 Well, thank you all for joining today. My name is David Gibson and I'm on the Executive Committee for the Sierra Club here in Maine. And I am a certified energy manager as well as a lead accredited professional for building design and construction with the US Green Building Council. And I have about a decade of experience with efficiency and clean energy. I want to start, I think it's important to acknowledge the original inhabitants of the land. And throughout Maine, the Wabanaki peoples lived on this land and stewarded it for thousands of years before us. And with the pandemic right now, many of our Native American tribes across the country are being hit much harder than other groups. And so it's important for anyone that can. I'd encourage you if you're able to make a donation to a local Indigenous tribe, like the Wabanaki Health and Wellness, or looking across the country. I know the Navajo and the Hopi have been hit really hard by the pandemic and so supporting them in these times. There's a little bit more about me. I studied civil and environmental engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. I moved out to Reno, Nevada for eight years. I started out at a nonprofit where we developed curriculum teaching middle school and high school students about energy efficiency and clean energy. Our program was funded by the National Science Foundation, and all of that curriculum and lesson plans are available for free for teachers online. And so if you are a teacher or you know any teachers that are interested in that, I have a lot of resources to help teach our students about efficiency and clean energy, how to make their homes more efficient and how to address the school buildings themselves and make our schools more efficient. I started out as a non-profit because I was hired by the Nevada Governor's Office of Energy. I led efficiency programs statewide in Nevada for two years, ranging from residential programs for low income seniors to retrofitting public buildings, working with cities, counties and school districts to organize self-funding efficiency projects and doing deep energy retrofits of those buildings. I moved back to Maine. I grew up in Maine. I grew up over in Freiburg and now I live outside of Belfast in Morrill. And I've been working for Revision Energy for the last two and a half years, and I designed solar and heat pump systems, helping people to transition their homes off of fossil fuels into solar energy. I transitioned two houses entirely off of fossil fuels. I made a video of our house in Rio showing how we transitioned an existing 1950s home to net zero energy. And here in Maine, my wife and I live in an 1828 post-Indian farmhouse and we're not quite to net zero energy, but we have turned off of fossil fuels and no longer burn any heating oil or propane in our house. And so that's mostly what I'll be talking about today is the steps that we've taken and the ways that anyone can take steps towards clean energy in their home. If you're, if you're all willing, I'd like to go around and let people introduce themselves. I think it's helpful to know who all the audience is. So if you'd take a minute and just introduce yourself and your town or location and what you're hoping to gain from this, that would be helpful. Holly, you're first on my screen, if you're willing to go first. Sure. I live in Colesboro. I live in an 1820s farmhouse. I would love to hear what you've been able to do. I would love to improve my energy efficiency in this house. And I don't have a lot of money to do it with so I'm hoping that you will have some hints that I can use. Yeah, definitely. Hi there. I'm sorry about my video, but I'm in Portland, Maine in a 1940s Cape. And I'm absolutely very interested in everything you're about to talk about. Awesome. And then Becky, if you want to introduce yourself. Hi, I'm Becky Bartavix. I'm actually a Sierra Club volunteer. I live in a retrofitted 1867 farmhouse that has no fossil fuel, but I know that there is something I'm missing so I'm really looking forward to hearing what I'm learning from David. Anything you can tell me about, maybe about how what happens over time with insulation. Sure. And Matt, do you want to give a quick introduction as well? Yeah. Yeah, Matt Cannon. I work for Sierra Club Maine. And I am a new homeowner who definitely could use some tips on how to save some more money and make my home more efficient. So I'm looking forward to this as well. Great. I thought we had one other person, but it looks like she must have dropped off. So. All right. Well, thank you all. It's great to have you today. So just kind of looking at the taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture. There's a lot of problems related to using fossil fuels on the economic side of the spectrum. We spend more than $4 billion a year importing oil, natural gas, propane, coal into the state of Maine, which works out to more than 6% of our growth state product leaving our state every year for the import of fossil fuels. It works out to around $2,800 per person when you look at all of our homes, all of our businesses, all of industry, as well as as well as the transportation. But it actually works out to and I should add this, it works out to around $3,500 per household that the average household is spending on heating fuels and electricity. And transportation fuels tend to vary quite a lot depending on how far people are commuting and where they're at in the state and those types of things. But our transportation, our cars and trucks are very expensive as well. And these costs disproportionately affect low income households. What