HEAT: Your First Line Energy Assessment

Explaining the benefits of energy efficiency to homeowners can be challenging, especially at the beginning of a business relationship. But when the conversation is focused on the specifics of a home and your solutions are tailored to the family’s needs it becomes easier to help them take the next steps.

Distrust is one of the single biggest reasons homeowners don’t invest in energy efficiency upgrades. Will the promised savings really materialize?

Elisa Wood asked how we can frame the conversation with homeowners and found that trust is a key issue. Simply put, if a homeowner doesn’t believe that their investment will pay off, they won’t be interested in retrofits or upgrades.

One solution is to break out the checklist and calculator, sit with the homeowner at the kitchen table, and run through the industry’s savings estimates: $40 per year with a low flow shower head; $50 per CFL; $2,000 over the life of double pane windows. And that’s the easy stuff. Get into air sealing and R-values and you may need a second cup of coffee.

We’ve used asset based home energy audits for years to quantify energy usage and envelope tightness, and we know these tools and methods work. The problem is that they are time consuming, expensive, and they also require some homeowner education before you break out the blower door.

To solve these problems, expert homebuilder Dean Durst developed the Heating Energy Assessment Tool, a first line web app that calculates actual energy used for heating, cooling, and domestic hot water. Based on utility data and envelope and appliance efficiency, AREVS estimates annual and long-term energy costs, and rates home performance three ways: on an A-F scale for easily educating the homeowner and comparing houses in the same service area, for normalizing the energy load of homes anywhere in the United States, and for pinpointing fuel and energy usage.