What exactly Energy audit is and the benefits involved with it.
An Energy Audit for a Building is a service where the energy efficiency of a Building is evaluated by a person using professional equipment (such as blower doors and infrared cameras), with the aim to suggest the best ways to improve energy efficiency in heating and cooling the house. An energy audit of a home may involve recording various characteristics of the building envelope including the walls, ceilings, floors, doors, windows, and skylights. For each of these components, the area and resistance to heat flow (R-value) are measured or estimated. The leakage rate or infiltration of air through the building envelope is of concern, both of which are strongly affected by window construction and quality of door seals such as weather stripping. The goal of this exercise is to quantify the building’s overall thermal performance. The audit may also assess the efficiency, physical condition, and programming of mechanical systems such as the heating, ventilation, air conditioning equipment, and thermostat. An energy audit may include a written report estimating energy use given local climate criteria, thermostat settings, roof overhang, and solar orientation. This could show energy use for a given time period, say a year, and the impact of any suggested improvements per year. The accuracy of energy estimates is greatly improved when the homeowner’s billing history is available showing the quantities of electricity, natural gas, fuel oil, or other energy sources consumed over a one or two-year period. Some of the greatest effects on energy use are user behaviour, climate, and age of the Building.
An energy audit may, therefore, include an interview of the Building owner to understand their patterns of use over time. The energy billing history from the local utility company can be calibrated using heating degree day and cooling degree day data obtained from recent, local weather data in combination with the thermal energy model of the building. Advances in computer-based thermal modelling can take into account many variables affecting energy use. An Energy audit is often used to identify cost-effective ways to improve the comfort and efficiency of buildings. In addition, homes may qualify for energy efficiency grants from the central government.
Recently, the improvement of smartphone technology has enabled homeowners to perform relatively sophisticated energy audits. This technique has been identified as a method to accelerate energy efficiency improvements. During an Energy Audit, equipment & instruments that are required are ultrasonic flow meter, anemometers, lux meters, DP manometers, temperature sensors, power analyser, and HOBO loggers to work at multiple sites simultaneously. We perform energy audit services for all types of HVAC systems, chiller plants, boiler plants, steam systems, compressed air pneumatic systems, refrigeration systems, lighting, and electrical systems. An energy audit is recommended to determine the energy consumption associated with a facility and the potential savings associated with that energy consumption.
From a general point of view, an energy audit provides enormous benefits in different areas:
- It helps reduce energy costs in your facility.
- With a reduction in production costs, the competitiveness of your company will be improved.
- It helps reduce the dependence on foreign energy sources.
- It helps reduce environmental damage and pollution.
- It can increase the security of your energy supply.
- It can reduce the consumption of natural resources.
- It can reduce damage to the environment associated with the exploitation of resources.
- It helps reduce the impact of greenhouse gas emissions.
At a particular level, among the major benefits of doing an energy audit are.
- It helps you to lower energy bills.
- It enables you to increase the comfort of those in the facility.
- It helps you to increase the life span of the equipment in your facility.
Advantages of an energy audit -
An energy audit will give you a list of action items, with estimated costs and benefits, to reduce your energy usage, energy costs, and carbon footprint. With this clear guidance, its easy to prioritize and know exactly what you need to do to reduce your energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions, how much you’ll need to spend, and what you can expect to save.
When undertaken by an experienced energy auditor:
- An auditor should be able to identify a greater number of savings opportunities than you could on your own.
- An auditor will be able to come up with an estimate of savings to an acceptable degree of accuracy (as determined by the audit scope).
- An auditor can identify likely desired and undesired consequences of a particular upgrade, and undertake calculations to quantify them.
Eg. In a cold climate, the auditor would quantify both the electricity savings arising from upgrading office lighting to high efficiency LED and the increased energy usage of the heating system to heat the buildings (as more efficient lights produce less heat, heat which usually helps keep the office warm). The maintenance savings from longer-lasting LEDs would also be identified.
- An auditor can give you up to date advice on specific technologies.
- An auditor can help you avoid investments in well-marketed technologies with dubious energy-saving potential.
- Identify low-risk measures - energy audit
- Identify low-risk measures – an advantage of an energy audit
Disadvantages of an energy audit -
- The key disadvantage of an audit is that it doesn’t save any energy. It won’t reduce your carbon footprint. Your energy bills won’t come down.
- It will tell you how to save energy, but action on the report’s recommendations needs to be taken to save energy.
Some other disadvantages are:
- The audit has a “use by date” or limited useful life. As technologies change, energy tariffs change, use of a facility changes, over time the recommendations and numbers in energy audits will become out of date. For this reason, energy audit standards generally consider that energy audits should be repeated every 3 years.
- An energy audit isn’t a design or work specification. You’ll still need to invest in design and specification to get a project “shovel ready”.
- The audit could be poorly done. Especially if you haven’t provided a clear scope of works to the auditor and been careful in auditor selection.
The results of an audit cannot be predicted beforehand. You don’t know whether or not you can cut your electricity usage by 25% with less than a one-year payback (not usual, but I’ve certainly seen this result), or by just 10% with a 6-year payback (at the other extreme, also rare, but I’ve also seen this result too).
In summary, an energy audit can identify energy consumption and energy costs of the facility and it can evolve over time to develop measures to eliminate waste, maximize efficiency, and optimize supply energy.
The energy audit affects three key factors:
- It discovers any unaccounted consumption that may exist at the facility's profitability through optimization of energy expenditure.
- Productivity through optimization of equipment and processes
- Performance, thanks to the rationalization of energy use.
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