happens is that people who have lower incomes, generally have less ability to afford the efficiency and clean energy improvements that would reduce their costs. So they're often living in the least efficient homes. And at the same time, even just that $3,500 a year average expense is a much bigger portion of your, of your total household budget when you have a lower income $3,500 is a huge portion of your income if you're only making 20 grand a year. If you're only making 100 grand or more a year, then $3,500 is not a whole lot. And so, and so these energy costs disproportionately affect those who can least afford them. And at the same time, burning fossil fuels has a whole array of environmental impacts from climate change and the ocean acidification along with it as carbon dioxide is absorbed by the oceans. We're facing an immense amount of sea level rise in the coming decades. I've heard projections of three to 10 feet by the end of this century. In Maine, most of our natural fish, most of our native fish are contaminated with mercury, and all that mercury came from coal power plants producing electricity, mostly in Ohio and Pennsylvania and elsewhere. The fossil fuels are causing air, land and water pollution. And, and it's affecting all of us throughout the state and around the country. I am going to get back for a minute. It looks like we had a couple more people join. We are able to turn on your video. It's helpful to see, see people as I'm presenting. And we did just do a quick round of introductions. Tom and Michael, if, if, if you're able to unmute yourselves and want to do a brief introduction just let me know your name and what town you're from and what you're hoping to gain from the class. Michael, I see you now but you're still muted if you want to unmute. I am, I am muted you. Hi. Yeah, I'm Michael, or I go by Misha. I'm originally from Ukraine. Yeah, I live in Bath, Maine. And just I'm, I'm a Sierra Club member. And I thought it would be interesting to listen to your presentation to just get basic facts. Yeah. It sounds very interesting with you. And I'm thinking about, yeah, well, eventually make my home as energy efficient as possible. Awesome. I'm in the very beginning stages of just thinking about strategizing. Yeah. What do you know what year your house was built? Oh, very old. It's 18 turned out it's older than we had thought like 1850s something. It's old Greek revival needs a lot of work. Yeah, well, you'll probably gain a lot from this. I, I mentioned in my introduction I live in an 1828 post in being farmhouse. So it's totally possible to transition these older homes to much less fossil fuel usage. So hopefully you gain gain some good insight from this. And Tom, are you able to unmute yourself or show your video at all? Video I'm not sure it's going to work out but I can unmute myself. Yep, I can kind of hear you now. Yeah, well because the microphone is not great. Okay. It could be better if I plug this other thing in. How about now? Oh yeah, that's much better. That's going to put the headset on. Yeah, I'm from Harpsville and I just thought it would be interesting to see the webinar. Awesome. I happen to have turned out that I was near my computer at this particular time. So I'm glad I made it. Yeah, thank you for joining us. So does anyone want to chime in here? How do our buildings use energy? What types of ways do we use energy on a day to day basis in our, in our homes or buildings? And just unmute yourself if you want to speak. Heat and light. Heat and light, yep. Running appliances. Yep, definitely. Refrigeration. Yep. Water pump. Yeah, water pumps, water heater. Those are, those are the big ones where, as it seems like things are warming up or getting more humid, where it seems like we're using more air conditioning in Maine now. And so those are, those are the primary, the primary ways that, and I like to break all buildings down. I work with students in schools and get schools as very different buildings in our homes. But all buildings use energy in the same types of ways. Heating and cooling makes up the biggest portion of our energy consumption. And a lot of that is due actually to the building shell. How the hot air, the hot or cold air is kept inside the building. And then, you know, with air sealing and insulation of our walls and doors and windows and all that sort of stuff. And then, and then our electricity goes towards our lighting and all of our appliances, our refrigerators and that sort of stuff. And then hot water, oops, apparently if I scroll it changes. And then our hot water is usually after our, after our heating in Maine, hot water is usually our second biggest consumer of energy. And so that can be another great way to reduce consumption. Looking at our hot water systems. And I am, I'm a big believer that every home can transition to 100% clean energy and particularly with the, with the laws we have in the state for community solar. I've found most homes can support enough solar on their roof to power the home. But there's many older, particularly older homes that have dormers or East West facing roofs that aren't great fit for solar. Although, although I do East or West facing roof, if it's got full sun exposure can, can produce a lot of clean energy. Or there's a lot of us that live in the woods and, you know, don't want to clear cut an acre of land in order to be able to have good solar exposure. So there are options if you can't fit solar on your roof, but then in every single home, there's a lot of steps that we can take to reduce the energy consumption and reduce our energy costs. And I'll talk about that