Home Energy Audits
by: David Andersen
Home energy audits are the best way to save money on your energy bills. Whether you live in the Southern United States, Northern Canada, or India, a home energy audit does two things:
- It shows you how your home uses energy, and thus
- It shows you where your home loses energy
This is important because if you know where specifically you are losing energy, you know how to attack the problem and can find ways to fix it.
This is the reason why many people spend hundreds of dollars on so called "professional" gadgets or green energy products (like fluorescent light bulbs) but don't see significant savings on their electric bill. They are buying into a false idea.
Simply put - if you want to save money on your energy bills, electric bills, gas bills, heating bills, whatever - you have to know why your bills are high in the first place. You have to know how you are spending the "energy".
A home energy audit can answer that for you.
A do it yourself energy audit of your home can reveal where you are using and losing energy, heat, electricity, and more. Then, once you know where the problem areas are, you can tackle them one at a time with very targeted approaches.
To go back to the previous example, the reason most people don't see significant savings after installing fluorescent bulbs is because only a small portion of their electric bill is taken up by lighting. If a home spends lets say $75 a year on lighting, that averages to $6.25 a month. If CFLs cut that number by 75%, the homeowner pays $4.69 less every month for lights. And often times, those savings are masked by increased costs in A/C or heating. So you never, ever actually "see" the difference on your bill. This is discouraging.
An energy audit "unmasks" this, because it shows you the bigger picture of whats going on, and can help answer the question "why am I paying so much for electricity?"
You can do a very simple energy audit right now by just walking around your home and measuring how much electricity you are using every day. Just take the number of hours an appliance is on, and multiply it by the energy consumption. That's your daily usage for that appliance. Add up all the appliance energy usage, and boom! There's your daily consumption.
There's a much easier way. Download the professional home energy audit kit from http://www.energyaudits.net right now, and you'll get several xls spreadsheets/energy calculators that perform the calculations for you. You'll be able to instantly see how much, in dollars, something costs you per day, per month, and per year. You can also use the calculators to figure out heat loss, insulation, furnace and a/c efficiency, and more. Plus you'll learn professional tips on how to do the most complete energy audit without paying a pro hundreds of dollars.
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