Energy sleuths

February 27, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

Professionals scour houses looking for issues that make occupants uncomfortable

By Mary Beth Breckenridge

Akron Beacon Journal

AKRON

Matthew Pickston thinks of himself as a detective.

But instead of searching for clues to crimes, he looks for the causes of problems such as chilly rooms and damaging ice dams.

Pickston is a home-energy auditor, a professional who scours houses for issues that can harm structures, drive up energy bills and just make the occupants uncomfortable.

The process surprises some clients, who think an energy audit is concerned mainly with electricity use.

“Most people think I’m going to show up and start looking at their light bulbs,” he said.

Instead, energy auditors such as Pickston look at a house as a system. They consider how all the parts work together to affect a home’s energy efficiency and search for solutions to the more puzzling problems.

To get an idea of the kinds of issues a home-energy auditor can uncover, I tagged along recently with Pickston as he audited a home in Hudson, Ohio.

Pickston, a Pro Energy Consultants franchisee in Sagamore Hills Township, Ohio, does his sleuthing with the aid of an infrared camera, a chemical-smoke stick and a healthy curiosity.

Some problems are obvious, but finding the source of others requires a knowledge of building science and a bit of deductive reasoning.

After interviewing the homeowners about problems they’d noticed, he started his investigation by depressurizing the house using a blower door, a powerful exhaust fan that fits into an exterior door frame.

As air was sucked out of the house, outside air came rushing in to replace it through all the little cracks and openings in the home’s exterior.

It was as though a 10 mph wind were hitting all the outside surfaces of the house, he explained.

The depressurization exaggerated the normal flow of outside air through those openings, allowing Pickston to detect leaks more easily.

Then, room by room, he cased the house.

He examined each space with his infrared camera, which displayed temperature differences in vivid color — red for warm, blue for cold. A blue area with feathered edges indicated a flow of cold air, which he could verify by holding the smoke stick near the source to see where and how fast the smoke traveled.

Many of the tests showed the results he expected, such as windows that were colder than the adjacent walls and air that flowed through unblocked chimneys. But some results surprised him.

“What on earth is going on?” he said as he aimed his camera at an interior door separating the master bedroom from an attached bathroom and saw a rectangle of bright blue. “That’s insane.”

It turned out the bathroom was being remodeled, so cold air was seeping in through all the untaped drywall joints. But the big issue was a leaky exterior door in the room, which Pickston recommended replacing with an Energy Star-rated door.

A frigid first-floor office posed another challenge. Pickston could attribute part of the problem to the fireplace’s open damper, and he also suspected cold air was entering gaps in the chimney structure. But it wasn’t until he got to the basement that he spotted the biggest source of the problem: The heating duct to the room was disconnected.

Many of the issues he found were fairly common, such as ceiling light fixtures that were allowing heat into the attic, air leaks along baseboards and around window frames, and gaps around pipes that extended through exterior walls, the basement ceiling or the attic floor.

He also pointed out a common trouble spot: the rim joist, the place where the house’s framing meets the foundation. Often, the rim joist isn’t sealed or insulated properly, allowing heat to escape, he said. He suggested cutting pieces of rigid foam insulation to fit the empty spaces and then caulking around the edges for a tight air seal.

The goal in an energy audit isn’t to create a completely airtight home, Pickston said. That’s difficult when you’re retrofitting an existing home, he noted, and bringing in some outside air is beneficial.

Rather, the intention is to help homeowners set priorities so they can make the improvements that will most effectively reduce their energy use, he said.

Often, though, they find that lowering their heating and cooling bills isn’t the biggest payoff, he said.

It’s having a house they can live in more comfortably.