The extreme winter weather we have been experiencing this week can be brutal on utility bills.
That’s where companies like Barry Dicker’s Decent Energy, Inc. can help. Decent Energy provides innovative renewable energy and energy-efficiency solutions for homeowners and businesses. Dicker, the company’s founder and president and a member of Kehilath Israel Synagogue, said the first step in finding energy-efficient solutions, which lead to ways to save money, is to conduct an energy audit.
An energy audit, Dicker explained, means testing the home for a variety of things such as air leakage. An audit can also test for combustion safety problems — such as carbon monoxide issues, gas leaks and sometimes mold or air quality issues.
“All these things tend to be symptoms of the systems in the house not working correctly. The systems all have to work together,” he explained.
The systems Dicker is referring to include insulation, air barrier, the furnace and cooling system.
“Very often they don’t work together and when they don’t, very often people feel uncomfortable,” he said. “That’s when someone will say ‘I feel a little cold’ in this room or that room. These are symptoms of the systems not working together properly,” he said.
Determining whether these systems are working properly is not guess work. Instead, Dicker said Decent Energy employs “a fairly rigorous process using some high-tech tools.”
Those tools include thermal imaging cameras and a blower door — which is a big piece of red fabric “and a fan that we stick in a door that tends to scare all the neighbors.” It’s used to test the air leakage of a home or an office building.
“There’s another fan that we put on the duct system called a duct blaster that gives us a sense of whether heat or cold air is escaping to the outside,” he continued.
Dicker explained that audits Decent Energy conducts for homeowners are considered independent audits.
“We are the trusted adviser and a neutral broker trying to provide the homeowner with independent advice around how best to proceed. Very often that involves coaching the homeowner in connection with implementing a series of do-it-yourself measures,” he said.
“We’ve got a lot of handy people around Kansas City and for something easy like caulking around window moldings and the wall; someone can do that while watching a football game on Sunday. That can add pretty considerably to the home’s comfort level,” he said.
“A lot of what we perceive as window discomfort is very often air moving through the moldings around the window, it’s not the window itself,” he continued.
Dicker said if a homeowner wants to select a contractor, Decent Energy will “provide ongoing instructions on to how to implement the energy-efficiency improvements in a sensible way.”
Decent Energy will also provide referrals. If the company does that, a homeowner will receive no fewer than three names of independent contractors.
“If we are the party that is also doing these improvements, we’re not going to be fulfilling the trusted adviser verification role, which is so important in terms of ensuring consumer protection and building a sense of public confidence in terms of the approach that we take,” Dicker explained.
He said Decent Energy wants to be able to make sure if the contractor doesn’t do the job correctly, the contractor can be held accountable for implementing the measures the Decent Energy recommended in a way that will work for the homeowner.
Dicker has been conducting residential audits for a couple of years. The company itself has been around since 2005.
Energy audits for homes can run from $550 to $750.
It may surprise people to learn that newer homes may need energy audits more than older homes, Dicker said.
“Some of the homes built in the early ‘80s are much better built than some of the homes built in the last five years,” he said. “Generally anytime somebody is feeling uncomfortable in their home and the bills seem to be too high, that’s an indication that an audit may be a benefit.”
Dicker said he’s in business to help people save energy because it’s something that speaks to him spiritually and something he enjoys from a teaching perspective.
Saving energy and teaching others how to do so is also important to Dicker because he believes that very often those that profit from traditional energy sources are groups that are hostile to Israel.
“I think that anyone who cares about Israel should care about energy and energy efficiency whether or not they identify themselves as a green person. When we buy more petrochemical products it puts money in the pockets of people who are hostile to Israel and ultimately that’s not a good thing,” he said. Originally from the Boston area, Kansas City is his wife Amy’s hometown. They moved here because they decided this was “a much better place to raise a family than the metro Boston area,” almost three years ago.
Decent Energy is also developing new products, Dicker said, which could help create more jobs for people in this difficult economy.
