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Home Energy Advisor Is Many Jobs In One

If you're good with people, if you like a job with a variety of duties, and if you are physically fit, or at least able to move about easily, then you might want to consider a career as a Home Energy Advisor. This career requires that you wear a lot of hats. You'll be a part-time customer service representative, part-time handyman (or woman), part-time data entry clerk, part-time architect and many other professions, all rolled into one. In other words, the duties of a Home Energy Advisor are many and varied!

As the name suggests, a Home Energy Advisor is a person who advises people about the best ways to conserve energy and to improve the comfort and safety of their homes. Sounds easy, you think? Just take a look at the many responsibilities these career professionals are face with.

One of the first things a home energy advisor does is interview the people whom he's advising. He'll ask questions about the home and how they manage their energy resources. For instance, he'll need to know how many people live in the home, whether they keep their thermostat set at a certain temperature day and night, or whether they turn it up and down, and what the average temperature is in their home. He'll look at their previous year's energy bills to see how much they've used in the past.

Next, the advisor will draw a sketch of the home, showing doors and windows and including detailed measurements, even such things as ceiling height and volume in each room.

He'll then inspect your entire home. He'll crawl around in the attic, examine closets, and peek into every crawl space of your home. He's not being nosy; he's looking for cracks, unwrapped pipes, and anything else that may cause energy loss. He'll look at your insulation, your windows, your water heater, your furnace, your weather stripping, and anything and everything about your home that could potentially cause energy wastefulness.

He'll record all this data into a fancy computer program, which then does some calculations and spits out a print-out of how much money you could save if you do the things he recommends.

He'll then recommend things you can do to save energy (and money in the long term), such as apply double-paned windows, increase your insulation, caulk around cracks, fix leaks, and whatever else he sees that needs done.

For all this work, he gets paid a decent enough salary, depending on the company he works for. The benefits of being a home energy advisor is that you don't spend a lot of time sitting behind a desk and you usually don't have the boss breathing down your neck all day. The downside is that you have to crawl around in dusty, dirty attics and damp, moldy basements. But if you don't mind a few cobwebs here and there, it might be a pretty good job for someone who likes variety. You'd also be helping people (well, for a fee, unless you're working for a utility company that does it for free as part of their customer service), and you'd be doing your part to help the planet conserve energy.

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