Results of the Walnut Creek House-Doctor Project

摘要

The results of an experiment designed to measure the additional energy savings achieved by adding two person-days of house doctoring to a standard energy audit. A house doctor and audit treatment is compared to an audit alone and to a passive control group. The results of a fourth treatment, house doctoring, audit and contractor retrofits, have not yet been analyzed. The treatments were applied to randomly selected groups of 10 houses each in Walnut Creek, California. The difference in energy savings between the treatments, based on monthly utility bills, was not statistically significant due to wide variation in savings and the loss of several houses from each group. Predicted energy savings, based in part on measured air leakage area reductions, indicated that the retrofit package completed during house doctoring had a Cost of Conserved Energy of 42 cents/therm. (ERA citation 08:010092)