The visit exists to change the order you spend in
Most people who call about a cold house already know what they want done. The windows are old, the windows feel cold, the windows are the problem. It is the most common conclusion in this trade and it is usually the wrong one.
An energy assessment is not a sales visit with a clipboard. It is a measurement, and the reason to have one is narrow and worth being honest about: you are about to spend real money and you do not know in what order. The assessment answers that and nothing else.
If you already know exactly what you want done and it is one small job, skip it. Nobody needs a measured survey to decide about one drafty door.
Why windows feel like the answer
Because they genuinely are cold, and your body is a better radiometer than it is an air-leak detector. Sit near a single-pane window in January and you lose heat to it by radiation. It feels like a draft. It reads as the hole in the house.
Now look at the areas. The glass in an average house is a fraction of the surface the heat is actually leaving through. The ceiling plane is far larger, is the warmest surface in the building, and in a lot of mid-Michigan houses has a few inches of settled insulation over an attic hatch nobody ever sealed. The rim joist — the band of framing where the floor meets the foundation, hidden behind the basement insulation if there is any — is a continuous gap running the full perimeter of the house.
Replacement windows are expensive per square foot of problem solved. The attic and the rim joist are cheap per square foot of problem solved. That is the entire argument, and it is why the assessment comes first: not because windows never need doing, but because they are almost never the first thing worth doing.
What actually happens on the day
Four things, and all four produce something you can keep.
1. A blower door test
A calibrated fan is sealed into an external doorway and used to pull the pressure inside the house below the pressure outside. How hard the fan has to work to hold it there is a direct measure of how much air the house leaks. It turns an argument into a number. Allow an hour and a half to two hours for this part.
2. Infrared imaging
The fan tells you how much. The camera tells you where. Walked while the house is under pressure, a thermal camera shows cold tracking in around top plates, recessed lights, wiring penetrations and the places insulation has slumped or was never installed at all. Anybody selling you the number without the walk is selling half the job.
3. Combustion safety testing
The furnace and the water heater get tested for draft, for spillage and for carbon monoxide. This is not an optional extra and it is not upselling. Tightening a house changes the air available to appliances that burn gas, and you do not seal a house blind. If you take nothing else from this page: an assessment that skips combustion testing is not an assessment.
4. The insulation, actually looked at
Depth and coverage in the attic, in the walls where they can be reached, the rim joist, and the crawl space. Coverage matters as much as depth — an attic insulated to a good depth with three bare patches around the chimney performs like the patches, not like the depth.
What the report has to tell you
A report worth having says four things:
- How leaky the house is, as a figure you can compare to the same house after work.
- Where, specifically enough to act on — not "the attic" but which part of it and why.
- What each fix is worth, ranked by what it returns.
- What is unsafe or unknown, including the things that stop work rather than start it.
That third point is where these go wrong in the market. A list ranked by what it costs the contractor to sell is a quote wearing a report's clothes. The ranking has to be by return, which means the honest version of the document sometimes says the cheap thing first and we are not the ones who do it.
What it costs
Published market pricing, as of October 2026: the national range is quoted at $300 to $500, and Michigan providers advertise lower than that — commonly around $150 for a house up to 2,500 square feet and $200 to $300 above it. A blower door test on its own runs $100 to $350.
Where the assessment is the front end of work, the cost of it is normally set against the job. That is agreed in writing before anybody comes out, not mentioned afterward.
What an assessment is not
Worth being plain about four limits.
- It reports; it does not certify. No house passes or fails.
- It is not a home inspection. If you are buying a house, you need a different document from a different trade.
- It is not an appraisal and says nothing about value.
- It is not mechanical work. Furnaces, heat pumps and air conditioning are licensed mechanical work and are not taken on here. Combustion safety testing is part of the assessment; repairing what it finds is a licensed trade, and anything behind the gas meter goes elsewhere.
Where this stands today
This is a new service and the job records do not carry it yet. BPI Building Analyst certification is in progress and is not held — it completes in November 2026, and until then nothing on this site claims otherwise. That matters practically as well as honestly: the performance-based state rebates require a measured assessment carried out by a certified Building Analyst, so for those programs the certification is the qualifying step, not a credential on a wall. The energy rebates page states where every program stands, including which ones are currently paused in this district.
Four things to do before you book
- Walk the house on the coldest morning you get and write down which rooms are worst. That list is worth more to an assessment than anything measured, because it says what actually bothers you.
- Pull twelve months of gas and electric bills. Most utilities show the history in the online account. It is the baseline everything else is measured against.
- Open the attic hatch with a flashlight. If you can see the tops of the joists, you already know most of the answer.
- Do not order windows yet.
Book it
Book a free quote · call 517-505-7135 · or read more about a home energy assessment.
The measurement on its own: blower door test. The two fixes it most often points at: air sealing then attic insulation, in that order. Who pays: energy rebates and grants.
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