Home Energy Audit Guide for Las Vegas: Find Where Your Money Goes

If you have ever stared at a $380 NV Energy bill in August and wondered where it all goes, you are not alone. Las Vegas homeowners pay some of the highest cooling costs in the country — and most of that money does not disappear because of the 115-degree heat alone. It disappears through gaps, leaks, and thin insulation that allow your hard-earned cold air to escape into a 150-degree attic before it ever reaches your living room. A home energy audit is the tool that tells you exactly where those losses are happening and gives you a ranked list of fixes with real payback numbers. Our technicians at The Cooling Company have performed hundreds of energy assessments across the Las Vegas Valley, and the findings are remarkably consistent. Most homes have three to five significant energy leaks, and fixing even two of them can cut $75 to $150 from a summer monthly bill. Here is what an audit actually involves, what we find most often in Las Vegas homes, and how to decide which fixes belong at the top of your list.

What Happens During a Home Energy Audit

A thorough energy audit is not a walk-through with a clipboard. It is a diagnostic process that uses equipment to measure what a visual inspection cannot catch. Here is what a professional audit in Las Vegas typically covers:

Blower Door Test

The auditor mounts a calibrated fan in your front door frame, depressurizes the house to a standard negative pressure (50 pascals), and measures how much air rushes in from the outside. The result — expressed in CFM50, or cubic feet per minute at 50 pascals — tells exactly how leaky your home's shell is. A tight modern home might measure 800 to 1,200 CFM50. Many Las Vegas homes built in the 1990s and early 2000s measure 2,500 to 4,500 CFM50, meaning air is pouring in from outdoors at a rate that makes your AC work hours longer than it should. During the test, the auditor walks through the house with a smoke pencil or thermal camera to find where the air infiltration is entering — attic bypasses, around recessed lights, plumbing chases, and the gap between drywall and flooring are the usual culprits.

Duct Leakage Test

This is the most important test for a Las Vegas home. The auditor connects a duct blaster — similar to a blower door but designed for the duct system — and pressurizes the ducts to measure how much conditioned air is leaking out before it reaches your rooms. In Las Vegas, where attic temperatures hit 140 to 160 degrees in summer, duct leakage is not just an efficiency problem — it is an expensive thermal punishment. Every cubic foot of cold air that leaks into a 155-degree attic is replaced by hot attic air that your system must cool from scratch. We routinely find 20 to 30% duct leakage in valley homes, and some older systems with flex duct that has separated at connections test at 35 to 40%.

Insulation Inspection

The auditor goes into the attic with a depth probe and thermal camera to measure actual insulation R-value and identify areas where insulation is missing, compressed, or bypassed. In Las Vegas, the DOE recommends R-38 to R-60 for attics. Many homes we assess — particularly those built between 1990 and 2005 — have R-13 to R-19, sometimes less after years of HVAC crews walking through and compressing the batts.

HVAC System Performance Check

The auditor measures supply and return air temperatures to calculate your system's actual temperature split. A properly operating system should deliver air 15 to 20 degrees cooler than the return air temperature. They also check static pressure in the duct system, inspect the coils for fouling, and verify refrigerant charge. This connects directly to your AC maintenance history — systems that have not been tuned in several years almost always show measurable efficiency degradation.

Window and Door Inspection

In Las Vegas's older neighborhoods, single-pane windows and aluminum frames are common. A single-pane window has an R-value of roughly R-1. A double-pane low-e window is R-3 to R-4. The difference in solar heat gain on a west-facing window during a July afternoon is substantial — the auditor will flag these and calculate the heat gain contribution.

Water Heater Assessment

Las Vegas has some of the hardest water in the nation — 16 to 22 grains per gallon. That mineral load builds up as scale inside your water heater tank, insulating the heating element from the water and forcing it to run longer to reach temperature. An auditor will check your water heater's age, efficiency rating, and visible scale buildup. For homes on conventional tank water heaters, scale alone can add $15 to $30 per month in wasted energy.

What We Find Most Often in Las Vegas Homes

After hundreds of energy assessments across Henderson, Summerlin, North Las Vegas, and the surrounding valley, these are the findings that show up almost every time.

