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Haresh Patel stares intensely at the electrical outlet. He inserts a device into the small space between the outlet and the wall, pokes, prods, measures and then produces a benign sample. He paces the room for clues, measures some more, muses, and then spots something troublesome: "Are those original windows?"

An hour before, bathed in sunshine, he was tapping on the frames of those windows, measuring, meditating, taking quick digital snapshots and making notations in a beat-up binder.

"We jokingly started calling these guys the CSI's of energy audits, because they poke around everywhere. You can't hide anything!" says Tracy Chong, director of marketing for Green$aver, Toronto's only non-profit corporation dedicated to energy efficiency.

I've got nothing to hide, so I've asked them to poke and prod my humble 1961 Scarborough back-split. While I don't anticipate many surprises - my furnace is a dinosaur and the coldest rooms in the house are those directly over the crawlspace - I do believe in doing my part for the environment by "Saving the planet one home at a time," as Green$aver's slogan says.

A few hundred dollars on a Green$aver energy audit, usually followed by spending just a few hundred more on small improvements, can make a real difference to the city's overall environmental health ... as well as one's pocketbook in the long run.

Another advantage, Ms. Chong says, is that information gained through an audit will act as a talisman against cold-calling contractors claiming that $10,000 in new windows will translate into huge savings on heating bills. Often, windows - such as vinyl models from the 1980s like most of mine - are perfectly serviceable with some fresh caulking and the replacement of cracked gaskets. Windows, she says, "do very little to change the R-value of a home."

And speaking of windows, during the first hour of Mr. Patel's visit on that sunny late May day, he documented each and every one by noting their age and placement, measured which parts of the house are above ground and which are under, calculated ceilings heights, basements depths, wall thickness and, by looking inside electrical outlets, determined what type of insulation I have. (Thankfully, it's not asbestos!)

"There's a lot of measuring," Ms. Chong says with a chuckle, explaining it's all necessary to create a computer model of my home once back at the office, which Mr. Patel will use to write his final report.

During the second hour, Mr. Patel conducted the "blower door" test. Resembling some sort of quarantine device, an adjustable frame with bright red tent-like material is fitted around the home's front door. At the bottom of the tent is a circular opening into which a huge variable-speed fan is placed. After ensuring all exterior windows and doors are closed and all interior doors are open, the fan is turned on, sucking air out of the house. By creating negative air pressure on inside of the house relative to the outside air pressure, a 60-kilometre wind striking the exterior is simulated.

Then, it's smoke pencil time; by squirting and observing little puffs in key areas - obviously, smoke will shoot toward you if air is rushing in - spots where I'll need to focus my efforts later will be determined.

This fascinating test revealed that my crawlspace is fine (no draughts, but the bare cinderblock will need to be insulated), as are most of my windows (I'll have to do some minor caulking).

It was determined that a cold corner that I attributed to draughts was more of an insulation issue. A quick dab of caulking will fix the leaky hatch to my small attic, but, unfortunately, another major air leak won't get fixed for some time because of its weird location.

Throughout the procedure, I shadowed Mr. Patel - something Ms. Chong encourages. "I think you learn more if you're side-by-side because you can ask questions in terms of how to solve [the problems that are found]," she says.

A few days later, I received the Ontario ecoENERGY report from Green$aver. My home rated a 58 on the EnerGuide scale, which is close to the average for a home of its age. If I were to implement all of the report's recommendations, I could bring my score up to a 72 and reduce my energy consumption by as much as 33 per cent. Just replacing my furnace with an EnergyStar, 92-per-cent-efficient model would add 9.3 points to my score; crawlspace insulation a further 2.8.

While I already had a general idea about this, I didn't realize just how beneficial those two acts alone would be. Interestingly, I found I'd been misled about a year ago when a heating contractor told me it'd be a waste to put a high-efficiency furnace in a house like mine.

"It drives us crazy," Ms. Chong says of this kind of "trusted" advice.

The report also gave me a priority sequence of things to fix, and I learned I'd still qualify for government incentives even if I tackled some of the work myself.

For those jobs I don't want to do, Green$aver can step in. "When we first started, nobody wanted to do little [jobs] - most of the contractors have what I call the Linda Evangelista complex: They don't want to get out of bed for less than $10,000. So we started doing these little $100, $300, $500 jobs," she says.

And, most important, I learned that CSI guys aren't just on television.

To learn more about energy audits or to schedule one, visit http://www.greensaver.org.

For folks interested in on-demand hot water tanks but have been scared off by the price (like me), it's worth noting that there is now a company offering rentals. Contact Toronto-based Newten Home Comfort Inc. at www.newten.ca/rental.html.

With a Green$aver energy audit, homeowners can apply for Alterna Bank's Green$aver improvement loan at variable prime rate.