Understanding Energy Audits: Harnessing the Power of Energy Efficiency / David Turnbull / Enerspec Energy

In this episode of the RAEdio Podcast, host Mark is joined by Dave Turnbull, President and Lead Energy Adviser of Enerspec Energy, to discuss how energy audits can help homeowners better understand their home’s energy efficiency, comfort and operating costs. Dave explains what happens during an audit and how tools like blower door tests and thermal cameras identify air leakage and insulation issues. This episode is a must-listen if you've ever wondered how an independent energy assessment can help homeowners prioritize upgrades and avoid unnecessary spending.

Key Topics:

• What an energy audit is and why homeowners may want one
• How EnerGuide ratings compare a home’s efficiency to today’s building code standards
• Why winter conditions can produce clearer audit results
• Common energy-efficiency concerns in older homes, additions, attics, windows and basements
• Questions buyers can ask to better understand a home’s future operating costs
• The connection between energy efficiency, basement comfort, rental suites and long-term tenant satisfaction

Website:
www.enerspecconsulting.ca

What is RAEdio Podcast?

The REALTORS® Association of Edmonton (RAE), founded in 1927, is a professional association of real estate brokers and associates in the Greater Edmonton Area and beyond.

Mark: 00:14

Welcome to the RAEdio Podcast brought to you by RAE, the Realtors Association of Edmonton. So that's the RAE in our radio. We deliver easy to understand market insights, some homeowner tips, perspectives from industry experts so that you can feel informed and empowered wherever you are in your home ownership journey. Because better decisions start with better information. Dave Turnbull is president and lead energy adviser of EnerSpec Energy, which does consulting and home inspections.

Mark: 00:44

And hopefully, you'll learn a few things about improving your home's energy efficiency and maybe what to look for when buying a home. Dave, welcome.

David: 00:52

Thanks. Great to be here.

Mark: 00:54

So let's start off with probably how you start off, which is which is the energy audit, which is what you have to do, right, to to do a lot of these home improvements. Tell me some of the reasons why a homeowner would want an energy audit.

David: 01:06

Well, there's a few. The most the most common one is is when there's rebate money and and programs available, which there aren't currently, but there are there is some local funding under a program called SEEP, and that does require an audit. So those are usually the first things we see, but we also get a number of calls. I'm going out to one this afternoon where a person's got some energy over consumption, shall we call it, And they're really concerned about it, and they wanna see where it's coming from and get some advice on how to fix it.

Mark: 01:41

So I had an energy audit. Oh, this was a long time ago on our house. Wanna say fifteen or twenty years ago. And they they opened the doors, and they did what I think is called a blower. Is is that is that sort of standard?

Mark: 01:54

Maybe explain to people what that is and maybe some of the other things you might do.

David: 01:59

Yeah. So energy audits have changed a little bit since then. Technology's kinda taken over and but, yes, we still do a blower door test, and that's the that's kind of the calling card for the energy advisers. We put a massive fan in your front door, and I tell people we're trying to suck all the air out, which is not really the case. What we do is we depressurize the home to 50 pascals, which mimics 30 kilometer an hour wind on all four sides of the home.

David: 02:31

Oh. And from that, we can tell how much air leakage there is in the home, you know, in terms of air changes per hour. So we take the volume and and that and calculate it. But we can also tell you how big of a hole. If we were to take all the small little cracks and crevices and holes in your building envelope, because everybody has them, and we were to put them all into one big piece, how big would it be?

Mark: 02:58

And that tells you how bad and how leaky your home is. Because obviously Exactly. In our in our, you know, environment, you're looking at, especially in the winter, warm air leaking out of your home, and that's where you lose a lot of money, I would expect. Right?

David: 03:11

Yeah. Well, depending on how old your home is, yeah, it can be 30% of your energy bill. Wow. Yeah. It's it's huge.

David: 03:19

But, you know, some of the other things that we do is, you know, we test your windows. We go through the home and basically draw it. We check out and your mechanical systems go up into your attic, check your insulation in different in different places. And then what we do after that is we throw it into some software from Enercan. And what that does is that gives us what everybody knows as an EnerGuide label.

David: 03:45

Okay. And these are the same kind of energy labels that you see on refrigerators, furnaces, all that sort of stuff. Right? So people are familiar with it.

