Home Energy Audits — Nogales & Santa Cruz County

A lot of homeowners picture an "energy audit" as someone walking through with a clipboard and guessing. Ours isn't that. We run the same instrumented tests used to qualify homes for utility rebate programs — a thermal imaging pass, a calibrated blower-door depressurization test, a separate duct leakage test, and a physical attic inspection with insulation depth measured at multiple points, not just near the access hatch.

Each of those tests answers a different question. Thermal imaging shows you where heat is moving through the building envelope right now. The blower-door test puts a single, comparable number on how much outside air your whole house is exchanging. The duct test isolates whether your HVAC system is losing conditioned air before it ever reaches a supply register — a separate problem from envelope leakage that a lot of audits skip entirely.

We run all four together because they catch different failure modes. A house can have a tight envelope and still waste 20–30% of its conditioned air through leaky attic ductwork. Another house can have perfectly sealed ducts and still lose heat all winter through an under-insulated attic floor. An audit that only measures one of these gives you half the picture — and half the picture is how homeowners end up paying for insulation in the wrong place.

At the end of the visit you get a written report, not a verbal impression. It documents your blower-door number, duct leakage results, thermal-imaging findings by room, and measured attic insulation depth against the R-38 floor / R-49 recommended target for this climate zone. Where the elevation of your property changes the calculus — a Sonoita property at roughly 4,885 ft carries a different winter exposure than a Nogales property at roughly 3,865 ft — the report says so specifically.

We then rank the findings into a prioritized fix list: what's costing you the most conditioned air right now, what's a moderate-priority item, and what can reasonably wait. Not every finding needs to happen in the same visit or the same year — the point of the list is helping you sequence spending, not upselling every line item at once.

If you decide to move forward with install work, the audit becomes the starting point for your quote instead of a separate expense that gets thrown away. We don't re-measure your attic from scratch or re-run a blower-door test you already paid for — the numbers carry straight into the project scope.

That audit-to-install path also keeps your UES rebate paperwork consistent, since the eligibility confirmation and the installed-cost documentation the program wants both trace back to the same visit. For the most common next step after an audit, see our attic insulation page — it's where most prioritized fix lists start.