Energy audits

Electrical energy audits for Edmonton businesses, industrial sites and homes: measure where power goes, find waste, and rank upgrades like LED lighting, controls and VFDs.

What an electrical energy audit is

An energy audit looks at how a building uses electricity and where that use could be reduced. It combines your bills, any interval data from the utility, a walk-through of the site and, where useful, metering of individual circuits or equipment.

Our audits focus on the electrical side: lighting, motors and drives, fans and pumps, controls, plug loads and how power is used across the day. The output is a practical, ranked list of things you can do, not a theoretical report that sits on a shelf.

What we look for

• Lighting that is old, oversized or left on when spaces are empty.
• Motors running at full speed when a VFD could slow them for most of the day.
• Baseload: equipment running overnight and on weekends that nobody needs.
• Controls that have been overridden, disabled or never set up properly.
• Block heaters and heat tracing left on through mild weather or chinooks.
• Power factor and peak demand issues that affect commercial bills.

Interval data, where your utility provides it, is one of the most useful tools. It shows exactly when power is used, which quickly points to what is running when it should not be.

Turning findings into action

Each finding comes with a recommendation, a sense of the effort and cost involved, and the expected benefit. We rank them so you can start with quick wins, like fixing controls or scheduling, and plan bigger items like LED retrofits or drive upgrades into your budget.

Incentive and rebate programs for energy upgrades change over time. We check what is currently available when we prepare your report, but we cannot promise eligibility, which is up to the program.

Homes, businesses and plants

For homes, an electrical audit is usually simpler: looking at heating, hot water, lighting, block heaters, hot tubs and standby loads. For businesses and plants, the audit scales up to lighting, HVAC, compressed air, motors and process equipment.

Cost depends on the size of the building, the number of systems and whether circuit-level metering is needed. Larger industrial audits may involve several site visits and a longer monitoring period. We scope the audit with you before starting, so you know what you will get.

Edmonton-specific savings

Our climate shapes where electricity goes. Some of the opportunities we look for are specific to buildings in and around Edmonton:

• Parking lot block heater receptacles left on all day instead of on timed or temperature-controlled circuits.
• Heat tracing and roof de-icing cables running through mild spells and chinooks.
• Make-up air and exhaust fans running at full speed through the coldest weeks.
• Long summer daylight hours that make daylight sensors and photocells worthwhile.
• Electric unit heaters in warehouses and loading docks with poor controls.

Small control changes to these systems can make a real difference without any change in comfort or reliability.

We also check the basics of how the building is billed. For commercial accounts, peak demand charges can be a large part of the bill, and spreading out when big equipment starts can sometimes reduce them.

Questions we hear