Now that we have gotten settled from all the holiday and school traveling, we have started focusing on the house. Well that’s kind of a lie… We actually got an energy audit done on the house before Thanksgiving and we’re just now dealing with the results.

Anyway… What is an energy audit? Well, it’s a comprehensive review of your house and it’s ability to maintain internal conditions (temperature and humidity). The goal is to identify aspects of your house’s construction or appliances that are deficient, defective, or costing you a lot to use and make repairs/replacements to lower your cost on energy and make your home more efficient. The best part about this process is that the power company encourages it and will give rebates (up to about $3000 for GeorgiaPower) if you can reduce your energy usage by certain amounts.

Our house is basically a leaky sieve with a 25 year old HVAC system and lots of awesome windows, so we knew there were plenty of things that needed some work. We decided to work with a local company that came with a glowing recommendation, Energy Conservation Solutions (ECS).

We worked with them through a 3-step process:

1. Initial energy audit – The crew comes to your house and assesses everything including weather stripping, appliances, large systems like HVAC and water heater, window sealing, fans, etc… They assess how well your house is sealed from the outside using a vacuum apparatus where they pump air out of your house and look at where air comes back in using a nifty little instrument that detects differences in temperature. They head back to their office and write up a detailed report, including pictures, and prioritize issues based on the easiest to fix vs. most energy gains if it is fixed. This includes an estimated cost of the work if they were to do it (you can also contract everything out if you want).
2. Do the work – We decided to have ECS do all the work for us because it was easy and we trusted the quality of work they would do. We had some extensive work done, including the installation of copious amounts of insulation in the attic space and a complete sealing off of our crawl space. The work took 3 days. The crew was great.
3. Re-assess – After all the work is completed ECS comes back to the house to re-test the house for energy improvements and sealing. They must notify Georgia Power in case it wants to send people to oversee. We were told they rarely show up, but we must be really lucky because not one, but two people showed up from Georgia Power. Under normal circumstances this process should only take about an hour, and then ECS will fill out all the paperwork and submit it to Georgia Power and a rebate comes in the mail. Easy peasy!

Unfortunately our special house failed the re-assessment. Now that the house is all nice and sealed up, part of the re-assessment is to make sure that our big systems (HVAC and water heater) can run properly and control their wastes (like carbon monoxide). To do this, they test them at maximal levels and then at normal use levels. Our water heater failed at both levels and our HVAC failed at the maximal level. So, before they were just old and now they’re a safety hazard. It wasn’t a surprise because they are 25 years old and this is why we were so adamant about extending our home warranty for three years. So now we have 60 days to get new major systems and submit paperwork to Georgia Power to get our rebate. Ouch! On the other hand, when we’re done with everything our house is going to be super duper energy efficient!