An innovative Home Energy Rating System (HERS) that measures a complete house for its energy usage and identifies areas for improvement and conservation through a detailed reporting system.

Homeowners requisition an energy audit that is carried out by a qualified Inspector. All information about the house ranging from appliances, insulation, heating, cooling, size, zip code, etc is captured by the Inspector and subsequently entered into the system.

The TOS HERS system then generates a detailed HERS Report and rates the house on a scale of 1-10. The system makes specific recommendations with regards to changing appliances, improving heating, insulation systems, etc including information relating to costs for upgrading, likely savings and revised house rating if all recommendations are implemented.

The system uses the US Department of Energy’s DOE-2 simulation engine in addition to other algorithms and databases such as climate-to-zip code maps, etc. to generate the report. Currently, in the process of being certified by the California Energy Commission, the report enables consumers to make intelligent choices about renovating and improving their homes as well as conserving energy. The recommendations and rating of the report also enable consumers to obtain FHA loans and Energy-efficient Mortgages.

A completely web-based system, the TOS system uses different components including the DOE-2 simulation engine and Geopraxis’s IDEA Server. The entire system runs on Windows NT Servers with IIS, a Visual Basic DLL, ASP-based pages and SQL Server 7.0 database.

IQura has been involved with this project from concept-to-commissioning. We have been responsible for the creative design process, all the web-related software development and deployment and management. We have been key partners in all the specification and system design along with Geopraxis, the energy consultants. IQura personnel setup the network for the TOS System, trained data entry operators as well as configured, installed and deployed the server. The entire Energycheckup.com site was also configured, hosted and deployed by IQura personnel.