Mark: 03:55

So that's kind of the rating of your home. This is how energy efficient it is or isn't.

David: 03:59

Yeah. And what it is now, when you had it done, it was a scale from zero to a 100. Okay. Depending on how old your home was, it may or may not have got closer to a 100 or not. In today's scale, what it is is it's a comparison against a your home, your exact home, if we were to build it to today's building code.

David: 04:20

Oh. So you're it's it's a comparison of your home to pretty much a newer home.

Mark: 04:28

So when you're doing the audit, first of all, how long does that process take? Sounds like it would be a full day thing.

David: 04:34

Not not quite a full day. But, yeah, generally, we were talking earlier about your son's semi bungalow. Yep. Those, those homes, to do them properly, we're probably on-site for two, two and a half hours.

Mark: 04:50

Okay.

David: 04:51

Yeah. People think we're casing the joint because we take pictures of everything, but that it it's the it's the government doing it. But yeah. It it's about a two and a half it should be a two and a half hour process.

Mark: 05:04

Now Dave mentions my son that before we got onto the podcast, I was telling him he was looking at, you know, possibly solar, how would that work, that kind of thing. So when you when you do the energy audit, how do you tell where the energy is lost? You know, you you use the blower, and that gives you, say, how big your hole is, so to speak. How do you tell where those individual places are? You're testing the windows, different places.

Mark: 05:28

How do you know where that air leakage is in? Like, are you use I I think or you have to smoke throw a little smoke here and you'll see which way it goes, but maybe that's not right.

David: 05:37

Smoke is our u is is our is our product of last resort.

Mark: 05:42

Okay.

David: 05:42

In our in our company, now I can't say this for every company because it's not required by Intercan, but where we can, we tend to use thermal cameras.

Mark: 05:52

Oh, okay.

David: 05:53

With thermal cameras, you know, there's a misconception that you can actually see the cold air coming in. You can't. But you see how the cold air affects the adjacent surfaces. And and we can tell by that, you know, how bad the leak is and and and where it is. We can actually pinpoint it.

David: 06:15

With with smoke, you know, it used to be back in back in your day, it was actually a fairly toxic substance. Nowadays, it's all water based. But Right. It's also it's also a little harder to demonstrate. We we usually take our homeowners around while the blower door is running, take them with a thermal camera, then we can actually show them on the camera where the leakage is.

David: 06:36

And it gives the homeowner a really good idea of, you know, what they might wanna look at with some caulking or some spray foam or something like that. Additionally, we have also found bees nests, squirrel nests, all all kinds of critters. We have found missing insulation. We have found water leaks, all that sort of stuff. Well, just while we're doing that test.

Mark: 07:01

Right. Now would it make a difference just because I'm thinking about the difference in the in the in the air temperature outside to inside your home? Is it better to do these tests at any particular time of year, like in the spring or the fall when there's a bit of a difference, but maybe not when it's 30 below?

David: 07:18

Actually, 30 below is when we get the best results. Oh. The the larger the temperature difference, the better it shows up on the thermal camera. Right. Additionally, in the winter, that is when your home is driest.

David: 07:31

So all the wood and everything tends to shrink a little bit. Mhmm. So that does expose some gaps as well that you may not see in the middle of summer per se.

Mark: 07:40

Oh. Alright. What areas of the home would you look at most during the like, where where do you think the biggest problems might be in most homes? Because I I'm understanding you look you look everywhere pretty much.

David: 07:50

We look everywhere. Yes. And and it and it varies depending on the house, depending on the age of the house, if it's been renovated. Additions are one of my favorite things to go looking at because they almost always leak something horrible. Right.

David: 08:05

But yeah. Every home is different. Every home is unique, so we can't really say for sure. When we're looking at new homes because, you know, they're they're inspected and everything like that, we generally don't find anything massively wrong with them as far as the building envelope and things like that go because it's all inspected. Older homes because they weren't necessarily done that way.

David: 08:28

They tend they tend to be, obviously a little bit leakier, but they also have you know, that's that's where we find missing insulation in some places, and we find, you know, that that that's where we also find some of the big air leaks where somebody may have just drilled a hole someplace and left it. Mhmm. And and it may not even be the current homeowner. It it could have been somebody from way before.

