Home energy contractor bids: scoring three offers side by side

Three bids arrive with three different scopes, three different assumptions and three different ways of describing the same work. Comparing the totals is meaningless until they describe the same job. This is a scoring sheet for getting them onto one basis and then ranking them on something other than price.

What to take away

• Write the brief yourself, and give the identical document to every bidder.
• Score scope completeness before comparing any total.
• Weight the answers you can verify above the ones you cannot.
• A bid that omits a line is not cheaper, it is incomplete.

Write the brief first

Bidders will scope the job differently unless you scope it for them. A one-page brief given to all three should contain:

• What you want changed, and what must not change.
• Photographs of the panel, the existing equipment and the space.
• Twelve months of utility usage data.
• Access constraints, working hours and any building rules.
• The deliverables you expect at closeout.
• A request that the quote be broken into named lines.

Describe your house accurately in that brief. National figures are a poor substitute; EIA's finding that newer U.S. homes are around 30 percent larger yet consume roughly as much energy as older ones is a reminder that size, vintage and construction interact in ways that make any assumption about a typical house unreliable.

The scoring sheet

Score each bidder one to five per row, then sum. Do not look at the totals until the sheet is full.

Row	What a five looks like
Load calculation	Done on site, output offered without being asked
Scope completeness	Every line in your brief addressed explicitly
Exclusions	Named clearly rather than left implied
Electrical scope	License holder named, permit priced
Commissioning	Named readings promised as a document
Change order process	Written approval required before extra work
Schedule realism	Dependencies named, not a single optimistic date
Service afterwards	Same company, or a named alternative
References	Same work type, same area, last year

Nine rows, forty-five points available. Price enters afterwards, as a tiebreaker between bids that scored close, not as the primary axis. A bid that scores well on paper still deserves the nine checks worth making before you sign a heat pump quote.

Ask whether anyone modeled the house

The better assessment firms do not estimate by eye; they model. Building energy modeling is a mature discipline with federal tooling behind it, and the Department of Energy's building energy modeling program develops the simulation engines the industry uses.

You do not need a full simulation for a water heater swap. For a whole-home retrofit, a bidder who models rather than guesses is offering something meaningfully different, and it is worth asking which tool they use and whether you get the file.

Handling the gaps

Any row scoring one or two goes back as a written question rather than a rejection. Bidders frequently omit things they intend to do, and a written answer both fixes the comparison and creates a record.

If a bidder will not answer in writing, score that row one permanently. For the verification checks that sit alongside this scoring, see our piece on the contractor checks people skip; the roles themselves are mapped in twelve kinds of contractor.

Common questions

Should I tell bidders what the others quoted? No. It invites matching a number rather than pricing a scope, which is the opposite of what you want.

How many bids is enough? Three is common. More matters less than giving all of them the same brief.

What if the highest score is also the highest price? That is a normal outcome. Decide whether the extra buys something you value, using the sheet as the evidence.

Is a verbal clarification acceptable? Only if it ends up in the revised written quote. Nothing else survives a dispute.