During the formidable upstate winter season, it can be quite a challenge to stave off frostbite without jacking up thermostats or making the transformation into a mountain of blankets and comforters. With this in mind, I met up with Stacy Gage from Blueox, to conduct a comprehensive home energy audit on a Gibbon Road residence for this week’s edition of Punching the Clock. The home energy audit is a free service provided by Blueox to make sure homeowners are aware of the money they may be wasting on their heating and electric bills.
“So many homes need to have energy audits done because they are wasting so much money,” Gage told me. Homeowners don’t need to be Blueox costumers and Gage could not stress enough how the service is free. “Not many companies like ours supply this service,” he told me. What could Blueox possibly hope to gain from saving people money on their energy bills, I wondered. The pay back is in the long term Gage explained – homeowners’ appreciation for all the money they save because of the audits, sometimes wins them over as costumers from competitors. Other times the improvements which can be made are services Blueox provides, though not always. But more than anything, showing up at people’s homes and actively seeking ways to save them money, expounds the image of Blueox as a costumer friendly organization.
I was running a little late and by the time I arrived at Gibbon Road, Gage had already finished taking the dwelling’s dimensions. The next step in the hunt for maximum energy thriftiness, was to peruse the interior of the home, hounding out Energy Star efficient appliances. “We don’t sell them ourselves, but they will save homeowners a good deal of money,” Gage told me while proficiently inspecting a microwave’s Energy Star label.
After completing a thorough sweep of the kitchen, we headed downstairs for a much more involved diagnostic of the home’s furnace and water heating systems. It turned out we were in luck because the home had an oil burning furnace and electric water heating. In other homes heated with gas, Gage’s job is a wee bit more involved as he has to traverse the domicile while manning a device called a sniffer, which detects any gas in the air. He also has to manually follow the piping, performing a soup test on suspect junctions, to identify the leak locations. “In cases were I find a leak, I have to call the gas company and get them to shut it down until it can be fixed,” he told me, a process which can be time consuming indeed.
When we got to the basement, Gage took note of a number of different things before we moved on to the furnace. The basement floor was made of concrete, which Gage told me was good because concrete acts as a good vapor barrier and stops water from rising up into the home. But Gage did note how the ceiling lacked any substantial insulation, allowing cold air in the basement to seep up through the floor boards.
