Home Energy Audits
So You Are Considering Renewable Energy For Your Home?
Consider improving your home’s energy efficiency first!
Why conduct an energy audit?
- To become aware of what appliances you have and how you use them
- To assess how much power each appliance consumes
- To decide what actions to take to reduce electrical consumption
We provide the service of home energy audits in order to find what appliances, habits, or mysterious high energy consumers are costing you the most money. Our experts, with BPI training, offer simple methods and techniques to reduce your total energy usage. We use and sell the TED, Total Energy Detective, for finding the average energy consumed per appliance.
You can start saving energy and money today by using compact florescent bulbs, energy star appliances, increasing insulation, installing programmable thermostats and using power factor correction units. We have provided a way for you to conduct your own home energy audit by following the simple steps below.
- Find your usage of Kilowatt-hours per day
Gather a year’s worth of billing history from your power company—if you don’t save your bills, call your power company for a printout of the kWhs for the past 12 months broken down by month.
2. Now chart your findings:
In the first column, record the read date, in the second column figure out the number of days in the read period, in the third column put monthly kWh, and the fourth column divide column 3 by column 2 to find the kWh/day. (See example chart below)
|
Read Date (1) |
No. Days (2) |
kWh/month (3) |
kWh/day (4) |
Comments |
|
Jan 15 |
30 |
1950 |
65 |
Furnace blower, Electrical Heat, Lots of Lights |
|
Feb 12 |
28 |
1274 |
46 |
More Furnace Use, Less Electrical Heat |
|
Mar 9 |
25 |
1045 |
42 |
Same as February |
|
April 15 |
37 |
1150 |
21 |
Close to base-load, still a little heat |
|
May 14 |
29 |
785 |
27 |
Base-load use no heat, no air conditioning |
|
June 15 |
32 |
1505 |
47 |
Opened the Pool, June 1st, air conditioning |
3. Make a detailed list of all the appliances in your home
Note how long each one is on every day. Not everything has an obvious power plug, things like well pumps, central vacuums, central air conditioners, and heating equipment may be connected directly to the circuit-breaker box. Also remember the garage, barn, attic, basement, and outside outlets.
Do not be alarmed if you cannot add up every last kilowatt-hour—the really important thing is to identify those items that are big used, and those that you can actually do something about.
