A Practical Energy Audit for Tennessee Commercial Buildings

An ASHRAE Level 1 audit is the most useful — and most over-sold — service in commercial facilities. Done right, it's two days of walkthrough and a report that ranks every retrofit you should consider, with realistic payback math. Done wrong, it's a hundred-page PDF that gathers dust on a shared drive.

What Level 1 actually involves

We start with twenty-four months of utility data. Electricity, gas, and (if metered) water. We normalize for heating- and cooling-degree days, then look for the four or five things that explain most of your bill.

Then we walk the building. Two techs, one day for buildings under 50,000 sq ft. Lighting count, HVAC inventory, envelope spot-check with a thermal camera, control-system review.

The deliverable is a fifteen-to-twenty-page report, not a hundred. Ranked retrofit list. Estimated cost. Estimated annual savings. Simple payback. That's it.

What Level 2 adds

Level 2 adds metered data on individual equipment, deeper financial analysis (life-cycle cost, net present value), and a sub-system-by-sub-system energy model. It's worth the cost for buildings over 75,000 sq ft, or any building considering a capital project over $200,000.

What we typically find in Middle Tennessee

Lighting is still the lowest-hanging fruit, especially in older parking decks and warehouses where T8 fluorescents are still running. Payback is almost always under three years.

HVAC controls — particularly schedule and setpoint optimization — are the second-biggest find. Many properties run cooling on weekends out of habit, not necessity.

Envelope work (windows, roof insulation) almost never penciled out at current Tennessee energy prices. We don't recommend it unless the envelope is failing for non-energy reasons.

How to read the report

Skip to the ranked retrofit table on page three. Look at simple payback. Anything under five years usually justifies action. Anything between five and ten deserves a second conversation. Anything over ten years is a "maybe in the next capital cycle."

Don't get pulled into the modeled-savings number on the cover. It assumes everything goes right. The bottom-third estimate is the one to budget against.