Big Brother is watching… your energy efficiency

There are plenty of ways to check your energy efficiency. In Ontario, for example, you can book a Home Energy Audit, saving up to $150 on the audit itself. The federal ecoENERGY program used to offer pre-retrofit evaluations that provided rebates on energy-efficient appliances, but the ecoENERGY Retrofit program was cancelled effective March 31, 2010. And, audits or no, you can always buy more efficient appliances and ensure that drafts and other gaps in your home’s insulation are taken care of.

Still if home audits are too costly, and you don’t like the idea of someone poking around your home, perhaps you’d be more interested in a plane taking infrared photos of your house. Live like you’re in 1984… in 2010!

All right, it’s not really as frightening as George Orwell’s dystopic vision of the future, but a Belgian company has successfully used thermal maps taken by a plane flying over Antwerp to measure the heat loss from houses’ roofs. It’s an unobtrusive way of measuring the amount of energy being lost by a house, and given our existing comfort with public satellite data like the kind found on Google Maps, it’s not hard to imagine that we might eventually be able to access this kind of image from the comfort of our computer. At the same time, it begs the question of just how public we want our energy consumption habits to be.

It might not be double plus good, but it’s certainly not bad either.

Via Popular Science