is leaky, has holes.

If it hasn't been put together right, if it's been run inefficiently, if there's more twists and turns than there should be, it's going to be really inefficient and devalue the, the, you know, the efficiency of that furnace that you bought. Appliances and lights, this is a big one. Switching from incandescent bulbs to LED bulbs provides a massive value in daily use savings.

So there is a little bit more upfront cost for LED lights, but once you get them, it will definitely reduce the amount of energy it takes to light your home. We recently did this in our house. I should say recently. A couple of years ago, we switched over from primarily incandescent.

We even had some fluorescent bulbs. These are even more efficient. They're very cool. You know, it's the kind that you can put on a Christmas tree, the LEDs, and they don't get hot.

So it's not a risk of starting to fire on a Christmas tree or anything like that. Same way in your roof or in your attic, in. I can't talk today in your ceiling and everywhere in your house that you might have lights.

So forgive my voice today, it's a little raspy, but we're going to power through this thing. And then another thing that you don't think about with regard to energy assessment is your water heater and plumbing.

So how efficient is your water heater? Do you have a recirculating pump and things like that?

In other words, do you always have hot water when you want it, or do you have to wait on it and run, you know, 30 gallons of water before you get hot water? Depending what end of the home you're on. So some common issues found in homes regarding problems with energy efficiency is drafty windows and doors.

That speaks for itself. Look around your door. Can you see daylight? If you can see daylight, that's not energy efficient. Same with your windows.

If you have older windows, especially if they're wood, wood will tend to shrink over time. And so what was a tight seal at the sides isn't anymore. So you want to make sure you get that figured out.

Pour insulation in attics, walls, and basements. So when you look in your attic or on your basement walls, you want to really look to see. What level of insulation do I have?

If we inspect homes that are from the 50s and 60s, a lot of times you might have 3 to 6 inches of insulation up there. And that's considered acceptable back then. Not anymore. Anymore.

You want to see something like 12 inches, 15 inches, and R value of around 50, which is what new homes are constructed to. And so that's what we're looking for on that. That is definitely something that you can consult with an installation company on.

How can I improve this? You know, if you have, if there's 12 to 15 inches up there now, there's not a lot you can do to really improve it.

I mean, you get a little bit of value, but for the cost of putting in additional insulation, you're probably not going to notice a great deal of difference there. Another thing we mentioned earlier, leaky ductwork. You want to make sure all the seams are sealed on the ductwork when the pieces come together.

And at the corners, where typically there might be a little bit of a, a gap, outdated appliances and inefficient lighting. Refrigerators can be a really big energy sucker. If you have that fridge in the garage like we do.

We have an extra fridge in the garage for some reason. We grew up with one and we were fine, but now we need two. With only two people in the house. But those can be energy suckers.

A refrigerator in the garage, especially because it's subject to heat and cool, unless you heat your garage and keep it at a certain level. And of course then it costs even more. But it's going to typically take 1:50 to $180 a year to run that thing, which doesn't seem like a lot.

I mean, that's only what, 10 to 12 bucks a month or so. But just something to consider is you're trying to reduce energy consumption in your home. So some ways to improve energy efficiency.

And then we'll talk about the Actual energy audit that we do and some of the things we're looking at overall in the home. So how to improve your energy efficiently Seal air leaks with weather stripping and caulk. This will be most effective around windows and doors.

Just you don't want to see that daylight coming through anymore. Upgrade installation in key areas.

Now I will say especially in your attic, if your home is not air sealed, adding more insulation may not be that effective.

And frankly the only way to air seal it is pull out the insulation that you have and have somebody go up there and seal all the gaps between where the walls meet the drywall and in the corners and places like that where penetrations come up through. When you seal that air, then you put insulation on top. It's much more effective and obviously that's going to be more expensive.

It's going to be more tedious to do that, but certainly will have some value if you do that. Replace old H vac systems with high energy models. Now this will depend on how old you have.

If you have a model that's let's say 10 years old, you're not going to gain much by putting in a newer one. If you have one that's 40 years old, those are probably about 40 to 50% efficient compared to nowadays. It's about 95 to 98% efficient.

