What You Need to Know About Home Energy Audits

A home energy audit is a useful tool to assess how efficiently your Orlando home uses energy and how it can be improved to further reduce your energy usage and utility costs. Here’s what to expect during a home energy audit:

Health and Safety Check

During a home energy audit, one of the first tasks an assessor will complete is a health and safety check. This process typically includes checking for dangerous conditions such as improperly-wired electrical systems, leaking appliance flues, high carbon monoxide levels or dangerous materials like lead paint or asbestos.

Physical Inspection

The assessor will then physically inspect the house to determine its layout, number of rooms, quantity of doors and windows, location of appliances and quality of the home’s insulation. Fuel-burning appliances such as furnaces, water heaters and fireplaces will be inspected for proper operation, and the assessor will note any problems in the home, such as leaking windows, missing insulation or poorly-sealed ductwork.

Energy Loss Tests

Next, the assessor will use specialized tools such as a blower door test or infrared thermography to determine where your home may be wasting energy due to air leaks or poorly-insulated structural components. A blower door test uses a large fan in an exterior doorway to remove air from the home, creating a negative pressure that draws air in from the outside through any air leaks. Leaks can then easily be identified by feeling for a draft or using tools such as smoke pens.

Infrared thermography uses infrared cameras to locate large temperature differences within your home. These can indicate heat loss or heat gain due to a lack of insulation or improper sealing.

Recommendations

After all tests are complete, the energy auditor will compile the information and indicate areas of your home that could use improvement. By making the recommended improvements, you can reduce your energy usage by an average of 5 to 30 percent.

To learn more about the benefits of a home energy audit, talk to our team at Rinaldi’s Energy Solutions. We’re proud to serve the home comfort needs of homeowners in the Orlando area.

Our goal is to help educate our customers in Orlando, Florida and surrounding areas about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). For more information about energy audits and other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Resource guide.

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