Inefficient systems in your home – poor insulation, sub-optimal HVAC, old electrical, or other problems – might be seriously inflating your energy costs.
You want to tackle those problems, but where do you start? What upgrades are worth the cost? How do you find concrete, reliable data and clear next steps to take action? Before you jump into a project (and before you start writing checks), you want to be confident you’re making choices that will pay off.
Learn your options for assessing your home’s needs, researching your options, and taking action to improve your home’s efficiency while maximizing return on investment.
Understanding Home Energy Usage
It’s always useful to review where the biggest drains on energy come from. The U.S. Energy Information Administration publishes useful overviews of how U.S. homes typically use energy, which will give you a sense of which efficiency updates provide the biggest payoff. The U.S. Department of Energy also produces comprehensive information about home energy improvements. Although state-level data is harder to come by, those nationwide resources also discuss regional differences.
You can likely intuit some of the information – for example, you could probably guess that heating and A/C are a bigger energy drain than leaving electronics on – but it’s helpful to get a sense of scale to target your efforts.
Assessing Your Home's Energy Efficiency
Although you can make generalizations about upgrades, every property is unique and needs an individualized review. You can do a self-assessment, or you can hire a professional (some professional assessments cost money, but Mass Save will do this at no charge).
A Do-It-Yourself Assessment
You can do a walkthrough and come up with a basic estimate of where you’re losing energy:
Check for air leaks: Light a stick of incense, walk through your home’s perimeter, and see if you have any drafts. Are the windows leaky? Are there drafts along the doors and baseboards, or junctures of the walls and ceiling?
Consider insulation: Do you notice big temperature changes between rooms, cold floors and walls, ice dams on the roof in the winter? Cranking your heating/cooling with seemingly little effect also may indicate that your home is under-insulated.
Inspect heating and cooling equipment: If your equipment is more than 15 years old, it likely needs an upgrade. You can also assess manufacturer maintenance recommendations and note their condition.
Estimate appliance energy usage: Pick up an electricity usage monitor at a hardware store, and compare your appliances’ data with typical usage data from newer models.
Professional Assessments
A DIY assessment can help you get an idea of your home’s needs, but a professional assessment can put hard data to these observations and provide suggestions for solving inefficiencies.
Professionals bring in tools like infrared cameras, draft gauges, moisture meters, watt meters and more to pinpoint your inefficiencies and compare them to what’s necessary. They might conduct a blower door test, where the assessor temporarily mounts a powerful fan in an exterior door frame to measure a home’s airtightness. All these tests will create a data-driven profile of your home.
Professionals will also review your fuel costs to analyze their findings and create a comprehensive home energy report to pinpoint the easiest investments you can make to boost efficiencies.
Calculating Return on Investment
Once you have a better understanding of your home’s inefficiencies, you can evaluate which projects make the most sense to tackle first. A professional home energy assessment typically comes with suggestions for action and contacts for completing work.
That includes considerations such as:
- What is the cost of a project? What rebates or incentives are available for efficiency upgrades?
- Considering the cost of the project vs. its likely impact on monthly energy costs, how long will that investment take to pay for itself in energy savings?
- What other factors are important in prioritization – comfort, aesthetics, resale value of your home?
Bigger up-front investments obviously take longer to realize a return through lower energy bills, but might be worth prioritizing if you’re thinking long-term. Meanwhile, simpler updates like sealing drafty areas, installing storm windows, or contracting to insulate your house are typically high-return, low up-front investments.
Doing the Math and Making the Call
Start with your home energy assessment, reputable data, and your own energy costs to start mapping out projects and timelines – and don’t hesitate to get started! The earlier you take action, the earlier you can start saving money and enjoying a more comfortable, efficient home.
Schedule a no-cost home energy assessment to learn where your home can benefit the most from energy-efficiency upgrades!
*Some restrictions apply and offers are subject to change or cancellation. Visit MassSave.com/HEA for full details.
Call (781) 776-5711 or contact us to get scheduled!