Can Residential Solar Companies Make Money Doing Energy Audits?

When solar companies consider adding energy audits into their service offering, one question always comes up: can you actually make money doing them?

In this clip from HeatSpring PRO Circles, building performance expert and “Avoiding Main Panel Upgrades” instructor Spencer Rosen tackles this question head-on. While energy audits won’t deliver the same margins as solar installations, they’re far from loss leaders. They’re actually a way to monetize what you’re already doing – site visits and proposals – while positioning yourself to deepen customer relationships.

Spencer breaks down how energy audits generate $300 to $800 per visit while uncovering opportunities like air sealing, insulation, and electrification that turn single transactions into ongoing revenue streams.

This conversation is part of HeatSpring PRO Circles, where industry experts share practical insights on diversification, building performance, and emerging opportunities in clean energy. PRO subscribers get access to these monthly expert discussions plus 16 premium courses across four learning paths, including Building Systems PRO. Join for $89/month or $890/year. Learn more about HeatSpring PRO.

Transcript below.

Brian: Is an energy audit a place you can make money, or is it a loss leader that leads to follow-on products that make money?

Spencer: It’s a personnel-driven process, so it’s not like selling panels for $30,000, buying them for $10,000, doing $7,000 of labor, and walking away with $12,000 or $13,000 profit. So it’s not a huge profit center for a business, but it doesn’t mean it has to be a loss leader.

A company could sell an $800 energy audit, it could cost them $300 to $400 worth of staff time, and they could be profitable on that offering—if they have the trained personnel, the right systems, the right software to do the energy audit efficiently.

What is often hidden from people’s view when they think about this is not that the energy audit is this low-profit thing. It’s that they already have loss leaders, and those are called solar quotes. They’re already going out to the home or spending time on the phone or sending a proposal. And if they’re sending somebody out, that is a cost that they’ve received $0 for.

So in a way, instead of it costing the labor with zero revenue, you can actually pick up anywhere from $300 to $800—typically that’s the range, depending on how comprehensive the audit is and your market—to fund the bidding process. And that’s one of the things that really worked for me when I started Energy Integrity back in 2010. There were a lot of utility subsidies for energy audits. In fact, we would get $600 in those days for performing energy audits—that’s probably $1,000 or $1,500 in today’s dollars.

Yes, it would take a lot of time, but we were able to provide a very comprehensive, holistic proposal process and we were getting at least our time and costs covered for that effort. So if you can leverage local utility rebate programs, if you can create the kind of value for customers that they’re willing to make that investment, it can actually—not be a profit center—but be a way to cover operational costs, is the way I look at it.