Nearly 1,800 Seattle homeowners benefit from low-cost home energy audit program

A friend and colleague, Peggy, was at a business networking event a couple of months ago where a gentleman introduced his home energy auditing business. He was promoting a $400-plus value audit for $95 to homeowners. Like me, Peggy owns an old Craftsman home in Seattle, and so she found the offer too attractive to pass up. Here’s what she told me:

Bob was in my house for about four hours, and went all over the place — the attic, the crawlspaces — taking pictures with his heat-sensitive camera. He took pictures of places where there were only boards! Some places I thought were well-insulated weren’t. He even found a gap in the roof and evidence of rats.

He told me where to add weather stripping and that insulating the garage ceiling and crawlspace would really warm up the living room. I have knob-and-tube wiring so blowing in insulation would be really expensive, but he offered other ways to add insulation. He answered a lot of questions that I had, and replaced all my light bulbs that weren’t on dimmer switches with CFLs.

Bob recommended taking certain actions and then calculated what the payback period for those projects would be. At the top of my list are a new furnace, a new water heater, and insulation. I plan to do the insulation pretty soon. I think the audit is a great value. It’s affordable, you get important information that you can use as a homeowner, plus it’s an environmentally responsible thing to do.

In 2009 the City of Seattle’s electrical utility — Seattle City Light — created and launched a program to subsidize home energy audits for its customers. The Home Energy Audit Program contracts with the Portland, OR nonprofit Earth Advantage Institute to provide the measurement tool for the audits — the Energy Performance Score (EPS) — and to train auditors.

The EPS provides a standardized estimate of a home’s energy use and associated carbon emissions, and the auditor provides the homeowner with a report detailing steps to reduce energy bills. Homeowners can also use the tool to compare the energy use of their house now with what it might be like after energy upgrades. The auditor informs audit customers about home retrofit incentive, loan and grant programs, and how to find local contractors if they want to move forward with some of the projects.

The Seattle program is funded by federal funds and the City of Seattle’s energy conservation budget. According to the Earth Advantage Institute, auditors have conducted 1,780 EPS home energy audits in Seattle and another 1,055 in other communities across the state of Washington. Meanwhile, the National Association of State Energy Officials is contracting with the institute to provide EPS-based audits in four states in four different climate zones — parts of Washington plus Massachusetts, Alabama and Virginia. Growing numbers of communities are expressing interest in developing programs using the EPS auditing tool.

To sign up for a home energy audit in Seattle, visit the Seattle EPS website. (Something I plan to do very soon!) To determine whether there is an EPS program in your city or county, visit the Earth Advantage EPS website.