That will gain you some. Now you got to factor in the cost of putting in a new system and if you want to go down that road or not. But it can definitely help in that regard.

So a couple other tips here. Switch my notes around here is put in a smart thermostat. A smart thermostat can simply help you regulate the temperature better.

So when you're not at the house while you're at work, let's have it lower instead of at 70, maybe we have it at 65. And then we can program it to start heating up before you get home so you don't miss out on the comfort. But you're not heating it while you're away.

Similar to a water heater going for a tankless over a tank water heater because it's always heating the water in the tank even though you don't need it, especially if you're not there. Right. Switching to LED lighting. We touched on that. That can definitely improve your energy usage.

And then consider solar panels or another renewable energy option. Batteries. You got battery banks that store energy and then use it when in off peak hours. Solar panels, they are expensive.

Look into it for your your needs. See what you need. I Know there's a lot of people going to that.

One little tip is if you do get solar panels, we highly recommend there's three options when you get solar panels. One, pay for them up front. Two, finance them. Three, lease them. We definitely don't want you to lease them.

If you lease solar panels, selling your house, getting rid of your house someday is nearly impossible. You will have to either give all the equipment back or the new owner is going to have to take over that lease.

And the value of solar goes down over time. After probably 20 years, it's not like 75% efficiency anymore. So then you need to upgrade your equipment.

So look into it if that's something you're interested in. But definitely an option for helping renewable energy.

So the ROI of an energy assessment, you know, I think anybody that does an energy assessment is going to typically not if you do a blower door test, it's going to be a little more expensive. But you could get local power companies to do those for you.

What we provide on our inspections is at a very low cost and the savings that we can find you just doing that energy assessment will more than pay for it. So you want to look into that. How to schedule one? Well, just call us. Let me go over a little bit of what we do on the energy assessment.

I'm going to read through some of the things that we fill in when we're doing this chart to create this residential entity audit. Obviously your address going to talk about how many H Vac units you have and what the seer rating is.

The SEER rating is just an energy efficient calculation. That is the newer one you have, the higher SEER rating you have. So they want to know that. Do you have a pool?

If you have a pool, obviously that's a big energy sucker. So they want to know the pump type, the heater type. Do you have a solar system? If you do, how much energy does it produce?

How many panels did you have? Do you have a solar inverter? And then it just summarizes kind of what your solar panel would panels would do for you.

Interior LED lighting percentage. If you have LED lights, what percentage of your house has them? Is it 80%, 90%? Are you 100% LED lighting in the home? Number of ceiling fans?

Ceiling fans help to distribute air evenly so that the thermostat will not tend to run as much because you have maybe stagnant air somewhere. And so this will help to lower your energy usage overall. Even though ceiling fans can run all the time.

What about a whole house, attic fan, how many thermostats do you have and what type of thermostat do you have? Are they the smart programmable kind or the old analog style garage? What type of insulation do you have in your garage? What about over your garage?

How many water heaters do you have? And then battery storage? Do you have any battery storage in the house where it stores energy and releases it as needed?

Most people, I would dare say, based on what we've seen in home inspections, don't have that. So and then they want to know how many windows do you have? Just simply how many windows, what kind? Are they double hung? Are they single pane?

Are they casement windows? All that together will help us to produce an energy assessment on your home. It's very valuable information.

It's a beautiful looking report with ideas on how to improve the energy in your home. And I just think it's going to be extremely helpful for you as you move forward, whether you're buying the house or whether you live there now.

So if you have any interest in that, give us a call.

We'd love to do an energy audit on your home, give you information that'll help you reduce your costs and that can go a long way toward just saving your budget a little bit. Budget that money for something you want to use it on. Save it for a vacation instead of spending it on air leaking out of your home.

It just makes sense. So thanks for watching today. Thanks for listening. Share this podcast hopefully it's valuable to you and we appreciate you listening.

Have a good day everybody.

Intro: 00:14:47

Thank you for listening. This week you can catch up on the latest episode of the Thoughts from the Crawl Space podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube.

For more information about Gold Key Inspection services, go to goldkeyinspect.com.