HOME ENERGY SCORE UPDATE
SCORING MADE SIMPLE By ASHI Staff
Already a smart move, new advances make it easier than ever to deliver a
SCORE. Readers of this column—including attendees of InspectionWorld® in San Diego, for that matter—know that delivering the US Department of Energy’s Home Energy Score (HES) is becoming a viable and profitable service for home inspectors working across a wide range of business models. Many business owners have jumped through the DOE’s hoops to become Home Energy Score Certified Assessors™ after deciding that it’s worth the trouble—that the benefits to their businesses in increased sales, better networking and higher customer satisfaction represent a net “win” when compared with the inevitable effort of taking on a new service.
Every business owner knows that cost-benefit ratios like these can “tip” when either the benefit side changes (when homebuyers’ awareness levels shift, for example, or when policies are adopted that encourage the disclosure of energy usage at point of sale) or when the effort required to provide that service is substantially impacted. Important shifts are happening on both of those fronts right now, and this article will focus on the latter part of the equation—on what the DOE and ASHI’s partners have been working on to make the Home Energy Score a much easier service for home inspectors to deliver.
THERE’S (FINALLY) AN APP FOR THAT!
If you were at IW in January and walked past the ID Energy booth, chances are good that you were drawn into the enthusiasm tractor-beam created by Brent Loya as he demonstrated the new Home Energy Score app now being used by ASHI HES Assessors. “We’ve been developing the app since last year’s InspectionWorld® in response to the huge demand for it,” he told us during a much-needed break, “…and it’s finally here. You won’t believe how easy it makes delivering a Home Energy Score!” 8
ASHI Reporter • MARCH 2019
Brent Loya with ID Energy is excited about easy Home Energy Scores.
ID Energy took its extensive experience with both the DOE program and the home inspection industry to develop a handheld tool that pares down the process to generate a Score to the bare minimum, shaving off many unnecessary steps along the way. “The DOE’s Scoring Tool is a great platform,” Brent told us, “but there are so many redundant extra steps. We built in a lot of the required calculations already, which really speeds up the process and lets the inspector hand over the HES Report right there on the first visit if they want to.” The ID Energy team told us that they’re preparing for a surge in demand from ASHI home inspectors since many have been waiting for the “drop” of this time-saving app as the decisive factor in their own cost-benefit equations.
CONVENIENCE FOR CLIPBOARDERS, TOO
There are plenty of inspectors among us who continue to swear by the timeless reliability of pen and paper, and the DOE wants to show that these inspectors aren’t being left out of the simplicity loop. Collaborating with ID Energy, the Home Energy Score team has created a one-page sheet that contains every item needed to generate a Score, arranged in a way that makes the most sense for an inspector’s work process.
The multi-page “data collection sheets” that have been a part of the program from its earliest days required a lot of shuffling (not to mention a lot of trees), and the DOE tells us that the new sheet will deliver the kind of at-a-glance simplicity that inspectors deserve. The back of the sheet can be used for sketches and notes, and the whole layout is designed to correspond to the “paperless” software used by ID Energy so that clipboard-based inspectors can breeze through that part of the process as easily as inspectors who use the app.