“Home performance” might not be a term that every homeowner in the Metro Phoenix area—including Mesa, Scottsdale, and Chandler—is familiar with, but the ways in which different systems in your house interact with each other has wide-ranging effects on how much money homeowners spend every year to stay cozy and healthy indoors.
Are you interested in lowering your energy bills and improving your home comfort but don’t know where to start? Here are five home performance projects to schedule with a home energy contractor that will help you see real changes this year in your utility bills and get you ready for our hot Arizona summer!
1. Schedule a Home Energy Audit
One the biggest benefits of starting out any home performance upgrades with an energy audit is that an audit will help you feel comfortable that the money you’re investing in retrofits to your house will be put to the best use.
A home energy audit is a series of inspections and diagnostic testing designed to evaluate your home’s current efficiency levels and identify specific areas of weakness where improvements can be made. We offer a few different energy audit options – one is a free visual audit of your home’s duct work (for leaks, kinks, and improper design), air conditioning system, window shading, and insulation levels. The other is a $500 diagnostic energy audit that uses tools like infrared cameras and blower doors, where our home performance company can test the airtightness of your home as well as your insulation levels. That diagnostic service starts at $500 and goes up from there.
The home energy audit checklist we work through for every home will help us gather valuable information about the condition of your home and make recommendations for projects that will immediately upgrade your home’s energy efficiency. To understand what approach to take, it’s best if we schedule a phone consultation!
2. Air Seal Your Windows and Doors
Home comfort doesn’t just depend on how powerful your HVAC systems are. If you have tiny cracks and gaps in the walls of your home, a significant amount of air could be moving in and out of your home. That can lead not only to wasting expensive conditioned air from your furnace or air conditioner, but can create inconsistent temperatures throughout your home as well.
The areas around the windows and doors in your home are a common location for air leaks. Taking weatherization steps like weatherstripping around these parts of your house can go a long way towards ideal indoor temperatures, no matter what month of the year it is. Plus, it helps to decrease the amount of dust that gets inside your home!
3. Upgrade Your Insulation
Do you know how old the insulation is in your house? Do you know how competent the original insulation installers were?
Contrary to some homeowners’ beliefs, insulation doesn’t just keep you warm inside your home during the winter—it also works to keep the hot air out in the summer so you’re cool and comfortable in your house. But if there are areas of your home’s thermal boundary that were never insulated, or insulation was incorrectly installed, or your home is simply old enough that your insulation has settled or fallen prey to moisture, pests, or old age, you could benefit significantly from removing your old insulation and replacing it. SRP has a $600 insulation rebate you can take advantage of if you use an approved SRP contractor!
4. Install Shade Screens
Installing shade screens on sun struck windows helps drastically reduce the heat gain on your home. It’s important that shade screens are installed on the outside of your window to get the most bang for your buck and we recommend a minimum of 80% shade screens – 90% shade screens will block even more heat gain! Whether you have single pane or double pane windows, installing shade screens will help with those pesky hot rooms in the summer! SRP also offers $.80 per square foot rebates back to help offset the cost of mitigating our Arizona sun!
5. Improve Your Indoor Air Quality
Did you know that the inside of houses usually have several times the levels of pollutants and contaminants as the outdoors? That’s, in part, due to how confined a space your home is, but poor indoor air quality can also be caused by your HVAC system—your air conditioner or your furnace or boiler as well as your ductwork.
From heat recovery ventilators and CO detectors to home ventilation systems, Ideal Energy will help filter the air you and your family are breathing in your house and ensure that your indoor air quality is high.
Make the Changes That Will Save You Money with Ideal Energy
Whole home performance can be a complex issue, but Ideal Energy makes the process of upgrading your home simple, with immediate cost-saving benefits for homeowners.
As a Home Performance with ENERGY STAR Contractor of the Year, our team of home performance specialists has the expertise and experience to identify the unique issues affecting your home and recommend the solutions that will make a difference. Plus, with available home performance project rebates and incentives through APS and SRP, you can save hundreds more on your upfront energy efficiency investments.