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 The purpose of Home Energy Checkup is to provide a quick economic analysis of potential energy efficiency retrofits in a single family home. To use this program, you need to enter information about your climate, energy prices, heating and cooling equipment, and appliances, and the program will then allow you to evaluate retrofit options.
Bullets at the bottom of the page provide general information about the program ("Getting started"), direct links to the five sections of the program ("Jump to section"), and further information about energy efficiency and economics ("Additional info").
When the program is running you need to enter information about where you live, what kind of energy-using appliances you have, and what energy efficiency improvements you are considering. The five sections in the main window are:
- Climate: click on the "Climate Zone Map" button to determine which U.S. climate zone you are in, then select the name of that zone in the climate pull-down menu. If you want to analyze a typical U.S. residence, you can use the "National average" setting.
- Equipment: here you select the type of heating system, cooling system, and water heater you have installed in your house. This is important, because different types of heating and cooling equipment have extremely different economic characteristics. If you are unsure of the equipment you have installed, you can select the "Unknown/typical" setting, which provides an average value for different equipment types.
- Fuel cost: the economic return on energy efficiency improvements depends on how much money you will save in reduced energy costs, and therefore what prices you pay for various types of energy. In the program, energy costs are represented by three values: "low", "medium", and "high". Click on the "help estimating" button to get assistance in figuring out which of these values is appropriate for you to select. If you are unsure of your energy prices, leave the settings on "medium".
- Efficiency measures: this section is a breakdown of the appliances and components of your house that consume energy and water. There are two things you need to do to analyze specific energy and water efficiency improvements. First, you need to set the "Existing" value of each component to what is presently installed in your house. Each component is listed as "low", "medium", or "high" efficiency, (or as "leaky", "average", or "tight" for components related to air leakage). You should click on the "estimating" button to determine which setting is appropriate for each component in your house. You should then set the "New" value of each component to the same as the value you entered for "Existing". Now, you are ready to make changes to the "New" settings for various components, and the program will provide you with immediate feedback on the economic and pollution reduction consequences of making that specific change. Note that if you would like practical advice on taking specific energy efficiency actions you can click on the "doing it" button associated with each component. This provides a few quick tips and suggests organizations and other resources to contact for further information.
- Summary: this is a summary of the economics and pollution reduction associated with making the changes to your house. It provides an estimate of your energy and water bills broken down by major sector, and estimates the economic and pollution savings you would realize by making the efficiency improvements you specified in the previous section.
Other Notes
- The "scorecard" at the very bottom of the screen is a recap of the last line of the summary so you can track results as you make changes in the input sections.
- If you want to clear the entire worksheet and start over, use the "reload" or "refresh" feature of your web browser.
- In the main Home Energy Checkup window with all of the graphics and buttons, is very important to let the entire document load before clicking on anything. If you click prematurely, the program will likely produce an error. If this happens, please select "reload" or "refresh" in your web browser.
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