Now that the new energy inspection tool is up and live, I have some interesting new stats. We took anonymous report data and pulled out some averages:
The average home that’s analyzed by our tool costs an estimated $2,380 to operate per year. That’s in line with 3rd-party data (the DOE says it costs around $2000/year to operate a home). What this means is that our tool is quite accurate at estimating energy costs.
The average savings from our upgrade recommendations is $1,092 per year (meaning that the average home, after upgrades, would cost $1,288 per year to operate). That is the savings your client can realize by making the recommended upgrades in his or her energy report. That’s a HUGE selling point!
On average, the total cost of all recommended upgrades is about $9,000, which means that it would take about 8 years to cover the cost of EVERY upgrade. That’s because we make our recommendations on a 10 year basis (if an upgrade would take more than 10 years to cover its cost, we don’t suggest it).
That said, a lot of our recommendations have a much quicker return on investment (ROI), so your clients wouldn’t have to spend $9,000 to see any results. For example, the average cost of upgrades with a 2 year ROI is about $1000, and the average savings from those upgrades is about $600. That’s another amazing stat!
I’ll post more information when we have it, but this is really promising stuff! That’s one heck of a sales pitch: “On average, my clients can save over $1000 per year based on recommendations from this report.” What person wouldn’t spend another $50-100 (or more!) for that service?
Good observation Christopher. And exactly why the general public rejected (for the most part) the idea of spending big money on full-blown energy audits in favor of InterNACHI’s.
In just a few month’s we’ve already completed more Energy Inspection Reports than all the full-blown energy audits ever completed. We’re going to do 5 million of these things.
Yeah—we’re considering changing the system to only suggest upgrades that would have a return within 7 years. The reason we chose 10 is that some homeowners will stay somewhere longer than the averages, so that information will be useful to them. All recommendations are sorted by the “Pay Back Period”, so your clients will see the lowest hanging fruit first (ie. the upgrades that only take a year or two to pay back).
What do y’all think? I think it makes sense to offer the longer-term suggestions even though they’re not applicable to everyone. It also helps in your marketing, because it pushes the “total potential savings” number up without being disingenuous (because 10 years is not that unheard of).
Unfortunately, Douglas, a Canadian version is going to take quite a bit of work. Right now we get a TON of data from the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory, which only has information on the United States. We’re looking into our options in Canada, but it’s looking like we’d either have to generate the models ourselves, or approach the software in a completely different way for Canada. Sorry I don’t have more promising news…
