ENERGY AUDITS LTD

ENERGY AUDITING

 

We perform comprehensive energy use and savings opportunities assessments in accordance with BPI, ASHRAE, and other industry leading standards.  We are happy to tailor our services to meet our clients needs, and offer two basic levels of energy auditing:

 

• Standard Energy Audit: These audits typically include: blower door testing to assess your building's air infiltration rate; infrared imaging to assess the integrity of your building's thermal boundary; visual inspection of insulation and air sealing; heating equipment testing; lighting assessments; appliance assessments, and more.

 

• ASHRAE Level II & III Audits: For some properties, further analysis can be extremely helpful in maximizing an energy retrofit's return on investment.  These audits also incorporate all aspects of our less intensive audits.  But they also include analysis of utility data and building energy modeling using PSD's industry leading TREAT software.  With building energy modeling, we can more precisely determine return on investment, payback period, and other variables that become more crucial when making larger capital investments. 

 

 

Blower Door Testing

 

A building’s envelope (or shell) should have a continuous thermal boundary separating conditioned spaces from unconditioned spaces and the outdoors. Ideally the thermal boundary consists of insulation immediately adjacent to an air barrier.

 

But when penetrations exist in the air barrier, the effectiveness of insulation is significantly reduced. Heat transfer and therefore heating and cooling costs are significantly higher. Insufficient or incorrectly installed insulation has the same effect.

 

Blower door testing allows us to much more ably pinpoint sources of air infiltration and thus reduced insulation values. For instance, existing insulation on an attic flat largely obscures penetrations on that attic flat. But blower door testing makes these penetrations immediately apparent.

 

By better diagnosing existing penetrations, we're able to develop better potential air sealing measures and to determine which would be most cost-effective. After air sealing measures have been implemented, blower door testing allows us to determine just how well those measures have been implemented.

 

Thermal Imaging

 

Are there significant gaps in your building shell's thermal boundary through which heat escapes and cold temperatures enter? Thermal imaging is another tool which helps us quickly determine this.

 

As the images below show, thermal imaging reveals insulation values and air barrier penetrations which would otherwise remain hidden - significantly increasing heating and cooling costs.