Mark: 08:53

You know, one of the things that people have issues with their homes might be, say, ice damming. Would an energy audit be valuable in a case like that?

David: 09:04

Ice damming is is a is a pretty common thing. It has to do with heat loss along the edge of the home. So it's it's heat loss from inside of the home going up through the exterior wall and into the smallest space where there's insulation in the attic. Right. And it's and it's more common in older homes.

David: 09:26

We don't get it too much in new homes because Mhmm. We build the trusses, the trusses have what we call higher heels. So we actually get more insulation there in new homes than we did in the old ones. But an energetic can absolutely identify some of the other causes because there's a couple of causes that'll do it. Like, a a lot of times, it can it can be just the heat loss, but sometimes it's air loss through there.

David: 09:50

And again, when we do the blower door test, we can identify that.

Mark: 09:54

You know, when I think of an energy audit, to me because you could have someone come in to give you an estimate, I got this problem, can you tell me what it is? And the insulator's gonna come in and say, yeah, you need more insulation. And the guy with the caulking gun says, well, can do it with more caulking. Whereas an energy audit is kind of independent, you know what I mean? Like, you're looking at it and saying, okay, this this is what you should do, and this is the kind of contractor you can hire to do that.

Mark: 10:16

It it's almost like an independent arbitrator you've paid to give you that advice.

David: 10:22

Yeah. We have to remain neutral. We are licensed by the government of Canada. As such, we are not allowed to recommend products or contractors, so we cannot be affiliated with anything. The only product we have to sell is our service.

David: 10:36

And and we're for the most part, I can't speak to other companies, but I'm pretty sure it runs this way. We're pretty much energy agnostic, in the in the sense that we're gonna come into your home and, you know, you may be saying you you may have an energy audit and say, you know what? I'm looking at solar because we were talking about that earlier.

Mark: 10:58

Right.

David: 10:59

But we may come back to you and and we're gonna say, okay. Here's what happens if you do solar. Here's what happens if you improve your building envelope, change your windows, make it airtight, and we itemize that in a report. So then you can maybe make a a better decision in terms of what's gonna be your better return on investment.

Mark: 11:18

Right. Because you might think, know, I'm gonna get solar. That's gonna help so much. But you've got so many problems with the envelope that you really need to deal with that first. Right?

Mark: 11:25

A lot of those things would be you'd have to nail those down before you go to something that that like solar that obviously brings you in more energy. But if you're leaking energy in a in a great way, you're fighting against that.

David: 11:38

Exactly. Yeah. And and solar does not make your home more comfortable.

Mark: 11:43

Right. Now how often do homeowners you know, how often are they surprised by some of the things you find? And and what kind of feedback do you get from them?

David: 11:55

I I would say every single time we go out, you know, we we generally surprise the people that we're doing the energy audit for. A number of years ago, the province had a had a program whereby they would send people into people's in into your home, and they would replace showerheads and light bulbs.

Mark: 12:17

Right.

David: 12:18

And there's still a large perception in the public that that's still what it is. And then we show up with basically the whole back of SUV full of full of gear and ladders and everything, and we're spending two and a half hours ransacking your house. The the the people are really really quite surprised. And then they get the reports and the the detail that we're that we get into and the best specificity that we get into, they're quite they're they're always quite surprised by that.

Mark: 12:53

Mhmm. Now you mentioned that often when you go to a home that's had a, say, an addition put on, that's where you'll you'll bring some things up that people might not be aware of. If someone was gonna do a renovation, even if it's not an addition, even if they're just use you know, changing things within their home, is there a good time to do an energy audit? Should you do that before you do the reno, or after you do the reno to find out where the problems are?

David: 13:19

You you wanna do it before. Suppose I could tell you that somebody could come to your door, knock on the door, and say, hey, you know what? I can do this for you, and it's gonna save you all this energy. And it's $10.12, $15,000, what whatever the number is. Yeah.

David: 13:42

And you know, what an energy adviser will do is they'll come in and they'll say, okay. Here's a whole bunch of things you can do. But if you and then one of the values that we offer is that, you know, we may look at that particular thing and say, yeah. You know what? That will save you energy, but it will cost you money.