Duct Leakage: 20 to 30% Loss is the Norm

This is the single biggest energy drain in most Las Vegas homes, and it is the one most homeowners are unaware of. Your ducts run through an attic that is essentially an outdoor space in summer — uninsulated, exposed to the sun, and capable of reaching temperatures that would destroy most organic materials. When duct joints fail, when flex duct sags and kinks, or when original duct tape (which cracks and fails within a few years in extreme heat) gives out, the result is conditioned air bleeding directly into that environment. A home losing 25% of its conditioned air through ducts is running its AC 25% harder than necessary. On a $320 monthly bill, that is $80 every month leaving through holes in your attic. Our duct cleaning and sealing services address both the leakage and the contamination that accumulates in leaky systems over time.

Attic Insulation Below R-30

Las Vegas tract homes from the 1990s and early 2000s — the master-planned communities in the Southwest, Centennial Hills, Henderson, and Green Valley — were frequently built with R-13 to R-19 attic insulation. That met code at the time. It does not come close to meeting what a desert climate demands today. With R-19 insulation and a 155-degree attic above a 78-degree living space, that 77-degree temperature difference is constantly pushing heat downward through your ceiling. You can feel it in rooms directly under the roof on July afternoons — the ceiling is warm to the touch and no amount of AC setting adjustment seems to fix the heat gain.

Air Sealing Gaps That Add Up Fast

Las Vegas homes built at speed during the housing booms of the 1990s and 2000s often have significant air leakage at attic bypasses — the unsealed gaps around plumbing and electrical penetrations, recessed lighting canisters, and the top plates of interior walls. These gaps create chimney-effect air pathways that pull conditioned air straight into the attic. A blower door test in a house like this often measures 3,000 to 4,500 CFM50, two to three times what a well-sealed home of the same size would register.

Single-Pane or Old Aluminum-Frame Windows

In neighborhoods built before 1995, single-pane windows with aluminum frames are common. Aluminum conducts heat roughly 1,000 times more efficiently than wood or vinyl — which means every aluminum frame is a direct thermal bridge between the scorching exterior and your conditioned interior. West-facing single-pane windows in a Las Vegas summer can dump significant radiant heat into a room even with blinds closed.

HVAC Systems Running Below Rated Efficiency

A 14 SEER system that has not been maintained will not operate at 14 SEER. Dirty coils, low refrigerant, and degraded capacitors all reduce real-world efficiency. When we check temperature splits on unmaintained systems, we often find they are delivering 10 to 13 degrees of cooling instead of the 16 to 20 degrees the system is designed for. That gap means the system runs longer — and costs more — for the same result. An HVAC maintenance tune-up addresses many of these losses directly.

DIY Energy Checks You Can Do Today

You do not need a professional audit to start identifying problems. These checks take an afternoon and cost nothing. Check your attic insulation depth. Pull down the attic hatch and look at the insulation depth on the floor. Each inch of blown-in fiberglass or cellulose provides roughly R-2.5 to R-3.7. If you measure 6 inches, you likely have R-15 to R-22 — well below what Las Vegas needs. If you can see the ceiling joists through the insulation, you are significantly under-insulated. Feel your supply registers during AC operation. Hold your hand a few inches below each supply register while the system is running. Registers that deliver noticeably less airflow than others often indicate a duct problem upstream — a disconnected section, a collapsed flex duct, or a damper stuck closed. Do the candle test on a windy day. Light a candle and hold it near electrical outlets on exterior walls, the gap beneath baseboards, and around recessed lights in the ceiling. Movement of the flame indicates air infiltration. The attic bypasses are harder to check without a blower door, but outlets and trim gaps are visible starting points. Pull your last 12 months of NV Energy bills. Look at your kilowatt-hour usage, not just the dollar amount. A typical 2,000-square-foot Las Vegas home uses 1,800 to 2,400 kWh in July. If you are at 3,000 or more, something is pulling significantly above average. Check visible duct sections in the attic. If you can safely access the attic, look at the first few feet of duct that extend from the air handler. Look for visible gaps at connections, sections where flex duct has pulled away from its collar, and original duct tape that has cracked or peeled. Any of these are costing you money every day.

ROI of Common Las Vegas Energy Fixes

Once you have an audit report, the question becomes: which fixes do first? Here is how the most common Las Vegas improvements stack up by payback period.