today. So my wife and I moved back to Maine two and a half years ago. And we, we bought an old farmhouse that was built in 1828. And so we've taken all these steps and an old post and being farmhouse and, and the same steps can be taken in any house. For the most part, although clearly the building style and the aid of it can affect some of the, some of the ways that we go about things. The first thing that we did was change out all of our light bulbs to LEDs. The LED lights are widely available now at Home Depot or Lowe's or Walmart or most of the local hardware stores as well. And efficiency Maine helps to buy down the price. And so, I mean, often I see a four pack of LEDs for $2, like $1.50 or $2. And so they've come down and cost so much that it's really worth all the light bulbs throughout your house. When I, when I first started teaching about energy efficiency 10 years ago, a single LED light bulb was $15 to $25. And when they were that expensive, it only made sense to put them in the most used pictures. The stuff, you know, your kitchen light that's on eight hours a day or those types of things. But now they've gotten cheap enough that it actually makes sense to replace every bulb in your closets and your basement and your attic. And I went through and I did that. And our barn has 15 or 20 light fixtures. I found some 150 and 200 watt light bulbs out there. So just massive energy savings. And while like our attic or basement lights aren't on all that often in both our attic and our basement, I think there were 10 light bulbs in each. And my, my take on it now is that if you leave those lights on, like, I mean, there's plenty of times where we, you know, come out of the basement and forget to flick off the light switch. And if they get left on over a weekend, those old incandescent light bulbs will use so much energy that the LEDs will have paid for themselves in that amount of time. And my strategy definitely paid off. I got a text from my neighbor about a year ago saying, Hey, did you know your attic lights are on? I haven't been in the attic in a few days. And so I knew that, you know, they've been running for, you know, two or three days straight. And so it's a, it's the sort of thing where it makes sense to replace everything with LEDs. And LED light bulbs use like an eighth to a tenth, the amount of energy of an incandescent. And they have much better lighting quality now. I know many of us changed our light bulbs to fluorescence, the compact fluorescence, the curly Q bulbs. And those tend to flicker and they take a while to turn on and they don't work in cold weather. And LEDs have overcome all of those issues. And they work ideally in cold temperatures. And so putting them in the outside fix, you know, all the outside lighting is important as well to, to make sure it's efficient. And there's a lot of variation from one household to another. But I've talked to a lot of people who have saved $20 to $30 a month on their electric bill just by changing their light bulbs. So it's a sort of thing where $100 investment to replace all the light bulbs in your house. Easily within a year. And, and sometimes faster. And so I highly recommend starting with this. The other really, really simple change that you can make is to get a low flow shower head. A standard shower head uses two and a half gallons of water every minute that you're in the shower. And low flow shower heads use one and a half to two gallons per minute. So you've got a 25 or 40% reduction in the amount of water. And more importantly, that, that's a 25 or 40% reduction in the amount of energy to heat the water. And so they, they make a tremendous difference in, in reducing water usage and, and particularly the, the energy to heat the water. And you can look for the EPA has the water sense logo. That you see on our left here. And any, any shower head that has that logo is going to be a much lower flow, much, much more efficient shower head. And there's a whole variety of types and styles and stuff. I've, I've seen a lot of basic ones that just have a single setting for five or $10. And actually my wife and I tend to prefer the cheap ones. We find that the ones that have five or seven settings. It just aren't as good a shower head. You spend five times more on it. And it's got a lot of features and we don't like those as much, but you know, like any shower head, you'll, you might need to try a couple to find the one that you really like. Just different flow patterns and things like that. But what about the fact that there's, there's no water pressure when you go to a low flow. So, so what's interesting is when you reduce the flow, it actually increases the speed of the water coming out. And so, and so there's, it feels like a greater pressure with some of the, with some of the better ones. And really it's only an issue if you have really, really poor water pressure in your, in your house. And I've, I've encountered some households that had abnormally low water pressure and the low flow shower heads just weren't a good fit for them because their water pressure was about half of what it should be. Right. So you spend twice as long in the shower trying to wash the soap off. Right. And, but if you have decent water pressure, I think the standard is 40 or 45 PSI, then it's not an issue at all. And I have long hair and I can tell you that it's, it's not an issue until we just, we just got a new low flow shower head. The one thing that we found is we have fairly hard water in our house. And, and the minerals built up on the shower head. And we've, we cleaned it a couple of times. I think you can use vinegar to demineralize