 Dana, tell us what's going on here at this homeowner's house. These homeowners are engaging in an air sealing project as part of Efficiency Mains air seal deal. They're doing six hours of air sealing and insulation around the house and incorporated with a BPI energy audit, one of our participating energy auditors from the area. And we're promoting folks taking these steps right away and we'll pay for the first $600 on the invoice. What kind of air sealing and insulation has done? So far in the program we've had more than 3,500 homes engaged in this air sealing deal. And the most common measures that are engaged in by the energy auditors is sealing around chimney chases both in the basement and the attic, sealing around plumbing and lighting and penetrations that go through the different floors, sealing around the rim joists and sills in the basement around the perimeter. Anywhere that air leakage can come in in the lower floor, get heated up, and then have the opportunity to rise up through the structure similar to a chimney. By cutting off those draft points, the high and low points in the building, you can dramatically reduce the energy consumption in the house and the amount of waste. Clean homes are exceptionally leaky to start with. And six hours of air sealing and insulation work does a good job and on average is reducing the leakiness of the houses by about 15%, which in a typical house using a typical oil fired boiler is expected to reduce their consumption by some place in the ballpark of 70 gallons a year, close to $300 a year in savings. That's just the tip of the iceberg though because a lot of these houses could stand a fair amount more air sealing and insulation work. But this program really gives homeowners the opportunity to see where the real problems are so that they can identify where they want to put their investment in weatherization going forward. And it also makes them more informed consumers and knowledgeable about the different safety considerations that they want to take into consideration in their house. A typical home like the one we're doing today, what is the average cost for doing this kind of project? 90% of the projects that are participating in the loan program, the total invoice cost is between $600 and $1300. So there are certainly a lot of people that are engaging in much more rigorous projects and really doing a lot of insulation in the attics or in the basements or upgrading their heating equipment, all of which can be supported through one of our loan programs, the PACE and PowerSafe loan programs. But in that $600 to $1200 to $1300 range, we're paying the first $600. So it really gives people an opportunity to pay just a couple of hundred dollars out of pocket and get a real good sense of what sort of weatherization they can get done. Mark, you've got a lot of sort of high-tech equipment here measuring heat and blower door and everything. Tell us a little bit about the technology behind what you're measuring today. Actually this equipment will help us to determine what the air leakage of the home is. The blower door is used to depressurize the home to negative 50 pascals. So what we're doing is we're taking the air out of the home and we're blowing it outside. We're doing that at a certain pressure that we're creating with a monometer and a fan. And that will give us a number, the number of cubic feet per minute we're able to draw out of the home. That number is a good indicator of how leaky the home is. And when it draws the warm air out of the home it has to replace it with cold air so it's easy to identify where the air is coming from the cold air. And you use thermal imaging to do that? I do. I'm terrified in thermography so we can use the infrared camera to see if there's insulation in the walls. And it will also track whether there's any type of convection loop going on where air is cooling the walls faster than it should. So it sounds like a really good program and a lot of good science behind it but something that also will help the homeowner save some money and make the house more comfortable. Yeah, definitely it will save them money. Sometimes the comfort, they will notice a decrease in dress but a lot of the air leaks are inside, chimney chases and any type of enclosed cavities that are going from the basement to the attic. So most of the people won't immediately notice a big difference. They might in the second floor but the heating cost will go down and typically people will place their heating unit near where they spend their time. But in this case if the air can't get out the top, the warm air will push down into the living area and make it more comfortable. Sam, your house has already been insulated, you've gone through the program. What kind of benefits did you see? Well, first of all there was a favorite sofa in my house that always felt drafty. And the air sealing that they did particularly to find air infiltrating under the baseboards in my comfort zone, in my living room, in my dining room has been very effective along with some other air sealing they did to eliminate the chimney effect on my basement stairway. What specifically kind of work did they do? They did some weather stripping of doors, they did some sealing of the hatch into the attic, they did a lot of caulking under those baseboards I mentioned earlier and they added behind the insulation I had put in foam board insulation between the joists and the sills around the basement of my house. Is this work that you could have done yourself or thought about doing yourself? Thought about it, never got around to it. I bet there are a lot of other people like that. Some of this stuff makes perfect sense but you know the other thing that the program does is by having the blower fan on when they're looking for the leaks makes it much easier to find where the air is getting in and that's where they have a real advantage that plus their infrared camera. Suzanne, tell me a little bit about the work of the Island Institute. Sure, the Island Institute is a non-profit organization based up in Rockland. It's our mission to work with and support the 15 year-round island communities of Maine and the related working waterfront communities. We work on a number of different issues ranging from education and supporting the island schools, fisheries policy and working with coastal fishermen and increasingly more and more we're working on energy challenges. And what are some of the special problems that island residents have with energy? Sure, the cost of energy on Mainland's islands are some of the highest energy costs in the entire nation. When it comes to electricity we have some communities paying up to 70 cents a kilowatt hour which as context we pay about 15 cents a kilowatt hour on the mainland and we also have communities that are paying extremely high costs to heat their homes. The cost of heating fuel is extremely high because we've got to transport it out to all the islands and to make matters even more complicated. A lot of the homes on the islands are very old. Sometimes we're seasonal housing stock originally that have turned into year-round houses so they're not necessarily the most efficient structures that we have. And how is this program addressing some of those issues? This program is designed to provide island residents with some basic air ceiling and insulation services from a certified energy auditor and also a report to help guide them to do future weatherization retrofits. What it really tries to do is make sure that these services are accessible to islanders. Oftentimes it's difficult to get a certified professional to travel out to an island and oftentimes it comes with an additional cost that's cost prohibitive for the island homeowner. So this program is working to organize the work in bulk so that it's more interesting for the contractor to come out and do that work and we can spread the cost over a number of homeowners instead of just one or two. On your website there are a lot of tools that a homeowner can use, calculators and that sort of thing. Talk about that and where can they go for that information. Certainly, we do have a number of different tools available for homeowners to check out on our website. It includes we have a locator tool for finding contractors that's probably the most used tool. You can enter in your zip code and a radius and a service, a weatherization service that you're looking for and it'll come up with all the energy auditors in your area ranked by the number of projects that they've completed. We also have calculators for comparison of different heating fuels and different heating technologies. So if you have a boiler and you spend more than $3,000 a year you can go to the heating calculator and dial down to your type of heating system and the cost that you typically pay on an annual basis and it'll show a comparable number of BTUs used, the comparable heating use for a variety of other heating technologies. Because oftentimes people say well I've heard propane's great and I want to switch over to propane but when they look at the current price of propane even though propane equipment tends to be more efficient the cost of the fuel is actually higher per heating unit and so propane tends to be a more expensive choice. And what's the website? Of course, efficiencymain.com, all your resources for energy and different contractors. We do have a call center in Waldobarrow at 1-866-ES MAIN and the folks there are happy to pick up the phone and talk about any of our programs or help you apply for a loan for weatherization or direct you to the resources in your area.