Ashburn Home Inspection

Home Inspections of Northern Virginia began offering Home Energy Audits about 8 months ago. While the number of Home Energy Audits has not been remarkable, what has been remarkable is the reaction of those who have ordered the Home Energy Audit. One home inspection in Ashburn, VA resulted in a very interesting discovery because of the energy audit!

Just five years ago, I had never even heard of a Home Energy Audit. I would hazard a guess that most people were in the same boat. Though the Home Energy Audit is far from mainstream at this point, I was recently reminded at a home inspection in Ashburn why this is a service that is here to stay.

I had scheduled a home inspection in Ashburn, VA for a couple relocating from California. As the West Coast tends to be a little more progressive in some respects than their counterparts to the east, the couple asked for a Home Energy Audit as part of their Ashburn home inspection.

The Ashburn home inspection was on a foreclosed home, as so many of them are. The furnace and heat pump were so close to the end of their life that the owners had decided to go ahead and replace them as part of the rehab in the home. As such, relative energy efficiency could not be addressed as well with historic electric/gas bills. The Home Energy Audit provided the perfect alternative.

For anyone who is not familiar with this service, the quick and dirty is this:

A special fan is attached to the home to place the home in a vacuum. Using an infrared camera, the interior of the home is inspected for temperature gradients/differences along the exterior walls, at windows, doors, penetrations, etc. The vacuum condition will amplify any air seepage and allow the home inspector to more quickly identify areas of concern due to outside air infiltrating the building envelope.

Back to the story...

I completed the initial home inspection in Ashburn, VA with many of the typical defects -- most of which the couple expected. After I completed the Ashburn home inspection I moved on to the Home Energy Audit by installing the blower door and getting out the infrared camera. I always start in the master bedroom and work my way down. We identified a half dozen air leaks on the first and second floor at various windows and exterior wall seams.

It wasn't until we reached the basement that we had the big surprise. This Ashburn home inspection was on one of the older homes in the area.

The basement was finished with a walkout door that had retaining walls to hold the ground back from the opening. I checked the basement, focusing on the exterior, when I came to the back wall of the home. It was MUCH warmer than the other walls of the basement. Upon further inspection I realized that this was a framed wall at the rear of the home. That isn't too exciting until you consider the fact that the rear wall was not exposed, it was buried. The brick water table made it impossible to determine from the outside, but this home was originally a walkout basement condition! At some point, when adding a pool, the homeowners backfilled against the framed wall to accommodate the pool. Without this Ashburn home inspection, this couple could have purchased a home that was rotting away!

Somehow, there was no evidence of leaking inside the basement. Although we were not able to dig down outside to see how the wall was treated to prevent leaking (not that it really mattered), the realtor did get written permission to pop the trim that covered the sewer cleanout on that wall so that we could look in. What we found was a wall cavity full of dead and living insects and wood rot that made me wonder how the wall was still standing at all.

You can't fix what you don't know is broken. Fixing the half dozen air leaks would have paid for the $450 Home Energy Audit all by themselves. Identifying the basement issue saved this couple from a mistake that would have cost $1,000's to fix.