Energy Saving is Just What the Doctors Ordered

Imagine losing so much energy through leaks and cracks in your home that it’s like keeping a window the size of a notebook open all the time, even with the heater or air conditioner on.

That’s what Robert and Monica Fortunato learned they were doing, unwittingly, after a visit from The Building Doctors.

The Fortunatos hosted a demonstration with The Building Doctors at their Hermosa Beach home on Saturday for a crowd of roughly 20 residents and community leaders. The mood was one of excitement and curiosity as the hour-long event conveyed the importance of having an energy efficiency audit conducted on one’s home. The Fortunatos are determined to turn their 51-year-old house into a net-zero energy dwelling.

“What we found was that if we dug to a deeper layer of what was really green that the answers weren’t that clear,” Monica Fortunato said. “There’s the surface green of ‘I want to be green’ and then there’s another layer of what’s really green. And so to dig deeper into that layer we found it just took a lot of time.”

Dan Thomsen, founder and president of the Building Doctors, a year-old company based in Los Angeles, performed a few of the tests Saturday that his company offers — a blower door test and infrared scanning.

In the blower door test, a fan is fixed to a flexible nylon frame on a door and pulls air out of the house to de-pressurize it. Once de-pressurized, the higher air pressure outside of the house helps find openings in the house when a smoke puffer is used, sending smoke drifting toward any leaks.

An infrared scanner is then used to determine the surface temperature of places in the house. While still de-pressurized, the hand-held machine allows the team to determine where more air leaks are and where insulation is poor or missing.

In addition to the tests demonstrated at the Fortunato’s, the $500 dollar energy audit includes a combustion safety test to ensure that harmful emissions like carbon monoxide aren’t at dangerous levels in the home when it’s sealed for the blower door test. Additionally, a duct blaster test is performed to check leakage in ducts in the home.

Thomsen told the Fortunatos that they were losing the energy equivalent of having a 9-inch square hole open in their home 24 hours a day. The energy audit provided them with the data that will help them address those leaks when they start retrofitting their home this summer.

Mayor Michael DiVirgilio, who attended the demonstration, said that he’s spoken to Thomsen about conducting energy audits on the city’s buildings and is hoping that they will be able to save the city money by cutting unnecessary energy usage.

“The real impact that we as individuals and as a community can have on the environment is also something that will impact us immediately with our budget,” DiVirgilio said. “A lot of the time the fixes are very easy or low cost.”

Thomsen said the Building Doctors guarantee energy savings of at least 20 percent and up to 50 percent with proper retrofitting. “People are becoming more aware of it — it’s becoming more common speak,” Thomsen said.

“Obama is talking about blower door tests and how insulation is sexy. It’s starting to become part of everybody’s vocabulary… people are starting to get it.”