Home Audit: Energy expert can help a homeowner cut costs by finding the leaks

Danny Gough was hunting for leaks.

He aimed his infrared camera up and down walls, moving from a downstairs dining room to upstairs bedrooms. Chilly areas stopped him in his tracks. "That's just a cold, cold spot there," he said, pointing to the screen on his camera in the sunroom. A corner glowed dark blue on the camera's display, a sign that the wall was cool even though the thermostat was set at around 60 degrees. "That's 36 degrees."

Gough is an energy auditor. His family-run business, Energy Solutions, examines local houses.

Just as a tax auditor goes over financial documents, an energy auditor goes over your house, looking for places where heat, cooling and power is being wasted.

Duke Energy offers a free, online energy audit for customers and plans to roll out in-home inspections later this year in the Winston-Salem area. Technicians will check ductwork, appliances, heating and cooling systems, windows, caulking and doors, said Dave Scanzoni, a company spokesman.

The U.S. Department of Energy recommends home-energy audits, too, and its Web site offers tips for conducting simple ones on your own.

And then there are the professionals, like Gough, who have such gadgets as moisture meters, thermal-imaging cameras and blower doors. A blower door is a high-power fan attached to a tarp. Positioned over a house's front doorway, it sucks out all the air inside. Then pinpointing incoming drafts is easy.

Gough and some co-workers, including Dana Myers, his daughter, spent a recent afternoon at Don Lendle's house, a long, wood-sided ranch on a shady, tree-filled lot near Clemmons. Tax records show that it was built in 1971. It's about 1,800-sqaure feet. Lendle, a family physician, and his wife, Margaret, have owned the house for 23 years.

It only takes a hard winter like the one we've had to remind us how important a well-insulated house can be.

Lendle suspected some of the house's problems. He knew that his 20-year-old gas furnace was on its last legs. But before he replaced it -- or even considered a new, environmentally-friendly system, such as a geothermal unit -- he wanted to be sure he had an idea of what he was facing.

That's smart, said Sarah Olson, a Winston-Salem Realtor who specializes in energy-efficient and green real estate. Before you start piling on the insulation and ripping out old windows, you need to know where you're losing energy, she said. "It's like a putting a Band-Aid on before you know where the cut is. It would potentially save you a whole lot of money and a whole lot of headaches."

Gough audited Olson's house last year. "In many cases windows are the last thing," she said. "An energy audit will show you if your windows are leaking or if the air is coming in elsewhere. He showed us areas in our house with no insulation at all.

"Really, what we found is that our attic was just a sieve and that's where we needed to spend our dollars. Doing projects on your own is fine, but you've got to know where your problems are."

Gough discovered plenty to fix at Lendle's house. In two hours, he poked and prodded the house from top to bottom, taking photos and making measurements. He grabbed a flashlight and put on a pair of white coveralls, then got on his hands and knees and wiggled through the crawl space, into the house's belly, where he found four snake skins, a discarded hot water heater and insulation installed upside down.

And then there were the uninsulated hot-water pipes. Cold spots near the ceiling. A blower-door test revealed a brisk draft in the stairwell.

The sum total of these cracks and cold spots? Imagine if you left a window open about a foot all the time, day and night -- that's about how much chilly air was getting into Lendle's house. "That's pretty substantial leakage," Gough said.

That's on top of a problematic duct system. As Gough moved around the house, he held a device called a pressure pan over the registers to measure their efficiency. The news wasn't good -- Gough estimated about 30 percent of any heat and air-conditioning was headed right back into the crawl space because of leaks. You're paying to heat the house and not the crawl space, I assume," he quipped.

"A lot of the holes don't necessary bring in healthy air. So the ideal is to seal as air tight as you can…and ventilate right with a controlled ventilation system."

Lendle didn't seem surprised by much of this. But all this bad news is not something that's easy for some homeowners to hear, Myers said.

"It's our job to go in and tell people they have ugly babies. You go out to someone's house, and they put in a bathroom, a new kitchen. But most homeowners don't crawl around in their crawl space, and it's this ugly baby dressed up in ribbons and curls. We take away the ribbons and curls and actually look at what makes a house function."

lgiovanelli@wsjournal.com | 727-7302

Energy audits 101

Look for home energy auditors who have BPI (Building Performance Institute) and HERS (Home Energy Rater) certification approved by the Residential Energy Services Network. The latter means that your auditor is certified to provide verification for new Energy Star homes.

Ask a potential auditor how many years of experience they have, and if they have expertise in related fields, such as engineering. Ask for references.

Home Energy Solutions of the Triad, a Greensboro company affiliated with energy auditor Home Energy Team, offers energy audits for $349, which gets you a personalized 25-page report including suggestions for energy-improving upgrades and a list of renovation priorities and their projected savings. Home Energy Solutions also does weatherization work on houses.

Danny Gough's company, Energy Solutions, offers two levels of energy auditing: a $250 "light" version for home-owners who want to know the biggest sources of energy waste in their houses (that's what recent customer Dr. Don Lendle chose), and a more extensive audit that can require repeated visits. Those can cost $600 and up, and are for homeowners considering major renovations.

A list of home-energy auditors across North Carolina can be found at www.energystar.gov.

Do-it-yourself audits are available online at www.duke-energy.com -- you must be a customer and subscribe to online services -- and at www.energysavers.gov.