Weatherizing homes: The next big green industry?
A thermal imaging camera. That blue spot in the corner means there's a gap in the wall insulation.
(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET Networks)It's not the sort of thing that excites your typical Silicon Valley venture capitalist, but companies that weatherize homes could be the sleeper green-business success stories this year.
Many people would like to lower their household energy bills but need an expert to recommend what steps to take as part of a long-term plan.
There's also a substantial amount of government support for energy-efficient retrofits, including from President Obama who has set a target of lowering utility bills at 2 million homes. The federal stimulus plan now being debated in Washington, D.C., sets aside $6 billion to weatherize low-income homes.
At the local level, too, municipal governments and nonprofits see home energy use as one the most important ways to meet greenhouse gas emission reduction goals, said Geoff Chapin, CEO of Boston-based Next Step Living, which provides energy auditing services.
"This is a tremendous time to be in the field," he said. "Cities and towns care about creating jobs that can't be outsourced and reducing their carbon footprint and saving people's money, so it has a lot of support."
Chapin founded the energy-services company last year and has weatherized more than 100 homes. A former consultant for cities and nonprofits, he founded the business in an effort to cut residential energy bills, lower greenhouse gas emissions, and create jobs.
A blower door is a removable door with fan and computer to measure air flow.
(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET Networks)There are already free home energy efficiency services. Paid services from companies like Next Step Living typically use diagnostic equipment, notably a blower door, to spot holes where heated or cooled air slips outside. (Full disclosure: I've signed on as a customer and am expecting my first visit soon.)
A blower door is essentially a cloth door equipped with a fan and a computer that measures air pressure and how fast air flows. By blowing air through a building, auditors can spot the biggest holes where heated (or cooled) air is escaping outside. With a thermal imaging camera, auditors can, for example, see if an area on a wall is not as well as insulated as others.
Next Step Living tries to set itself apart from free energy audits by actually doing work and being available after the first visit for advice on devising a long-term plan.
On a three-hour visit, Chapin said that auditors can reduce a home's energy usage, combining electricity and heating, by 10 to 20 percent. They can come back to take on larger projects, like air sealing an attic, or recommend partners.
"Energy efficiency is the biggest low-hanging fruit. It's the bridge to get us to a renewable energy future," he said. "It's the lowest-cost way to reduce greenhouse gases and has the highest pay off."
Martin LaMonica is a senior writer for CNET's Green Tech blog. He started at CNET News in 2002, covering IT and Web development. Before that, he was executive editor at IT publication InfoWorld. E-mail Martin. 
By the way, say you spend $1000. How long does it take to break even vs the energy bills they get? Months? Years?
"""The federal stimulus plan now being debated in Washington, D.C., sets aside $6 billion to weatherize low-income homes"""
And just what is a "Low Income" Home? Does that include single-wides?
Another Government Fraud.
Thank You.
Why don't you read the bill first to find out exactly what they consider a "low income home' before calling it fraud.
If federal assistance helps a family who lost a job to reduce their energy expenses and thereby avoid possible foreclosure, then I think it's well worth it.
It makes much more sense to pay $1000 to an outfit that will save 20% on utilities for the rest of the life of that building than it does to give people money to heat the outdoors. I have lived in houses in the midwest for which $1000 would be about a two year payback at 20% of utility bills.
Would you rather pay a subsidy to the gas and electric companies in the form of utility assistance or pay to fix the houses in the first place? Ideally, the owners of these rentals would modernize the buildings (a lot of existing housing has NO insulation at all) but since they don't pay the utility bills there is little motivation for this to happen.
Just the act of adding extra attic insulation, weatherstripping the doors, and mending a couple of windows dropped my power bill by 30% this year (compared to last year). Next summer it'll be time to make window inserts and re-insulate under the floor, which will cost far less than $1000 and yet I'll probably realize a similar savings. A set of french doors to replace the old aluminum-framed sliding glass ones will help give an even bigger boost to efficiency.
Not so sure that spending a grand just to have someone find the esoteric is worth doing, unless you're still paying outrageous energy bills compared to your neighbors. There comes a point of diminishing returns, yanno?
