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You can easily conduct a home energy audit yourself. With a simple but diligent walk-through, you can spot many problems in any type of house. When auditing your home, keep a checklist of areas you have inspected and problems you found. This list will help you prioritize your energy efficiency upgrades.

A home energy audit is the first step to assess how much energy your home consumes and to evaluate what measures you can take to make your home more energy efficient. An audit will show you problems that may, when corrected, save you significant amounts of money over time. During the audit, you can pinpoint where your house is losing energy. Audits also determine the efficiency of your home's heating and cooling systems. An audit may also show you ways to conserve hot water and electricity. You can perform a simple energy audit yourself, or have a professional energy auditor carry out a more thorough audit.

Energy recovery ventilation systems provide a controlled way of ventilating a home while minimizing energy loss. They reduce the costs of heating ventilated air in the winter by transferring heat from the warm inside air being exhausted to the fresh (but cold) supply air. In the summer, the inside air cools the warmer supply air to reduce ventilation cooling costs.

Balanced ventilation systems, if properly designed and installed, neither pressurize nor depressurize a house. Rather, they introduce and exhaust approximately equal quantities of fresh outside air and polluted inside air, respectively.

Supply ventilation systems work by pressurizing the building. They use a fan to force outside air into the building while air leaks out of the building through holes in the shell, bath and range fan ducts, and intentional vents (if any exist).

Exhaust ventilation systems work by depressurizing the building. By reducing the inside air pressure below the outdoor air pressure, they extract indoor air from a house while make-up air infiltrates through leaks in the building shell and through intentional, passive vents.

The decision to use whole-house ventilation is typically motivated by concerns that natural ventilation won't provide adequate air quality, even with source control by spot ventilation.

Spot ventilation improves the effectiveness of other ventilation strategies — natural and whole-house — by removing indoor air pollutants and/or moisture at their source.