By Jim Cavan

When you’ve been through a hot spell like the ones we’ve seen in New Hampshire this summer, you can imagine a few businesses that would benefit from the rising mercury: lemonade stands and ice cream trucks, air conditioner retailers, water parks.

And energy auditors? It’s true. Just ask Mike Grecco.

For Grecco, owner of Affordable Weatherization Solutions, business has been booming.

“People are finding that, with all this heat, they just can’t keep the air conditioners going to keep the house cool,” explains Grecco. “In a lot of cases we’re talking substantial homes that people paid a lot of money for, and they just keep throwing money out the window because the house is full of holes.”

People often believe – falsely – that newer homes are better insulated and more efficient than older homes. Not true, says Grecco.

“Just because the houses are expensive doesn’t mean they aren’t poorly done,” he explains. “A lot of times builders are afraid to quote or build in the cost for better insulation because they’re worried the buyer won’t go for it. But when we’re talking about a $500,000 house, what’s a few extra grand for quality windows or insulation?”

Over the summer, Grecco’s clients included an inordinate number of homes built in the middle of the decade. Because the owner’s had three or four solid years of watching their energy bills rise and rise, they turn to energy auditors like Grecco to essentially stop the bleeding. Indeed, Grecco claims that while most homes more than 15 years old have an 80 percent chance of being improperly insulated, the newer homes simply don’t have enough insulation to begin with.

How does an energy audit work? First, a homeowner will contact AWS, at which point AWS sends out a brief questionnaire to get a basic sense of the home, its owners, energy use, lifestyle, and layouts of the house (where the attics or basements are, etc). At that point the team will come to the site and inspect literally every nook and cranny in the house – from the windows and doorframes to attics, basements and crawl spaces you might never have known existed.

One of the methods AWS uses involves conducting a “blower door test”, where they hook up what most resembles a giant, inflatable camping-ready sleeping pad to your door, in order to calculate how much wind is moving throughout the space at any given time. At that point the crew figures out where the source of the “leak” is.

As Grecco puts it, “Nine times out of ten, if you’re standing in a room that’s cold, the problem lies somewhere else in the house.”

The job of AWS is to find that problem area.

Another aspect of the audit involves what is called a thermographic scan, which basically looks behind the walls and into a house‘s nooks and crannies, to find out where leaks are. Sometimes it might be the 15 year old insulation, while other times it might be the quality of the insulation itself. In that sense, each house is different, and poses different challenges for reading and measuring.

After the audit is conducted, AWS provides a comprehensive, detailed analysis of their findings, giving the customer their best interpretation of the problems and how to best mitigate them. Depending on the findings, Grecco recommends any one of AWS’s many subcontractors for everything from insulation to alternative energy options, window installation, and more.

How effective can all this be? After doing an audit and making improvements to the envelope of his girlfriend’s home, the oil company actually called her thinking she had switched to another provider. She hadn’t switched, of course – that’s just how much more efficient her home had become.

That’s not to say Grecco doesn’t have any competition: energy auditors make up one of the fastest growing occupations in the country. But it’s not the professional auditors that Grecco has a problem with.

“There are some guys out there doing audits for $50. Of course, it’s a scam,” he explains. “For a lot of these ‘auditing’ outfits, their primary thing is remodeling. So what they do is, they give you the $50 audit, but it’s tied to doing thousands of dollars of work – insulating, windows, or whatever.”

What’s worse, according to Grecco, is that the “work” they end up doing ends up being of poor quality, meaning the audit itself was all for naught.
Obviously, that’s not how Grecco and AWS do things. “We have a motto of sorts: don’t pay us to do the things you can do on your own; pay us to do the things you can’t do.”

Instead of pushing thousands of dollars worth of windows, Grecco first tries to identify the little things a homeowner can do to help bolster the home’s envelope. Sometimes the fixes are cheap and simple: repairs to the old, seldom used cellar door; new door sweeps to help seal in heat; improving window trim; and the like.

But even if the repairs needed are big and potentially expensive, Grecco does his best to show the customers how such an investment will only save them money down the road, boasting a veritable who’s who of local contractors capable of doing the job right the first time.

According to Grecco, for every dollar of energy saved by bolstering energy efficiency in homes, between 5 and 6 dollars is created in the economy. Because heating a home -- particularly with fossil fuels -- is so energy and labor intensive from start to finish, the argument is by using less of it, more resources are allocated throughout the economy.

So not only is Grecco’s business one of the few thriving in this tough economy; AWS is also helping business and home owners save the kind of money which – when it’s not literally flying out the door in the form of hot or cold air – can truly help us get back on our collective feet.