Home Quiz Can Educate Consumers and Advance Sales Conversations


BPI has relaunched the Home Quiz on our homeowner site. It's a valuable engagement tool to help friends, family, and customers understand what they could gain from home energy upgrade work.

Homeowners may disagree about if it’s important to reduce carbon-based fuel use, but everyone can agree on saving money. And because most people spend more time at home now, when public activities and travel are curtailed, a comfortable home is more important than ever. The Home Quiz helps users to understand how their home's energy issues may be affecting their quality of life--and their pocketbook.

Owners can be overwhelmed by the decisions involved in their home and have a hard time knowing where to start. They may fear making investments in the wrong area or be unsure of which will bring the best return. While your relationship to the customer will always be the most important part of the sales process, the Home Quiz can be a valuable tool for conversation and education.

The Home Quiz uses the home's location, size, and age to calculate its energy use. It combines publicly available data with the same technology used in the EDS Auditor to give a simple report on potential savings. Customers can add info about their heating system and water heating systems and adjust values to reflect their actual monthly bills for more accurate results.

The Home Quiz is much less detailed than an energy audit and is not meant to replace one. It is a tool for customer education and engagement. By giving visualized estimates of potential savings, it can help customers understand how much they may have to gain by making improvements.  

The benefits of a retrofit can be abstract and hard to understand for people without a background in building science. Engaging and educating customers on your website is the first to converting a visitor to a customer. The Home Quiz can start conversations that lead to customers being ready to buy. Friends and family who live at a distance can use the included  zip code locator tool to find BPI GoldStar Contractors or certified technicians in their area to help them take the next step.

The Home Quiz is created and maintained by EDS Tech, a company that specializes in home performance modeling software. It is a simplified version of the HVAC Home Auditor, a contractor-friendly heat loss/heat gain load calculation and home performance modeling software.  All the calculations are based on industry standards from ACCA, AHRI, and the DOE. It is one of the only software programs that allows a user to calibrate and true up energy calculations to the customer’s actual utility bills.

We hope that BPI stakeholders will get a chance to use the Home Quiz as an engagement tool for deepening relationships with homeowners. The Quiz is also available from EDS for placement on company websites for easier customer access and location-based marketing.