MyHEAT: A Cool Tool for Homeowners

A cold draft coming into your home on a frigid December morning is uncomfortable. Most homeowners will search diligently for the source of that draft, and either close the window left cracked open by your teenage son who snuck back into the house well after curfew, places a “draft snake” at the foot of your front door, or cover up the cracks around your old window frame with some weather stripping. Unfortunately, while dealing with drafts is a great way to improve your home's energy efficiency, the vast majority of dwellings lose much more heat in ways that you can’t necessarily feel or see.

While a professional home energy advisor can help you locate where heat leaks occur in your home, the national average for a home energy audit costs almost $400. At the same time, buildings with larger square footage might well pay four times that amount. While the payback time on an energy audit (and the recommendations made by the advisor) is usually relatively quick, homeowners in some urban regions of Canada have a unique online tool at their fingertips that essentially gives them a free energy audit.

Below, Rise takes an in-depth look at how MyHEAT works and some of the advantages it offers to homeowners looking to improve their homes' energy efficiency and sustainability.

Why Do Homes Lose Heat? 

The heat that is produced in your home or captured via sunlight through passive solar design, unfortunately, doesn’t stay where you want it: inside the walls of your home. Following those immutable laws of physics, heat energy is transferred from homes through conduction, as the heat moves through windows, floors, walls, and the roof of your home.  Heat energy can also leave your home through a process known as convection, wherein cold air currents carry heat away from your home. Of course, air leakages also create ventilation where heat losses can occur quickly.

Cavity insulation is one of the most essential strategies to stop heat loss in a home. Insulation creates a barrier between the inside and outside of your home and thus reduces the heat loss by conduction. Insulation can also stop air circulating in the cavity between your exterior and interior walls, thus further reducing the heat loss through convection.

Unfortunately, recent research has found that upwards of 90 percent of homes in the United States are under-insulated. Improved insulation in dwellings could lead to a substantial decrease in residential energy use while simultaneously improving the comfort of your home. Unlike those pesky drafts coming from your cracked window frame, heat loss through a poorly insulated wall is hard to feel and impossible to see. MyHEAT, however, offers an easy-to-use tool to help homeowners identify precisely where their homes are losing heat.

What is MyHEAT?

MyHEAT is a Calgary, Canada-based company that uses an award-winning technology called Object-Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA) methods to detect, map, and monitor the invisible waste heat escaping from different types of buildings. This technology allows them to rely on large-scale data processing to establish precisely where energy and heat escape from residential, industrial, commercial, and other types of buildings.

The heat loss data is collected through a thermal sensor attached to the bottom of an airplane that subsequently flies over some urban regions where homes are located.