In an effort to educate homeowners on the energy-efficiency of their residences, Vice President Joe Biden and Energy Secretary Steven Chu have launched the Home Energy Score pilot program.

“The Home Energy Score will help make energy efficiency easy and accessible to America's families by providing them with straightforward and reliable information about their homes' energy performance and specific, cost-effective energy efficiency improvements that will save them money on their monthly energy bills," said Secretary Chu.

Here’s how it works: A trained and certified contractor will come to the consumers’ home use a standardized assessment tool developed by DOE and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to quickly evaluate a home and generate useful, actionable information for homeowners or prospective homebuyers.

There will be about 40 inputs that help decipher how energy-efficient a home is, such as insulation levels, heating and cooling systems, and other factors that affect how much energy it takes to run a home. Obtaining this information is expected to take the technician about an hour.

From there, the home is given a rating from 1 to 10. A home with a rating of 1 would highly benefit from major energy upgrades, and a home with a rating of 10 would be extremely energy-efficient.

This easy-to-understand rating system allows homeowners to see how their homes fare in energy-efficiency and allows them to compare to it to other homes in the area, regardless of how high or low they keep their thermostat or whether individuals take long, hot showers or quick, cooler showers, the Energy Department said in a statement.

The program, which is expected to run from November 2010 through mid-2011, will be tested initially in ten communities across the U.S., in both rural and urban areas, and in a wide range of climates.

The following states and municipalities are participating in the pilot program: Charlottesville, Virginia; Allegheny County, Pennsylvania; Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts; Minnesota; Omaha and Lincoln, Nebraska; Indiana; Portland, Oregon; South Carolina; Texas; and Eagle County, Colorado. Learn more about each of the testing locations along with details on how to participate in the Home Energy Score program.


Sources:
U.S. Department of Energy
The White House