Conducting An Insulation and Facility Audit

Determining if there is a need for removable insulation covers or traditional forms of insulation is essential to the continued cost effective operation of your facility. An insulation audit is the most succinct way of defining your facility’s needs in a concise and affordable way.  This professional analysis is critical for identifying areas of energy loss and areas of energy conservation.

Energy audits help facility managers:

• Prioritize projects
• Identify areas in need of energy improvement
• Track overall success

Commercial Energy Audit

Begin the insulation audit by conducting an inventory of your facilities equipment. This way you’ll have a sense of what systems throughout your facility you must survey. Start by reviewing utilities that currently have various form of removable and non-removable insulation. A walk-through is one form of such an audit, where management and various team members can visually inspect equipment for noticeable misuse, cracks, holes, excess exhaust and other eye catching instances where insulation is needed or in need of repair. Build ups of moisture in and around piping systems are also one of the first signs of inefficient insulation of cold elements passing through the pipes.

After the initial observational review of your facility, a more thorough survey is needed. After consulting qualified professionals, utilize infrared line scanner to conduct an appropriate remote temperature map of your facility. This will help detect heat spikes and determine areas of high propensity for energy loss. This is one of the greatest contributors to high energy bills and often makes the benefit of an insulation audit outweigh the cost. Finally, water loss detection is also an equally important means of inspection during your audit. Through apparent losses, which includes meter inaccuracies, data errors, and unauthorized consumption, and outright losses due to physical water leakage does water loss occur.

Cost Efficient Removable Insulation Coverage

There are a few steps towards determining whether it is cost efficient for your facility to conduct an insulation audit.

1. Calculate the facility’s expenditure on energy each year. Understand your MMBTU Cost.
2. The age of your facility.
3. The geographical location of your facility.
4. The size and dimensions of your facility.
5. The number of buildings that make up your total facility.
6. The industry you’re operating within.
7. What is the facility’s current insulation status pre-audit?

Tips For Your Insulation Audit

Determining your facility’s need is the most important step you can follow towards conducting a successful and cost efficient audit. The three types of insulation audits help define what scale of project you are looking to have implemented. A low-hanging fruit walkthrough is what we’ve discussed earlier, where a simple walk through audit is conducted using our mere senses and institution. This is the most cost efficient model because it only requires a few eyes to survey your buildings and look for noticeable problems; however it is not always the most detailed of audits.

The second type of audit is a support systems review where the management of the facility does both a walk through and a technical examination of all equipment with a support team from each department. This is a much more thorough analysis of your various equipment systems, requiring more time and funding than a lower level walk through analysis.

Lastly, an extensive outside study is conducted by a third party company in conjunction with your own. This is the most detailed of all three types of insulation studies available, but obviously the most expensive and long lasting. This type of audit can last for months at a time. If your company has sufficient funds to support this level of analysis it is most certainly going to save you the most money in the long term while being extremely proficient in terms of bringing results.