Duct Sealing and Repair: $800–$2,500 — Payback 1 to 2 Years

For a home losing 25% of its conditioned air, professional duct sealing typically reduces that loss to 5 to 8%. On a $350 summer bill, that is $50 to $75 per month in direct savings during the five-month cooling season — $250 to $375 in a single summer. Aeroseal technology, which pressurizes the duct system and sprays a sealant that adheres to leak points from the inside, can seal even hard-to-reach leaks that manual sealing cannot reach.

Attic Insulation Upgrade: $1,500–$3,500 — Payback 2 to 4 Years

Upgrading from R-19 to R-38 or R-49 reduces the heat load pushing through your ceiling by 50% or more. For an average single-story Las Vegas home, this translates to 15 to 25% cooling savings — $45 to $90 per month in summer. The work is done by blowing additional insulation over existing insulation, a process that takes one to two days and produces no interior disruption.

Air Sealing: $300–$1,200 — Payback Under 1 Year

Sealing attic bypasses, recessed lights, and penetrations is the highest-ROI energy measure in most homes. The labor is intensive because it requires working in a hot attic, but the materials cost is low. A home that tests at 3,500 CFM50 before air sealing might drop to 1,800 to 2,200 after — reducing the continuous infiltration load your AC must fight.

Window Film: $500–$1,500 — Payback 3 to 5 Years

Low-e window film applied to existing single-pane or clear-glass windows blocks 50 to 80% of solar heat gain while maintaining visibility. This is a fraction of the cost of window replacement and delivers most of the thermal benefit for west- and south-facing glass. For a home with significant west-facing window exposure, film can reduce cooling load noticeably in the afternoon peak hours.

HVAC System Upgrade: $5,000–$12,000 — Payback 5 to 10 Years

Replacing an older 10 to 13 SEER system with a modern 16 to 20 SEER2 system reduces electricity consumption per hour of operation by 25 to 50%. In Las Vegas, where your system runs 2,500 to 3,000 hours per year, this efficiency gain compounds significantly. Our AC installation services include a Manual J load calculation to ensure the new system is correctly sized — which matters as much as the SEER rating for real-world performance.

Smart Thermostat: $150–$350 — Payback Under 1 Year

A programmed setback schedule that lets the house warm to 82 to 85 degrees during vacant hours and pre-cools before occupants return typically saves 10 to 15% on cooling costs. At $350 per month, that is $35 to $52 per month — covering the thermostat cost in two to three months. We cover this in detail in our maintenance plan packages, which include thermostat optimization as a standard step.

Indoor Air Quality Improvements

Homes with air sealing and duct improvements often see measurable gains in indoor air quality as well. Reducing attic air infiltration means fewer dust particles, allergens, and pollutants pulled into the living space through duct leaks and ceiling bypasses.

Professional Audit vs. HVAC System Assessment: Which Do You Need

A full home energy audit — with blower door, duct testing, thermal imaging, and report — typically costs $200 to $500 and is performed by a BPI-certified or HERS-rated energy auditor. This is the right choice when you want a comprehensive picture of your entire home's energy performance, including envelope, windows, appliances, and HVAC together. An HVAC-focused assessment, which our team offers as part of our HVAC maintenance and diagnostic services, concentrates on your mechanical system and ductwork. It measures supply/return temperatures, refrigerant charge, static pressure, coil condition, and performs a duct leakage test. This is the right starting point if your primary concern is your AC system's performance and your monthly energy bills — which, in Las Vegas, is where 50 to 70% of your electricity goes. For most Las Vegas homeowners, the practical answer is to start with an HVAC assessment (which we can schedule quickly and often the same week) and follow up with a full building envelope audit if the assessment reveals significant remaining gaps. Many homeowners find that addressing ductwork and HVAC efficiency alone accounts for the majority of their savings opportunity.

Schedule Your Las Vegas Energy Assessment

Every month you skip an audit is another month paying for cooling that never reaches your rooms. The Cooling Company's licensed HVAC technicians serve homeowners across Las Vegas, Henderson, Summerlin, Centennial Hills, North Las Vegas, and the entire valley. We provide honest assessments, real numbers, and recommendations that make financial sense for your home — not upsells that do not move the needle on your bill. Call us at (702) 567-0707 or schedule an HVAC assessment online. We will tell you where your money is going and what it costs to stop the leak.

Share This Page

• Share on Facebook
• Share on X
• Share on LinkedIn
• Share by Email