Home Energy Audit

This week Doug Staab from Broken Bow Municipal Utilities was kind enough to come out to our house and conduct an energy audit for us. This is a free service available to all Broken Bow residents. The energy audit conducted by the city is a relatively basic one. They use a thermal sensing camera to find areas of your house that are losing excess heat (or cool air in the summer months). More extensive audits also evaluate the efficiency of your heating and cooling systems, as well as ways to save electricity and hot water. While these issues are not addressed in our local audit, you can basically address those issues with a self audit. Make use of the expertise of your local heating and cooling vendors as well as hardware personnel to get yourself educated on efficient systems for your home. Also check out EnergySavers.gov for easy instructions on performing a self audit.

Here is what we learned from our brief audit (total process about 45 minutes).

First, we were happy to find out that the newer, double paned windows in our house were well installed and keeping heat in nicely. On the other hand, our achilles heal is our basement. It is an old, unfinished basement, that we basically avoid going into at all costs. Because of our tendency to avoid it, we have been ignoring some important (and easily remediable) sources of heat loss.

This opening to a no longer functional chimney is a great example of an obvious problem that we simply never thought to look for. We hardly needed the camera to put a hand inside and feel the draft go by. A few dollars on a metal cover from Ace Hardware, and problem solved!

Helpful hint: if you can see daylight, you are losing heat! A $6 can of spray foam from Ace fixed that. The thermal sensing camera helped us identify some less obvious sources of heat loss. After seeing the cool spots between the basement ceiling and walls, we plan to tack some extra insulation on there to keep in the heat and keep out the cold.

The camera also showed one of our three doors to the outside was quite drafty underneath. We chose a simple draft stopper to remedy that. Hardware stores also offer lots of barrier options for drafty windows and doors.

As mentioned previously, the Broken Bow Utilities auditors do not make assessments regarding heating and cooling systems, nor do they offer official suggestions on how to fix the problems they identify. Nevertheless, just taking the time to walk around our home we were able to identify several easy to fix energy wasters as noted above.

We would also like to remind families with low incomes that many of the homes in our town will qualify for free weatherization through federal programs. Simply contact Central Nebraska Community Services to find out if you qualify.

We strongly encourage all Broken Bow residents to take advantage of the free energy audit offered by Broken Bow Municipal Utilities. You might be surprised by the simple things you can to to reduce waste in your home.

More information available at the following links:

Broken Bow Municipal Utilities

Central Nebraska Community Services

U.S. Department of Energy