Increasing demand by home owners and businesses to make their buildings more energy efficient is spawning a growing niche for what's called energy auditing. Meanwhile, programs to train individuals to perform such audits are being funded here with federal stimulus money.

"The energy audit business has really taken off," says Chris Permann, who owns Energy Doctors Inc., a Spokane franchisor of energy auditing outlets that now do business in 22 states.

Overall, Energy Doctors outlets do about 3,000 energy audits a year, says Permann, adding that the chain does about 900 annually in the Spokane market alone. The Spokane operation has six employees and serves Eastern Washington, North Idaho, Eastern Oregon, and Western Montana.

Steve McBride, who owns another such company here, Energy Efficient Solutions LLC, with his wife, Lindsay Gray, says that while a host of companies around the country perform energy audits for homes and businesses, there are few such enterprises here. He says he first became interested in the business when he was studying in a sustainable building leadership program in the Community Colleges of Spokane's Institute for Extended Learning. Recently, he has been working in sales, but had been involved in the construction industry for 10 years, he says.

Identifying residential energy auditing as a high-demand occupation, the Spokane Area Workforce Development Council has funded training for energy auditors here through the community colleges, using federal stimulus dollars, and Avista Corp., of Spokane, is seeking grant money to help establish a training program and a loan fund to help people make energy-efficiency improvements in their homes or businesses.

McBride says energy auditors use specialized technology in doing their audits, including thermographic imaging cameras and devices called blower doors, which pressurize buildings and quantify how much air is leaking out of them.

The infrared, or thermography, technology is packaged in a handheld camera, which can cost between $20,000 and $40,000 to purchase, Permann says. The thermographic camera takes a photo or video of a structure, and each pixel in the image includes embedded temperature information. So when a hot spot—indicated by bright orange red on the image—is examined, the temperature of each area can be seen and compared with surrounding temperatures.

Permann says his company also has a blower door, but finds the thermography to be such a good diagnostic tool that its technicians don't use the blower door frequently.

After a year of operating the business part time, McBride and Gray now have hired two additional energy auditors and planned to delve into the business full time as of Sept. 1.

Energy Efficient Solutions has been performing about four energy audits a week, and in its first quarter of full-time operation it hopes to complete about 100 such audits, McBride says. He says about 10 percent of its customers so far are small businesses, and the remainder are residential customers. In addition, Energy Efficient Solutions offers rooftop scans for businesses, to identify areas where insulation needs to be replaced because it has become damp, making it ineffective. McBride says businesses that are considering replacing their roofs can save money if they don't have to replace all of the insulation when they reroof.

Energy Doctors' Permann started that company as Thermotek, in Las Vegas, in 2002, and moved it to Spokane in about 2005 to develop the company's franchise model. Permann says he became interested in energy efficiency when he was remodeling his own home, but had trouble finding a way to compile information about how he could reduce his home's overall energy consumption.

"I was actually remodeling my own house way back then, and I knew that it had issues related to energy consumption, but I couldn't find anyone to come in and tell me what was wrong," he says. "The only people who would tell me anything wanted to sell me something."

He says the issue was very apparent to him in Las Vegas, where energy efficiency is a big problem in new-home construction, but he and his wife later decided to move to Spokane both for quality-of-life reasons and because he felt Spokane would be a good test market for his franchise concept and marketing plans.

Now, Permann says, the thriving company is making its mark, adding franchise affiliates in 22 states since it began franchising about a year and a half ago. About 75 percent of Energy Doctors' energy auditing business currently is from residential customers, and the other 25 percent is from commercial customers, he says.

In addition to energy auditing, which is most in demand in the coldest and hottest months of the year, the company provides preventive electromechanical surveys for businesses, Permann says. In such surveys, the same thermographic technology used in energy audits to find hot spots also can be used to identify parts or electrical wires that are hotter than those around them, which Permann says can indicate potential malfunctions or power overloading. That service is targeted particularly at companies that have large production runs, for example, to identify any failing or faulty parts in their production line before a production run is begun.

In homes, some of the biggest problems Permann and McBride say they find involve too little insulation, which allows too much heat to escape through attics. Permann says that's the primary cause of ice dams in cold weather, which can cause water damage to a home.

Permann and McBride say that to avoid conflicts of interest, their businesses offer diagnostics only, not repair services.

"It's really difficult to perform diagnostics and then turn around and offer services," Permann says.

They say they recommend to customers how best to improve the efficiency of their homes, and refer them to other companies for quotations on any work they might want to have done, but don't do any contracting work themselves, though each also has a background in home construction.

Frequently, McBride says, they find minor things that building owners can do themselves, such as caulking around places in the structure where water or electrical systems enter a house or commercial building, or putting an insulated blanket around a water heater.

Energy auditing businesses are fairly nimble, because they need only a small amount of equipment to perform the audits. Since they do most of their work onsite at clients' homes or businesses, McBride says he and Gray currently are operating Energy Efficient Solutions out of their home.

Permann says Energy Doctors has an office and warehouse space here, but his employees work remotely, relying on a connection to a company computer server via the Internet to share and file data and handle other communications.

While Avista offers commercial energy audits, in which an engineer from the Spokane utility visits customers' sites and shows them the best way to conserve energy, as well as working with business customers on new construction projects, it no longer offers its own in-home energy audit services because that became cost-prohibitive, says Avista spokeswoman Debbie Simock.

Though it doesn't do on-site residential energy audits, Avista does offer its customers access to an Internet program through which they can evaluate the efficiency of their homes and get recommendations about how they can conserve energy. The program evaluates the customer's bills, and estimates which appliances or systems are using the most energy, Simock says.

A new crop of auditors coming

Community Colleges of Spokane received about $22,000 in federal stimulus funds, distributed through the Spokane Area Workforce Development Council, to train 16 students this summer at SCC in a noncredit residential energy auditor course.

SCC's dean of technical education, Mike Mires, says the colleges probably will offer the course again. In addition, the colleges also are adding an energy audit component to a for-credit program on heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC).

Meanwhile, Avista has applied for $2 million in federal stimulus funding through the Washington state Department of Commerce to set up a revolving loan fund and to help establish training criteria for an auditor training program as part of an energy efficiency audit and financing pilot program here, Simock says. Avista would, in coordination with the Workforce Development Council, establish criteria for training in-home energy auditors. The program would be a partnership that also includes the cities of Spokane and Spokane Valley, Spokane County, and banks and credit unions here.

"It will create new green job opportunities as we bring resources to train energy auditors," she says.

Avista also would set up a revolving loan fund, from which residential and small-business customers could borrow to pay for energy-efficiency upgrades, in combination with Avista rebates and incentives, and federal tax credits.

Permann and McBride say they and their technicians have obtained credentials to operate the thermography equipment.