6 Reasons You Should Schedule an Energy Audit of Your Home Today

Unless you have an energy audit report sitting in front of you, you have no idea just how efficient or non-efficient your energy is at home. Those electric bills you have to pay each month may be unnecessarily high — and if they are, wouldn’t you want to know how to fix that? An energy audit provides you with a thorough assessment of energy use in your home, which empowers you to fix any draining issues. Discover six reasons you should schedule an energy audit of your home today!

6 Reasons You Should Schedule an Energy Audit of Your Home Today

1. Keep Your Family Safe

Although an energy audit helps you ensure energy efficiency in your home, it can also highlight issues inside your home that could be harmful to your family‘s health. For example, if there is a carbon monoxide leak, this could be wildly dangerous and even fatal. An energy audit highlights if that’s the case, which allows you to keep your family safe.

An audit also detects electrical problems, which could cause electrical fires. By catching them in time, you prevent any potential fire hazards. If your heating system isn’t working properly, you may have a higher risk of fire in the home. If moisture is excessive inside your home, this could lead to mold. This thorough assessment ultimately helps detect all of the areas that could go otherwise unnoticed, leading to a range of health problems for your family.

2. Lower Your Electricity Bills

An energy audit looks at all the ways that your energy is both working efficiently and being wasted. When you correct all of the issues that waste energy in your home, you immediately impact your electricity bill. Surely, you are not interested in needlessly throwing your money at your electric company, so an energy audit provides you with the benefit of saving.

3. Improve Your Environmental Impact

With an energy audit, you can immediately start improving energy efficiency, which means you’re going to be using less energy overall. An auditor will let you know how you can optimize the systems in your home, including some energy-efficient models you may want to integrate. Whenever you reduce how much energy you use in your home, your carbon footprint decreases. This immediately puts you in an eco-friendlier state.

4. Improve Your Air Quality

An energy audit helps to improve the air quality inside your home, which also benefits your family, particularly if one of your family members struggles with allergies or respiratory issues. With an energy audit, you can determine where pollen and dust are finding their way into your home, wreaking havoc on your family members’ health. When you identify these points of entry, you can do something to seal them up.

5. Fix Insulation Issues

As part of your energy audit, you can understand how effective your insulation is. If something was installed inadequately, it’s going to show up in your audit report. This is how you know when you are losing heat inside your home. Once your auditor knows where your insulation issues are, you can focus on fixing those issues and upgrading wherever needed. You also get a clear understanding of how poor insulation is impacting your energy costs.

6. Improve Your Home Value

If you incorporate energy-efficient features and let potential buyers know that you’ve conducted an energy audit and made changes to the home, you put your home ahead of the game. Buyers are attracted to energy efficiency because not only does it mean that it’s more cost-effective to operate the home, but it also means that they are going to be more comfortable living inside the home.

They can trust that they’re going to have consistency with temperatures, they’re not going to have any unsealed cracks or other entry points, and they know they’re going to experience better air quality as well. Some financial incentives may include tax credits when your home is energy efficient.

What Is An Energy Audit?

An energy audit helps you determine how efficiently energy is working in your home. For example, say there’s a crack somewhere in your property. On a hot day, you run the AC. But that’s an inefficient use of energy, which means your bills are unnecessarily higher. The same is true for cold, winter days while you’re running the heat. There are lots of ways that energy may be used inefficiently throughout your home but you don’t often notice until you conduct an energy audit.

You are likely spending more than you need on electricity but with an energy audit, you can identify even the most minute issues that could have a great impact on your electricity bill. Ultimately, you want the energy in your home to be working as efficiently as possible. Sometimes that means fixing a few kinks to ensure that’s possible. Sometimes it means a major repair. Not only do you benefit from determining where your energy is working inefficiently, but you also reduce your carbon footprint.

Preparing For An Energy Audit

To prepare for an energy audit, you’ll have to know what to alert the auditor to and you’ll have to do some things around the home. For instance, if you have noticed any cold or hot spots inside your home, make sure to write them down so that you can let your energy auditor know. If you’ve noticed that there is a moisture issue, be sure to include that in your list.

Your auditor will need basic information about your home as well like the square footage and when it was built. A helpful piece of information is to let them know if one of your family members suffers from any allergies. Also, make sure to have your electric and gas bills available so the auditor can take a look at a full-year history.

If you have any pets in the home, make sure that you secure them so that the energy auditor can do his or her job without trouble. Do a sweep-through of all your windows and doors and securely close them. Open your curtains and draw your blinds. The auditor is going to be analyzing all the different parts of your house, even the parts you rarely venture into.

Make sure that the area in front of the crawl space is clear as well as the area that leads to your attic. If your home has a fireplace, make sure it’s clear of any ash. Ultimately, you want to ensure the auditor has easy access to all the locations of your home, particularly the areas you don’t frequent where you might have a bit of clutter.

After You Know the Issues, Then What?

An audit highlights issues you have to address, which can feel overwhelming at first. However, if you don’t know, you can’t budget for repairs and replacements and you can’t plan ahead to create an energy-efficient home. Knowing is the first step. After you review your audit report, you can put together a plan to address the high-priority issues first. Later on, you can address lower-priority issues.

You can obtain multiple quotes for high-cost items and look into any government incentives for working on energy efficiency in your home. As you make these improvements, you’re going to be able to track how it impacts your energy use. An energy audit is just the beginning of a process and repairs will take time. However, when you see the energy savings, you’ll know you made the right decision by getting an energy audit of your home.

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