by teddlesruss dat who

Created on: September 09, 2009   Last Updated: September 11, 2009

Energy auditing brings up visions of men with briefcases and suits crawling all over your appliances?

Maybe not so much. Your energy audit should encompass more than just a quick survey of the toaster, the number of lightbulbs, and the central heating.

Your greatest energy cost in the home is always going to be temperature related in winter, you don't want cold air pouring in through cracks and inadvertently left open vents, and in summer you'd probably prefer it if the cold air stayed inside the house instead of cooling your surroundings.

There are other articles in this topic which describe in detail how you can check for these thermal energy leaks and fix them, generally resulting in a significant percentage of energy saved. I leave that exercise to those articles, because there are far more things to cover. For my purposes, let me say that windows that emanate chill in winter and radiate heat in summer are probably a good lace to start. Any drafts are next, and then uninsulated spots in walls and ceilings.

Presented as an exercise are the following examples of other things you should think of in an audit of the energy requirements and how to reduce them. Think about the stove in winter, it's a good source of heat, but the range hood is designed to conduct heat and cooking smells outside. It doesn't differentiate between stove heat and the warmth your central heating system is trying to put in the air. Try and have a system which can be used to direct heat outside in summer, but be switched to filter and return the hot air in winter. If you use your stove and oven for appreciable periods of time, this alone can save you an appreciable amount of energy.

While we're on the topic of heat sources, what about the fridge? A fridge is a heat pump, it pumps heat out of the compartment to the outside. It's not very efficient, so it introduces some extra conversion heat as well, some fridges double what they are pumping out of your food in heat. So then you open the door and that doubled or trebled heat flows around and gets back in, raising the temperature of the compartment, and the fridge pumps that out and adds it's double overload... The solutions here are to make sure that the fridge has a range hood or vent that will take the waste heat outside the house. Another substantial energy saving,

More energy, of course, is consumed by the fridge or the stove itself, this also has to be included in your energy audit both before these changes are made and afterwards, to give you an idea of how much was being wasted before.

Now add up the wattages of devices you use such as washing machines, hot water systems, vacuum cleaners, clothes dryers, toasters and kettles, that Geo Forman grill, the TVs, the PCs, the laptops, any monitors, routers, external hard drives etc. Find the vampire power of any instant-on devices that you don't unplug completely, and add it all up, as a before and after exercise. You may be surprised.

To help you, there are sites out there which will allow you to get estimates of what various machines and appliances use per hour, and some have a suggested number of hours per day of use as well.

Most people should be able to reduce their energy footprint (AN their bill!) by 15% to 25% with a few simple changes, and some may be able to make a far higher percentage. Now go out there and take inventory!

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