David: 14:00

Right. So the the proposition that I always ask people is, do you wanna pay an extra $10,000 so that you can pay an extra 6 or $800 a year on your utility bills. Although you save month, you save energy, but because you're switching you're switching sources of energy, your cost on that source is so ridiculously higher. Right. It's just not worth it.

Mark: 14:33

I I guess that brings you you know, sort of a related question might be that an energy audit could help you avoid spending money on upgrades that might not deliver the result you were expecting.

David: 14:45

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Mark: 14:48

Are there questions people should ask when they're buying a home to better understand future operating costs, or even if the home itself has had an energy inspection. And in the buying process, this is maybe a separate question, but is an energy audit possible during the buying process, or is it something you do after you bought the home?

David: 15:11

Good questions all. Yep. So when when you're when you're looking at at at buying a home, an exist let's let's pick an existing home because new homes will be a little bit different. Sure. If we're buying an existing home, you know, you have you you know, you have a home inspector that comes out and tells you if there's anything, you know, massively wrong.

David: 15:31

Like, if, you know, if there's leaks or some or things like that. But they don't really get necessarily into the energy profile of the home. So some questions you, you know, that you wanna ask or or or you wanna ask when you're at least having the inspection, you know, you wanna look at the age of your mechanical equipment. You know, you wanna make sure that he does go up at least into the attic and and make sure that you've got a reasonable amount of insulation up there and that it's consistent. What we don't wanna see, and we do see it an awful lot because, you know, some people have stored things in their attic and stuff.

David: 16:08

So we've we go up and we see that the insulation is just just beat down something terrible, and that's absolutely doing nothing. Right. So we wanna you know, you wanna make sure that that your inspector addresses those things. To the point of, can we get an energy audit beforehand? Yes.

David: 16:30

It is the short answer. If you're looking for an EnerGuide label, an EnerGuide label has to be requested by the current homeowner. Okay. But we can do an energy audit without one for anybody.

Mark: 16:46

Yeah. I would think that it might not be worth it in the buying process. I mean, I'm not sure what it would reveal that would make you not wanna buy that house.

David: 16:58

Exactly. Yeah.

Mark: 16:59

Something spectacular. I mean, there's probably all kinds every house, I would think, has its issues. Right?

David: 17:04

Oh, absolutely.

Mark: 17:05

Yeah. What are some misconceptions people have? You mentioned the one where people thought you're, you know, you're coming in to change the light bulbs. Are there any other misconceptions about energy audits that people might have?

David: 17:16

No. Not really. I I think people are genuinely curious about it. Mhmm. We we have and we welcome this.

David: 17:25

You know? People are welcome to walk around with us while we do this sort of thing. We will pretty much every energy adviser here will wax poetic as long as anybody will listen. So, you know, we're we're happy go along, tell people what we're doing, why we're doing it, what the results are in real time. So there's, you know, there's not a lot of misconceptions that way.

David: 17:47

There I I guess the one big misconception is, you know, is the value when there's not a program. Again, like we had talked about earlier, not only can we tell you how to improve the home and give you basically a road map to doing it. But we can also prevent you from doing things that you shouldn't.

Mark: 18:12

Okay. That's interesting. So what are some things

David: 18:15

that people shouldn't do? Well, when we're when we're talking to people about renovations and things like that, again, going into, upgrades that may not necessarily save them money. They're gonna cost you money, but there's no return on it, that doesn't really have a large benefit or the benefits are very small. And and that's part of the beauty of of the reporting system that we have is that we kind of stage it down. We give you kind of a a tiered list.

David: 18:48

Here's the first thing, second, third, fourth, fifth you can do, and here's what the energy savings are going to be. And the thing you may be thinking of might be item number seven out of 10.

Mark: 18:58

Okay. So so you give it a ranking as to this would be the best thing you could do down to lesser things.

David: 19:04

Yeah. Exactly.

Mark: 19:06

So when when you go in and do this, how do you price it? Are they all priced the same? Does it count is it square footage, or what would the average person pay? I I know I don't know what the average home is anymore. It used to be 1,200 square feet when

David: 19:19

I was

Mark: 19:19

a kid. Now it's more like 2,000. So Yeah. Let's say 1,500 square foot bungalow. What are you looking at?

Mark: 19:26

Or what do you look at when you price that?

David: 19:28

Yeah. So our pricing and it's not and it's not the same. It varies throughout the industry. But our pricing is based on the size and style of home that you have. For us, it's all about time.

