Do It Yourself: Energy Savings at Home
Energy audit

Watch the video:

Kathy Hopkins, University of Maine Cooperative Extension Educator: We had a frost last night and it’s starting to get cool, so you might be thinking about how you can button up your house and save some energy this year. One thing you want to do when you are thinking about that is to have an audit done or do a self-audit yourself. How can you tell which one you need? Well, if you’re applying for rebates or loans or things like that, you may need a professional audit done and in that case, you’ll need to call and line up someone to come do that.

While you are waiting for a professional audit or if you choose not to have one and just do it yourself, you can do a self-audit. You can get a little check list like this that we have and it will give you ideas of things to look at around your house and find ways to go around and find those leaks and penetrations that can make a big difference in your heating bill.

As you’re walking around doing your self-audit, you are going to look for joints and penetrations where air might be leaking in. You’ll be looking for insulation and how much you have and how much more you might need. You’ll also be looking for places where you might caulk, you’ll be looking for the quality of your doors and windows, the types you have, whether they’re well caulked around them or whether they’re allowing air to leak in. You’ll also be looking at things like your appliances inside and seeing whether those may need to be updated. There are a lot of things that anybody can do; there are low-cost changes you can make, moderate-cost changes and high-cost changes. The audit will help you go through all of those things and then make a decision on what you need to do and what you should try to do first.

So, check around the outside of your house, around the foundation, and look for cracks and leaks -- anything that opens from the outside to the inside could potentially have a place where air could get into the house. Cold air could get in. So, check for those, make sure they are filled in, they’re sealed and that they’re tight.

As part of your energy self audit when you walk around your house, you want to check your doors and windows to see if they’re drafting. You can make your own low-cost “draft checker” by taking a used feather out of your down vest if you have one or milk-weed pods if you get the seeds from those, or you can get a pencil and use some double sided tape and attach some little toilet paper strips to it. What you want to do is hold that up against the window when it gets colder and see if you have motion. If the strips or if the feather is being pulled toward the window and out, than you have a draft there. You are losing a lot of heat and you need to do something about that window.