In the past year Matt has learned a massive amount about home efficiency. Last summer he found out that the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation desperately needed people to become energy raters, and he saw it as an excellent way to break out of standard bathroom remodels into green building. Multiple rounds of classes, books, plus visiting hundreds of homes to rate their efficiency has given him a good understanding about how all the different factors work together to make a healthy home.
But of course Matt wasn't satisfied with just seeing and studying about homes from the outside. It drove him crazy to come home to our single pane windows, four inch walls, and leaky doors. Every time a customer would say, "you must have a really efficient house!" he would cringe. We had to get an independent auditor to rate our home, but by the time he finally came in March, Matt already had ordered the new windows. Only, Matt was not content to just replace windows and do some air sealing. He wanted to go top of the line.
We are installing a "remote wall" system, which means that we insulate on the outside of our house and then put on new siding on the outside. It is a fairly new concept, and has many details that have not been totally worked out, so Matt has been doing tons more research to figure out details like how to attach siding to four inches of foam. He even built a "model section" of wall to figure out how the windows and corners were going to fit together.
The dumpster arrived two weeks ago and he hired a couple of guys to help him. First they had to rip off the 50 year old shake siding and install a new vapor barrier. Then they replaced the windows with triple pane, building them out four inches so that they will be flush with the new siding. We made the window in our bedroom that faces north (and another house) smaller, and the kitchen window which faces south a little bigger. It is amazing the difference in the comfortability of the house already... cooler by day and warmer at night. Yesterday they started putting up the foam.
Matt is still doing energy ratings for other people... they are helping to pay for our project, as well as the wages of the guys helping. When we are finished we will bring our two-star home to a five-star-plus! This will qualify us for the whole $10,000 rebate from the Alaska Housing Finance Center's energy rebate program, plus there will be some tax incentives. This will help with the costs, but in no way cover them. It is not cheap, and many people that need it the most cannot afford to front the money. We are very lucky to be benefitting from this program in two ways. We will also recoup costs many years to come with dramatically lower energy bills.
We are hoping to learn a lot through this experience to be able to pass it on to other people. As energy costs continue to rise, these sorts of retrofits may become standard. We will no longer be able to waste our precious resources. People are already starting to take notice. The energy rebate program has been extremely popular, with a waiting list thousands of people long. Rich or poor, everyone is feeling the hit. So, let us plow on ahead and figure these details out!
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