David: 19:40

The bigger the home is, the more time we're gonna spend on-site and the more time we're gonna spend on the computer modeling. Right. So the the prices are adjusted accordingly. For the what you just asked about, that that's a $505,100 dollars plus GST. Mhmm.

David: 19:56

Like I say, we can be we're in and out of your home in two and a half hours, hopefully, unless we find some really crazy stuff. We will we will you know, if if we keep finding things, we're gonna stay there longer.

Mark: 20:09

Right.

David: 20:10

And then it's another two and a half to three hours on a computer as well.

Mark: 20:17

Do people also come to you and say, okay, I want to get the audit. I think I have this problem. Is is that often a thing you hear?

David: 20:23

We hear we hear two things. We hear my bills are too high. And and can everybody please stick up their hand whose bills are too high? Right. Exactly.

David: 20:35

But, you know, they they they feel that their bills are not in keeping with maybe what their last home was, And they feel that there might be something that that's running amok there. But, yeah, we also have I'm going out to one this afternoon where people think they know what their issue is. My suspicion is it's something different. But again, we will investigate it, and we will prove or disprove whatever theories we can come up with.

Mark: 21:07

One one area of the home that we didn't really touch on, which I'm curious about whether there's any impact or even study it is is say the the foundation in the basement, especially of an old home. Does that have an impact on energy consumption at all if you had cracks or if you had water coming or any you know, because a lot of these homes have sump pumps. They're going all the time. Do these things impact energy efficiency?

David: 21:29

They can to an extent. What what the what really affect, like, the the cracks and and if you have a high water table or if you have high moisture content in in your foundation, that really affects a lot of comfort as well because things feel damp. And when things feel damp, you automatically feel cold. Basements in particular, the the phrase that or the saying that I have is that basements are notoriously dark, damp, and cold. Right.

David: 22:01

And and our job as energy advisers in in my previous life as a home builder and stuff is to make them, you know, warm, dry, and comfortable. Right? Right. And the the the lighting lighting is is what handles the dark part. And unfortunately, you know, even throwing more windows into a basement doesn't always help.

Mark: 22:24

Mhmm.

David: 22:24

But the comfort and the and the and the warmth, we can handle with a good building envelope there. And, you know, we can give you suggestions for what you might wanna look at, and there's depending on the age of your home, there's different strategies for making a warm, comfortable basement.

Mark: 22:43

That would be great. I mean, I I think a lot of people, especially nowadays, are looking at, can I put a suite in my basement? How can I make that comfortable for somebody if somebody was gonna live there? There's a lot of those being built now, for sure, in the new builds, in infills, and that kind of thing. But I think it's something that people would consider except they think, oh, man.

Mark: 23:01

That basement sucks. I don't wanna live down there.

David: 23:03

Absolutely. And when we're doing basements doing basement suites, even in new homes, I'm I'm we're kinda fortunate in that we do deal with a lot of people that are developing these as rentals commercially, would suppose. And they understand if this is something that your listeners are looking at doing. The one of the largest costs that a landlord has is when a tenant leaves. Because usually, a place will stay empty for at least a month, and that's a month of revenue you don't have.

David: 23:38

Right. And one of the biggest reasons that people will leave, particularly a basement suite, is comfort. The the more comfortable you can make a space, the more likely it is that people will stay there longer, and that actually saves you money.

Mark: 23:55

Well, that leads me into my final question, which I didn't prep you for this, but I hope you're ready to answer it because we ask all of our guests this question at the end of our interview. And the question is, to you personally, what makes a house a home?

David: 24:11

Oh, jeez. You're asking a technical guy that question.

Mark: 24:14

That's right. This is a warm and fuzzy question.

David: 24:17

Yeah. Did I mention I'm a technical guy? No. What make what makes a house a home is is is the is the people that live in it. There's I I'm a technical person, but I also have a family.

David: 24:32

I have four four daughters who are fantastic, and I I couldn't picture a home without them. Yeah. But my my concern and my profession is the house. Yeah.

Mark: 24:44

Well, Dave, think you've got people given people a lot to think about. I think there's some great stuff there, and thanks so much for joining us to talk about it. We really appreciate it.

David: 24:53

It has been my pleasure.