BOULDER — Energy-audit software made by Snugg Home LLC in Boulder is designed to help save money on energy bills.
Founder Adam Stenftenagel said the iAudit Pro software can identify what needs to be done to create “cash-flow -positive improvements” to an existing home or business. Stenftenagel said “cash-flow positive” means saving enough money on energy bills to pay for the improvements almost immediately or financing them in a home loan.
“What's your payback on a BMW, or an iPhone? Why talk about comfort and safety in terms of payback?” Stenftenagel asked rhetorically. “What's more important is cash flow. Over a 30-year mortgage, I'm making money in the first year.”
How the software works: An auditor comes to your house to conduct an energy assessment. The audit includes a blower door test, which measures how air-tight a home is, an infrared camera scan, which can show air leaks and a combustion safety test, which measures safety of gas appliances. The information is loaded onto the energy adviser's audit software as the tests are being done. At the end of the assessment, the auditor is able to create a report that shows places where the homeowner can save money if energy upgrades are made.
Snugg Home is not the first company to have the audit-software idea. Several energy efficiency companies have sprung up in recent years across the country — most of them looking to help businesses and homeowners take advantage of a variety of federal and local energy efficiency rebates mostly available for retrofitting existing homes. President Obama in December 2011 said $4 billion in federal and private-sector energy upgrades would be made to buildings during a two-year period, just one example of the funding available to help the relatively new industry grow.
Stenftenagel wants to make sure his software lasts beyond federal programs. The software is available for contractors for $30 per audit and Snugg Home offers a 30-day free trial to get started.
So the maintenance person who comes to your house to fix the light switch or install a new cabinet then can offer to help you save money on new energy efficiency projects and print out a copy of an audit to help you make a decision. Stenftenagel believes the software works so well that it will be easy for contractors to sell upgrades that can make them money, too.
“If you have a good report, and you make it easy to explain this stuff, the contractor can now be the energy adviser, and they're the ones making the money on this big up-sell,” Stenftenagel said. “They can afford to take a little time with the homeowner and do a little hand-holding.”
Stenftenagel got the idea for his 18-month-old company after volunteering to build the website of the Colorado Green Building Guild, a Boulder-based nonprofit organization that works with the construction industry. He also did computer modeling to create “net-zero” homes in the planned Geos neighborhood in Arvada, a project of Norbert Klebl, a Boulder developer. A “net-zero” building is one that generates as much energy as it takes in.
Klebl has high praise for Stenftenagel, saying that he created computer modeling that can cut a home's energy use by 40 percent, through more insulation and better windows, among other things. The Geos neighborhood's goal was to have homes where the temperatures range from 68 degrees in the winter and 78 degrees in the summer, Klebl said.
Eric Doub, founder of Boulder-based EcoSmart Homes, is a mentor as well. The iAudit Pro software is built on a software technology called OptiMiser, which was created, in part, by Doub in 2006.
OptiMiser was used by Recurve Inc., a San Francisco-based energy-audit software company, bought by Tendril Networks Inc. in Boulder in February for its assets, Doub said. Tendril is an energy-management technology company that provides energy-management software, hardware and services for customers and utility companies.
“iAudit Pro is now center stage because it's what Xcel Energy adopted. So we're all looking forward to a high degree of functionality from it,” Doub said. “It's exactly what the industry needs, a tool to quickly assess problems and communicate solutions.”
Snugg Home has booked about $1.7 million in revenue since it was formed. It was founded with a $150,000 investment gathered from friends and family, Stenftenagel said. It now has five full-time employees in addition to the three co-founders.
Stenftenagel previously started Sustainably Built LLC in 2009, a green building consulting company. An employee now runs that company, which helps people build net-zero custom homes with a $10,000 to $20,000 cost built into their mortgages.
With 130 million existing homes in the United States that could go through the energy efficiency retrofit process, Stenftenagel figures that Snugg Home has nowhere to go but up.
“The key is to bring all the pieces together, make the financing work and make it super-simple, so Joe doesn't have to take away from his weekend,” Stenftenagel said.
Around the country, Snugg Home has worked on government contracts with energy efficiency programs such as SunShot, a U.S. Department of Energy program in Connecticut; Energize, an energy efficiency program in New York; and Long Island Green Homes, an energy efficiency program in Long Island, New York, among others.
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