I Suck At Energy Audits

yesterday, karen and i had our first ever energy audit. now, i suck at energy audits.

when karen and i purchased our digital programmable thermostat from a while back, there was an accompanying rebate. the rebate made the somewhat expensive purchase more palatable... well as palatable as purchasing a thermostat can be. unfortunately, the rebate was only good for nstar customers. it so happens that karen and i are national grid customers.

not to be undeterred from getting the elusive rebate, i went to masssave, which was the company behind the rebate for nstar. i simply wanted to see if masssave had a similar rebate for national grid customers. lo' and behold, they did!

the catch, however, was that our house had to have an energy audit performed. naturally, when there is a catch, one normally thinks "oh no!". in fact, i thought the worst when i heard about having an energy audit for a rebate. it turns out, the energy audit is free!

of course, i inquired how this could be true: a free energy audit and a rebate. it turns out that on every customer's bill, there is a small charge for "conservation". it is this small charge that pays for the energy audit. and as the representative told me, i'm already paying for it (even if i don't know about it), so i might as well use it.

so needless to say, the energy audit was yesterday. i was quite interested in seeing what the audit would reveal about the house. to sum things up: the house that karen and i live at is doing well. the attic is great; the crawlspace basement... not so good; the hot water heater on the first floor... also not good. and the best part of the whole experience: the free schwag.

the auditor basically switched out about 18 flood light bulbs and replaced them with their compact fluorescent equivalents. the auditor also switched out 3 shower heads for more water saving shower heads. it was great... especially since everything was free.

needless to say, i would definitely recommend to anyone that they have this energy audit performed on their house... just for the free light bulbs alone. i can't wait for two more years, which is when the auditor suggested having another energy audit performed. it was great.