As a Denver homeowner, you want to keep your home comfortable while also keeping energy bills and energy waste low. This is where home energy audits, blower door tests, and duct leakage tests come in.
As an independent testing company, e3 Power can provide unbiased, building-science based testing and data about your home. Here are the different ways that we can test your house’s energy efficiency and reveal the areas where energy efficiency improvements can upgrade your home.
Why Should I Care How Energy Efficient My Home Is?
Why test your home’s energy efficiency? By finding inefficiencies (and then fixing them), you can benefit from:
- Lower energy bills: An energy-efficient home wastes less energy, reducing your monthly utility bills.
- Improving indoor health and comfort: By identifying and addressing air leaks and insulation issues, you can make your home more comfortable year round.
- A home that’s better for the environment: Reducing energy waste is one of the easiest ways for homeowners to reduce their carbon footprint.
The Energy Audit: Your Home’s Energy Health Check
A home energy audit is akin to a medical check-up for your house. It’s about making sure your home’s energy use is healthy and efficient. Here’s how it works:
- A certified auditor from e3 Power will conduct a comprehensive inspection of your home, assessing your home’s building envelope (including insulation, windows, doors, and air leaks).
- Your audit will pinpoint where and how energy is wasted, and we’ll provide practical recommendations for improving the energy efficiency of your home.
Why conduct a home energy audit in Denver? Simply put, it’s a crucial first step towards understanding your home’s energy consumption and where it’s wasting energy.
Blower Door Tests: The Detective of Air Leaks
Blower door tests use a highly specialized building science tool—the blower door—for identifying air leaks within a home. It allows you to calculate how leaky your home is and makes identifying the location of air leaks much easier.
A blower door test uses a powerful fan that depressurizes your home, which exaggerates air leaks. This makes it easier to find even the smallest leaks. You can use blower door tests for new construction (it can be required in local Colorado building codes), but it’s equally useful in existing homes.
Blower door tests are included in e3 Power’s home energy audit process. As an independent auditor and blower door contractor, we are uniquely positioned to help homeowners identify those sneaky air leaks that contribute to energy waste.
Duct Leakage Tests: Ensuring Your Home Breathes Right
A duct leakage test, on the other hand, is all about ensuring your home’s ‘respiratory’ system—the HVAC system—is functioning effectively.
Ductwork distributes conditioned air throughout your home. However, leaks in these ducts can result in significant energy loss, not to mention poor indoor air quality. Unfortunately, in a typical house, 20 to 30% of the total air is lost due to ductwork problems. Duct leakage tests can help determine how leaky your home’s ductwork is.
In most cases, e3 Power is able to identify the sources of energy waste and comfort issues in a home during an energy audit, which doesn’t include duct leakage testing. However, we may suggest duct testing if we need to dive deeper in your home in order to get to the bottom of problems you’re experiencing.
Schedule Home Testing from e3 Power
At e3 Power, we want to give you the knowledge to make your home more energy-efficient. We offer unbiased, science-based home energy audits, including blower door tests, in the Denver area and other testing services to help you understand how to test the energy efficiency of your home. We don’t perform energy efficiency upgrades ourselves—instead, we offer unbiased data and recommendations you can trust, allowing you to make informed decisions about your home’s energy efficiency.
e3 Power has conducted more than 1,500 energy audits, 5,000 blower door tests, and 500 duct leakage tests throughout Colorado. See why local homeowners and commercial building owners trust our team for accurate, actionable energy efficiency analysis!
