When I was ready to have our home energy audit done I thought back about 14 years ago to when I first met Dan Thomson of the Building Doctors. Back then I was covering environmental issues in the South Bay Beach Cities for the newly launched Patch.com.

So I was there and was there a couple of years later when Dan conducted an energy audit demonstration in the just built Green Idea House in Hermosa Beach.

Dan used infrared handheld imaging devices to see inside walls and ceilings. And he did a blower door test to show how airtight the building’s shell was. I learned a lot from Dan and began to follow the Building Doctors work.

So when it came time to finally have our energy audit done here at our 1948 built home, I gave Dan a call and scheduled our Doctor’s exam.

Mark Hensley of the Building Doctors made the house call and he audited every square foot of our home from the outside, from the inside, from the attic to the crawl space and every place in between.

I liked the idea of the whole house performance checkup and finding out what condition our house’s condition was in. And I especially liked the idea of a detailed written report of the findings with recommendations for improvements. You’ll see screen shots from that report in this post.

Mark used infrared imaging to see about insulation in the walls, floors and ceilings.

He performed the world famous blower door test to measure air leakage in the house, pressurizing and depressurizing.

Here’s what those tests revealed.

From a big picture standpoint, here’s the results of all the tests done on where we were losing heating or cooling in our home’s “envelope.”

It seemed pretty obvious we should insulate the walls, attic and floors based on the report. Insulating the exterior walls looked like it would be the most intrusive process.

Before we began this process our attic was filled with over two hundred cartons of toys, books, files, memorabilia and the other flotsam and jetsam of 30 years of living in one place. But all that stuff wasn’t providing any insulation. It took almost 2 years to get it all out and get the attic ready to be insulated.

One thing we discovered was that if were going to have the attic insulated with blown in cellulose we would need to replace all our ceiling can lights. Here’s why –

We hadn’t even thought about insulating under the house, but it seemed like a smart idea.

In new construction, you don’t see this kind of breaks in the building envelope, but in our 70+ year old house we had plenty of these penetrations. Sealing them all up was logical.

Our house has a separate water heater closet off of the master bath. We were already looking to replace it as part of our de-gassification and electrification process, but the home energy audit gave us additional strong reasons to do so.

Again, we were looking to ditch our gas appliances to begin with, but in this video of Mark testing the CO2 level of our stove when the oven is first turned on, we got more of a sense of urgency to give it the heave ho.

If we got rid of the gas oven and replaced it with electric, the exhaust fan would be fine.

After getting this report and then getting the estimates for doing the work recommended we decided to approve 90% of all the improvements in order to change the climate address of our home.

Since we plan to stay in our house for the next 20-30 years, health willing, and because we know that the beautiful temperate climate beach weather that existed for so many years can no longer be counted on, but continuing extreme weather can, these moves make sense for us.

Maybe they make sense for you too. Next up The Building Doctors Go To Work. Measuring Their Success.