Weatherizing Your House

Wasn't there some talk about a stimulus bill that would assist people in replacing old energy guzzling appliances?

I'll second the idea of a minimal level of efficiency for rental housing. I rent, and I pay the utilities. As such there is NO incentive for the landlord to improve efficiency. Heck, I've discovered heating vents that were disconnected from the hot air ducts (i.e., hot air being blown under the floor instead of into the room!) and it took weeks and weeks of pestering. It got done, but the job was so crappy that the next season the ducts were once again disconnected.

This is an area where improvements will only happen through legislation. Unfortunately, I'd imagine that your average landlord has more political clout than your average renter.

Minnesota used a portion of its Fed stimulus money to create a program that unites residential energy conservation with creating jobs in the remodeling industry via Project ReEnergize ( http://www.homeenergyresourcemn.org/ProjectReEnergize/index.aspx ). Remodeling contractors went to training to understand the construction parameters and the tax rebates for homeowners. These same contractors sold the program to consumers (with the help of a state-wide publicity campaign run by the state builders association). Few restrictions were placed on homeowner eligibility - basically no home built after 2000 and no McMansions. No contractor could sell more than two contracts, so no one cornered the market. In 3 weeks, $2.5 million was sold, producing long term energy conservation, creating jobs in a depressed industry and improving home values.
Packaged properly it is possible to put some sizzle in conservation.

If the weatherization savings are so profound over time, here's a bizarre idea for overcoming the inertia. The theory here is that homeowners will be pleased to get a small benefit, coupled with the warm fuzzies from being kind to the planet, as long as they don't have to spend anything much out of pocket.

I'm going to completely invent numbers here just to explore the idea. Suppose it costs $5,000 to weatherize Mr. Jones's home, but Mr. Jones will save $1000 in utility bills per year (like I said, I'm making this up). Suppose the following happens:

1) The federal government loans $5000 to Mr. Jones's utility companies at some low interest rate, say 6%, if they can persuade him to get his house weatherized.
2) The utility company pays some weatherizing company to get Mr. Jones's home properly weatherized.
3) Mr. Jones pays nothing out of pocket, but agrees to pay some percentage of the savings from weatherization to his utility companies for some period of time, out of his monthly utility bills. Thus, the utility company and Mr. Jones split the $1000 each year in some way.
4) If Mr. Jones sells his house before the weatherization is paid off, the balance comes out of the sale price of his home.

The big trick, which might make this untenable, is defining what "savings from weatherization" really are and how to quantify them. Perhaps Mr. Jones would get to keep more of the savings if he cut a larger percentage of energy usage off his bill or something.

Still, I wonder if you could structure something that would make the utility companies some money if they did the weatherization properly and Mr. Jones some money if he was smart about energy usage. That could get around the inertia issue because the utility companies could approach their customers with an eye to extra revenue and sell their customers on making a little cash and doing a good thing for the planet at the same time.

I believe one of the issues is that people only see the big expensive projects. I am not even close to being rich, more like slightly about poverty level (by choice). My neighbor across the street lives in a similar house, built the same year as mine, about 90 years ago. She recently paid over $1,800 for oil to heat her house for the winter. My total bill to heat my house last year was just above $600. The only difference was my high efficiency gas heater (that already paid for itself), I keep my house at 63 degrees (I actually got used to it and I'm from the tropics), wear layers of clothing, use plastic sheets on my very old windows and curtains on the rest, cover my pipes, etc. I only increase the temperature while I shower. I buy what I need for the next year on sale at the end of the season. I usually spend about $40-$50 a year on weatherizing supplies. I live in Central Minnesota and cold (very) season here lasts around seven months, if we are lucky. Yes, I could spend $10,000 plus and save myself a few hours a year, but why?