Services

Home Energy Consulting

Home Energy Audit services are designed not simply to provide reports about your home energy usage and improvement recommendations, but also advice for human behavior changes that can reduce energy costs through changing simple habits. This service is broken down into: Basic and Advanced.

What to expect

Thorough building envelope inspection, documenting findings with thermal imaging. Insulation evaluation for attic, walls and basement. Appliance review for major systems, furnace, AC, and hot water. Utility bill review. The final report will include recommended changes prioritized by most to least beneficial.

Inspection Philosophy

Recommendations based on best value. Since we don’t offer services to make these changes, we are motivated to help you save the most energy with the least effort / money. Our goal is to find issues that if corrected, should be able to pay for themselves with a single year as these provide the greatest value. We also try to keep things simple to understand, while still providing evidence for our recommendations.

Off-Grid Consulting

Off-grid in this context refers to electrical systems that are NOT connected to grid power. There are many options for electrical generation locally, but the most common in our area is solar, wind, hydro and generator. We don’t believe wind to be consistent enough in Western PA, thus have chosen not to offer designs utilizing it presently, but that could change based on circumstances. Our designs will focus primarily on solar with generator as a backup if workloads are critical.

Design Principals

• Minimize system and component maintenance requirements
• Clear written alignment of design with customer requirements with approval prior to system build
• Safety is critical, for both design and ongoing maintenance
• Design simplicity over cost, we will always prefer a simplified system over a cheaper system as long-term costs from complexity always add up costing the customer more in the end

For those interested in our more tangible design preferences, the list below will highlight some of those. Please note that this list is not exhaustive, and it often changes as new products are released and customer requirements differ.

Design Preferences (subject to change)

• Ground-mount or accessible solar panels (lowest maintenance)
• Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries when energy storage is needed
• Tightly integrated battery management system and inverter
• Mobile accessible data for monitoring entire system