If you’re a homeowner in Las Vegas, NV, you should be interested in making your home as efficient as possible. Doing so will lower your monthly energy bills and help you save money for other priorities. However, it’s not always obvious where you should start any effort to improve your home’s efficiency. One way you could find out is to pay for a professional home energy audit. Or, you could conduct a basic home energy audit yourself that comes with many of the same benefits. If you’d like to do that, here are eight steps to perform a DIY home energy audit.
1. Examine Your Utility Bills
The first thing you need to do as a part of your home energy audit is to examine your home’s utility bills. This will help you understand how much energy your home uses in an average month. Energy efficiency experts refer to that figure as your home’s base load. To get that information, you’ll need to gather an entire year’s worth of energy bills. Ideally, you want a consecutive calendar year’s worth of bills so that you can understand seasonal usage changes.
Once you have your year of energy bills, identify the three months within the year with the lowest costs. These will likely be in the spring or fall when you’re not using your heating or air conditioning systems. Next, add those three months of costs together and divide by three. The result will be the average of those bills and your base load figure. It should represent the approximate minimum energy use your home requires to function each month.
2. Check Out Your Furnace, AC, and Water Heater
Your next step is to take a look at your home’s furnace, AC, and water heater. If they have ENERGY STAR stickers on them, note the information you find there. If not, note the make and model of the equipment. This will help you figure out how efficient your existing HVAC and water heating equipment is.
With your information in hand, contact your HVAC and water heater manufacturers. For your furnace, you want to find out your model’s AFUE. For your AC system, you’re looking for its SEER rating. And for your water heater, you want to know it’s UEF. These are the standard efficiency scales for each type of system. The answers will help you decide if it’s worth upgrading any of your HVAC and hot water equipment.
3. Inspect Your Home’s Light Fixtures
After checking your heating, cooling, and hot water equipment, you’ll want to move on to your home’s lighting. Take an inventory of your home’s lighting fixtures and the type of bulbs they use. If you still have incandescent bulbs all around your house, you should immediately upgrade them to LEDs. According to the US Department of Energy, doing that alone should save you around $225 per year in energy costs. And if you find any fixtures that aren’t providing the lighting you want, consider upgrading them. This will allow you to make the most out of the money you are spending on lighting electricity costs.
4. Check Your Home’s Insulation
One of the ways the average home wastes electricity is through heating and cooling losses. This typically means they don’t have sufficient insulation. That means your next step is to check your home’s insulation. If you have an accessible attic, measure the depth of its insulation. Multiply the result by 3.2, and it should give you the insulation’s R-value. Ideally, your attic insulation should have an R-value between 49 and 60. If it’s lower than that, you likely need an upgrade.
Unfortunately, it isn’t easy to measure the insulation in your exterior walls and ceilings on your own. A professional energy efficiency expert might use thermal imaging equipment to do the job. To do it on your own, you will need to open a small hole in each wall you want to measure. This will allow you to measure the depth of the insulation and perform your calculations. Ideally, your ceilings need an R-value of 19 or higher, and your exterior walls need an R-value of about 20.
5. Identify Phantom Electronics
Your home’s phantom electronics are all of the devices that keep drawing electricity even when you’re not using them. The easiest way to do this is to begin by looking at your home’s power meter. It can tell you how much electricity your home uses each hour by comparing its readings an hour apart. After you get that figure, go around your home and unplug as many nonessential devices as possible. Things like phone chargers, televisions, coffee makers, and other small electronics are a good place to start. Then, check your home’s energy usage for another hour. The difference is how much electricity those devices use while plugged in. You can use that information to decide which devices cost too much in electricity to leave on standby.
6. Survey Your Home’s Appliances
Just as you did with your home’s HVAC and water heater, you will need to also check its major appliances. This includes your oven, refrigerator, washer, dryer, and dishwasher. You should be able to use the ENERGY STAR website to look up efficiency data for many common appliance models. If any of your appliances don’t appear in their database, it’s a safe bet they’re not very efficient. Those devices should be at the top of your replacement priority list.
7. Find and Fix Air Leaks
To test your home for air leaks, close all of your exterior doors. Then, turn off gas-burning appliances like your furnace or water heater. If your home has bathroom exhaust fans, turn them all on. This will create negative air pressure inside your home. Then, all you have to do is walk around your home with a candle or a lit stick of incense. Every time the smoke gets pulled out of or sucked into a room; you’ve found an air leak.
You can seal visible gaps that allow air leaks using caulking. Just purchase a tube and fill the visible gaps to seal the leak. If you do this and still experience air leaks, they may be in places you can’t spot with the naked eye. In that case, you will want professional help to solve the problem.
8. Inspect Your Home’s Ductwork
Finally, you will need to take a look at your home’s HVAC ductwork to look for leaks. This is a common efficiency issue in many homes. Some HVAC systems waste up to 30% of the energy they consume via ductwork-related losses. Look at any parts of your home’s ductwork that you can reach. Pay attention to any joints to see that their seals remain intact. Also, look for leaks or gaps where your ductwork connects to your HVAC and around each HVAC vent. Ask us about our ductwork services, too!
Home Energy Efficiency Experts
If you’re interested in home energy efficiency upgrades in Las Vegas, Bumble Breeze can help. We offer complete HVAC installation, repair, and maintenance services. We also offer indoor air quality services, including ductwork services. We’ve served the local community since 2018 and have an excellent reputation. Plus, we’re Better Business Bureau-accredited with an A+ rating. So, call Bumble Breeze today to find out how we can improve your home’s energy efficiency!