Half the problem with a retrofit is this, is the house you're in really worth it.
In the USA there are a lot of very old houses, I live in one, and to be honest, it would be a waste of money to dump X grand dollars into it. Honestly, there are a lot of old structures that need to be torn down and replaced with newer, more efficient construction.
On to the article, YES, this will become a new business, and those that are familiar with modern building will benefit... This isn't building like grampa did way back when...
Modernizing a house is definitely worth it - hopefully in the future there will be good laws for residential property akin to California's AB1103 (requires disclosure of 3 years of building energy consumption to prospective tennants) so that people will be able to see the whole picture when it comes to deciding on purchasing a house.
But as it stands now you're better off putting $1000 worth of granite countertop into a house than the same value in insulation...
The best way to do this is increase the insulation all the way around the house to the R38 standard and replace all your windows with Energy Star-rated windows that no only have double or triple panes to keep the heat in winter in but also the ability to block the heat of the sun from coming into the house during the summer. This results in a dramatic reduction in both heating and air conditioning usage, substantially cutting your utility bills.
Firstly, any auditor worth their salt will use a blower door and a thermal imaging camera. The blower door accentuates the air leaks so you can find where the leaks really are and the thermal camera shows you temperature patterns, which can show you where air is leaking in as well as show areas in the wall missing insulation or spot water leaks that may not yet be visible.
Much of the work I do is for other contractors. Experienced, quality contractors who know about basic weatherization practice but often can't figure out why a customer's house is uncomfortable. An energy auditor can, in a couple hours, pinpoint the source of the problem without having to tear out walls or randomly fix things, often saving many hundreds or thousands of dollars in random repairs. These are things that very few people without these tools or experience can find.
As for payback, that's a common question. I've run into a handful of people who say "why should I pay you to tell me to insulate? I'll just add more fiberglass to my attic." the problem is, the big issues are usually not so obvious. You could add several feet of insulation to the attic and have it make no difference if the real problem is a leaky duct. People can live in a house for years without finding the problems. Once found, it may be as simple as $1 worth of caulk, but that one duct leak may have been costing hundreds of dollars per year in wasted system efficiency. Conditions like this exist in almost every house I examine.
There are a lot of other things we do during our evaluations that can make it worth the expense. For example, I helped a lot of clients this fall decide on new heating systems. This involved determining how large a system was needed, putting them in touch with quality contractors, reviewing quotes, and ensuring that the contractors provided the right system. Many of these people were spending $10k-$20k on major heating system renovations that they'll have to live with for years. A few hundred dollars paid for my consulting time was well worth their money.
I could go on with more examples. Once you've done this for a while, advocating for the consumer, you realize the value you're adding, as do your clients. Everybody I've worked with has been glad they hired me. The value of a safe, comfortable and energy efficient home is far greater than the fees we charge.
It helps that these improvements pay for themselves (maybe in one year, maybe in ten). And that a good consultant can detect indoor air quality concerns (poor indoor air quality has been linked to asthma and other health concerns). And that you decrease your carbon footprint.
As a society, we can pay for more power plants (and hope renewables can keep up with rising demand), or we can pay less money (estimates in the range of $.01 - $.05 kWh) to reduce demand by improving efficiency. Your (and society's) choice.
Energy efficiency = $ savings for homeowners, better indoor air quality, more comfort, less greenhouse gases, less other pollutants (e.g. NOX and SOX from power plants), more low, medium, and highly skilled domestic jobs (to retrofit homes), less imported energy sources, less military need to protect those energy sources, and a less hypocritical foreign policy that currently has to look the other way when energy rich countries are a little less than democratic.
Did I mention that the residential sector is the world's largest consumer of end-use demand and according to a McKinsey & Company study it is where the largest energy efficiency opportunities are?
But perhaps the government has no role in this, if everything the government does is a fraud.
