Energy Audit made simple

What is an energy audit and why is it important, especially at this time when the cost of energy is at an all time high in Jamaica.
In its most basic form an energy audit allows you to see where you are using energy either at home or your place of business.

• Wouldn't  be nice if you could predict the cost of energy each month?
• What if you could tell what actions on your part leads to energy usage or wastage?
• How do you know if you are actually using what you are being billed for?

Have you ever received a water bill and you know that you could not have used that volume of water. I am sure this has happen to many persons and what they typically do is the most basic of audits, yes you may not even realize that is what you did.
So you shut off all pipes and go look at the meter and lo and behold the meter dial is spinning like crazy and you are sure everything has been locked off.

So what do you do now, well go look around to try and find where this water is leaking, as it must be leaking somewhere for your meter to be registering usage. You look but cannot find any leaks, so what do you do next.
Do you leave it and continue to line the pockets of NWC or do you take action. Most persons will take action and will seek the services of a plumber to try and figure out where this leak is and fix it, so they can stop paying for what they really have not consumed. I use the word consumed as while the meter did register the usage you actually did not consume all that water, quite a bit was wasted due to the leak.

Now that you understand the concept, why are we treating electricity any different. With water you can physically see the leak(or well the plumber can) but with electricity there is nothing to see. The fact that you cannot see the electricity "leaking" does not mean its not occurring, so what do you do.
Whatever your meter registers ( we are assuming the meter is accurate) is a combination of what is used and what is wasted(leaking), and the only way to know what's really going on is to measure it.

An energy audit will tell you where you are vulnerable and will provide you with data, which you can now use to plug those leaks.
The audit will NOT fix the problem, it will point you in the direction to fix the problem, what you do with the data however is what determines the level of savings which you will see.