A home energy audit is a complete evaluation of your home to see how energy efficient it currently is. During a home energy audit, professional technicians analyze the HVAC system, your insulation levels, cracks in the walls, doors and windows, and more to get an accurate idea of what could be negatively impacting the energy efficiency levels in your home. Despite their usefulness, more than 90% of people have never conducted a home energy audit. Here are all the reasons why getting an energy audit would be a good decision for any homeowner.
Educate Yourself on Energy Efficiency
One of the best reasons it’s beneficial to have a professional perform an energy audit on your home is because they can help educate you on what negatively or positively affects energy efficiency. Technicians who professionally perform home energy audits are extremely knowledgeable about everything that affects energy efficiency within a house. Every detail from large to small is taken into consideration and fully analyzed for issues.
You’re welcome to walk with them through their evaluation to understand everything that is being checked throughout the audit. When you know how to spot these issues and how to fix them, you can better prepare yourself to make informed decisions about energy efficiency in the future. You can even pass on this knowledge to your family and friends to help them be more energy efficient as well.
Save Money
It’s always an incredibly frustrating feeling when you realize you’ve been wasting money on a regular basis. You work hard for your money, and you don’t want to see it go to waste when it is very preventable. Many homeowners are shocked to discover how much money they could be saving on their energy bills if they fixed a few simple issues in their homes that they didn’t even know they had. On average, home energy audits save homeowners between 20% and 30% annually in energy costs.
A professional home energy audit pinpoints everything within your home that is reducing your energy efficiency. The technician will also provide you with helpful suggestions for fixing the issues in a manner that will maximize efficiency and save you as much money as possible.
Be More Environmentally Friendly
Using electricity and burning fossil fuels have a massive impact on the environment. Everyone has a responsibility to lessen that impact as much as possible by making environmentally-friendly choices in their everyday lives. It’s especially important for homeowners to be as environmentally conscious as possible since homes consume massive amounts of energy.
Getting an energy audit performed on your home allows you to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels and wasting electricity. Everything you do to improve your energy efficiency, no matter how minor, matters greatly in reducing your carbon footprint.
Make Your Home Healthier
Home energy audits will locate areas in which air is leaking from your home. Air leaks allow heated or cooled air from your HVAC system out while allowing cold or hot air from outside in the home. This is a waste of energy since it forces your HVAC system to work harder to heat the home in winter or cool it in summer. However, these air leaks also present health hazards to anyone within your home.
When air from outside seeps into your home, it allows other substances in. Allergens, bacteria, dust, dander, pollen, mold spores, and more blow in from outside. Inhaling these substances increases your chances of catching an illness and makes symptoms from allergies and respiratory conditions more severe.
Improve the Comfort Level of Your Home
Poor energy efficiency reflects in the comfort level of your home. The most obvious cases of this are when it’s difficult for the house to warm up in winter or cool off in summer, but the opposite situation is also common. When HVAC systems work overtime due to poor energy efficiency, they can make some rooms feel too hot in winter and too cold in summer.
Addressing the issues revealed by a thorough home energy audit makes temperature regulation across the entire house much easier. You won’t have to constantly adjust the thermostat, wrap up in blankets in the summer, or break out your shorts in the wintertime; you can simply set your thermostat, leave it, and enjoy the comfort of your home.
Make Your Home Safer
An extremely important part of home energy audits is checking how safe your HVAC equipment is. Many homes utilize propane, natural gas, oil, and other fuels that need to be safely stored and used by the HVAC system of your home to prevent dangerous chemical exposure and possible combustion. Home energy audits help find gas leaks, high carbon monoxide levels, potential fire hazards, and more to keep you and your family safe.
Uncover Other Home Issues
In the process of a home energy audit, the technician may reveal other issues around your home that need to be addressed. For instance, they might find cracks in your foundation, mold in your attic, or signs of pest infestations that would have gone unnoticed for a long time if you hadn’t hired a professional to analyze your home. If serious issues are uncovered by the audit, you can catch them early and repair them as soon as possible to minimize the damage.
Increase the Property Value of Your Home
If all of these benefits seem appealing to you, imagine how nice they sound to potential future buyers of your home. There has been a drastic increase over the years in people desiring energy efficiency when searching for a new home. Merely saying your home is energy efficient isn’t worth much. Most homeowners can’t pinpoint exactly what makes their home energy efficient.
Having a home energy audit performed allows you to prove that any weaknesses in the energy efficiency of your home have been rectified. For example, a potential home buyer may be concerned that your insulation is insufficient, which would severely reduce the energy efficiency in your home. Presenting the audit information and proving that you installed plenty of insulation throughout the home will put their concerns to rest.
It’s even more beneficial to get a second home energy audit after you’ve performed the necessary repairs and improvements to increase the energy efficiency in your home. Show the potential buyer how much the second assessment improved in comparison with the first audit and you will impress many people.
If you’d like to have a professional home energy audit performed on your house, our skilled technicians at Environmental Heating & Air Solutions will provide you with the most thorough analysis. We’ll not only create a detailed evaluation of the energy efficiency in your home, but we’ll also rectify any issues the audit uncovers. In addition to home energy audits, we also offer installation, repair, and maintenance services on HVAC systems and water heaters, air duct cleaning, attic fan installation, home automation system installation, and more. To learn more about any of the services we provide to the areas in and around Roseville and Benicia, California, contact us at Environmental Heating & Air Solutions today.