Utilities, partnering with agencies and contractors are wasting customer/federal/state money in low income and private weatherization programs through a lack of monitoring, training, and accountability, and the PUC is helping this waste and fraud by the lack of oversight. The Federal Departments of Energy and Housing and Human Services should be made aware of these ?shortcomings? and the noted waste, fraud and lack of monitoring.
Work is not being done to specs, not being inspected, not being accounted for, false PR is generated such as ?Energy Efficient? versus ?More Efficient than what the customer has? with regard to Refrigerator Replacement.
Work is paid for jobs that failed inspection but were never fixed.
Customers who are not low income routinely are admitted to the program. Non residential customers are also admitted, as are ?customers? not residing at the site, such as a family member not living in an apt. but whose name is on the bill.
Agencies that have contracts for work in these programs have managers who abuse employees, threatening them on a daily basis with dismissal for poor work, when they were never trained, committing the same mistakes over and over again, month after month, year after year. This is documented by the thousands of pictures taken by Inspectors over the years.
These same agencies allowed the use and sale of drugs on their property, as evidenced by the many pipes, razor blades, drying rack and scales found in Lancaster. The office there had a person holding PPL contracts for Audits, but that person also had a full time salaried position with CAP.
He is still doing the Energy Audits but no one is allowed to talk to him! So the workers have no avenue to communicate with the person drawing up the work orders.
ECA in Philadelphia was written up in the August 2007 Auditor General?s Report on Weatherization, but this document has never made it into any official record at PUC even though it was given to PUC staff.
PUC did not allow me to file a complaint because of an ?Investigation? supposedly being conducted by Kriss Brown during 2008.
Small businesses of one person who have been subcontractors in the Residential Energy field are being left behind. A handful of contractors get free training and free equipment from public utilities. They then use this equipment in competition against private sector contractors. Agencies get free training and free equipment also. PA Home Energy, PSD Consulting, West Penn Power, PPL and BPI and Penn State, and the State of PA are forcing small companies on the edge of survival to go bankrupt by requiring new "certifications" and expensive training to get these certificates. So if you have been doing Energy Audits, teaching it, training people in it at a state funded college for over 20 years, you can't get a customer a better interest rate on an Energy improvement loan, but someone who sat in a room for 4 days and passed a test can. They get reduced pricing on equipment if they pay.
The contractors who get free equipment from the utilities for low-income programs use that equipment in competition against other contractors in the private sector market. WHY is this allowed and supported by taxpayer funded programs? And now even more money is going into that pipeline....Where is the program to help those already experienced, or is the State saying, "go get in the unemployment line-oops you never paid UC because you were a subcontractor...guess you'll starve then, sorry!"
The DOE can not monitor dollars under the protocols presently in place.
Who are RESNET and BPI (connected to PPL)
What is PA Home Energy? (connected to West Penn Power) Who is PSD Consulting? And what role does Penn State play?
Pa Home Energy/West Penn Power/PSD Consulting/Penn State
Are creating a locked down monopoly for contractors in PA
PPL and BPI are doing the same.
If you don?t pay them, you can?t play. If you are on their list you can offer lower interest rates on Energy measures installed, and offer rebates. So a person with 20 years in and no certification can?t do this and someone with 2 weeks and certification can.
They have set up a process whereby THEY decide who is fit to work. And who are THEY, what are their credentials? Only that they have set themselves up as THE gate keepers of training and testing and certification for Home Performance.
AND you must buy their software and no one else?s?
But if a person has taught this as a subject, at a state university, they aren?t good enough to work in PA. That person would have to pay these people who are good MARKETERS.
Now that the Federal Green Jobs initiative is coming, the potential for waste beyond the normal hundreds of thousand of dollars going into the millions is a frightening reality.
representing a leader in Solid State lighting - but the concept of finding bldg flaws and
fixing them should be the clear,logical solution for all. I really wish across the continent
energy auditting was as commonplace as starbucks. For the unemployed check into
this career its sure to grow - based on merit.
- by jjbaulikki November 17, 2009 7:56 AM PST
- You can find some good resources to entering this business at <a href="http://www.energyauditortalk.org" rel="dofollow">weatherization</a> www.energyauditortalk.org
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