it. But after doing that a couple of times, we ended up replacing it again. And I wish I had measured flow from it for, because we got a new one that was one and a half gallons per minute and it felt like 10 times more water coming out. There was so much water coming out that I actually measured the flow. I, you know, I held up a half gallon pitcher and timed it to see what the flow was out of it. And it was indeed a one and like right around one and a half gallons per minute, potentially a little less. But the old one must have just been so corroded that it was, you know, a quarter of that amount of water or something. But typically we, we don't find a lot of issues as long as you have decent water pressure. And if, and if you don't have adequate water pressure, if you, if you have a well, then that may be something where you can adjust the pressure settings on your well pump in your, in your pressure tank to increase the pressure a little bit. So then in terms of appliances, most appliances, the energy consumption of the appliance is, you know, fairly low. And the exception to that, the basically the only appliances that the energy savings could be worth replacing an appliance would be their, their refrigerator or like a chest freezer. And, but for any appliance, you can get one of these kilowatt meters. And most of the libraries in Maine have these that you can check out just like a library book, efficiency Maine bought a set of them for all the libraries in Maine, like, I don't know, five or eight years ago, maybe even longer. And most of them still have those and you can check them out and you just plug the appliance in. And you have to hit the pink button over on the side that measures the kilowatt hours. And typically you want to leave the appliance plugged in for six hours or 12 hours to get a good average of how much it's using over time, particularly with a refrigerator. It uses a lot more energy when the compressor kicks on. And so if you, if you just plug it in and look at the instantaneous wattage, you're either going to get a really low reading if the compressor is not on or really high reading if the compressor is on. And so you just want to get a nice average over time and met and see how you're, how efficient your appliances are. And the rule of thumb is that if you're, if your refrigerator was made before the year 2000, it's going to be worth replacing it. Right around the year 2000, the Department of Energy had a big competition amongst manufacturers and the average refrigerator in the U.S. got three times more efficient over the span of a couple of years. And so an old refrigerator is going to use a lot more energy than a new one. And when you're buying a new fridge, the most efficient ones are just a kind of standard freezer on top fridge on the bottom. When you start getting all the bells and whistles of French doors and being able to pull the milk out through the door and that sort of thing, you're introducing just a lot of inefficiencies into it. And, you know, the little clear thing to see the milk through the front of the door is basically a hole in the insulation of the refrigerator. So you're going to lose a lot of the cold air out that way. And so the simpler, the smaller and simpler you get, the more efficient it's going to be. But they do all have these nice energy guide tags that tell you the more important number rather than dollars is the number of kilowatt hours per year. And that's really helpful when you're buying new appliances. And other than refrigerators and chest freezers, anything else, again, just look for the energy star tag or look for the one with the lowest energy usage if you're replacing an appliance. But for the most part, the energy savings of a TV or a computer or that sort of thing is not going to pay for the cost of the new appliance. So it's really only worth getting a new one if you're on the market for that anyway, and then just getting the most efficient one that you can. Another fantastic, simple fix that we can all do is working with the nonprofit window dressers. And they build insulating window inserts that go, it's like an interior storm window that slides inside your window. And it's got two panes of heavy duty plastic that on either side of a wooden frame, and it basically doubles the efficiency of your window. And if you have older windows that there's air gaps or stuff, it helps to block all those drafts as well. And so the window dressers make a tremendous difference. And what I find most beneficial is they feel warm to the touch. And so like we, all of the windows in our house are double pain, but they're older double pain windows. And on a cold winter morning, there would be frost forming on the inside of the glass. And what happens is your body radiates heat towards that cold surface. And so even if your house is heated to 70 or 72 degrees, you can still feel cold. If there's exposed pains of glass or other cold surfaces that your body is radiating heat towards. And so having the window dressers, adding those two additional pains, even though it's just a plastic film makes a huge difference and it feels warm to the touch. And so the comfort in your home without changing the thermostat is much greater because you're no longer radiating heat towards that cold surface. And window dressers, they do different build sites all around the state. Revision has hosted one at our office in Liberty. They were founded in Rockland and do stuff there. My dad volunteered at a build in Norway last year. And he's planning to organize one in Freiburg this coming winter. And they do stuff in Bangor and, you know, up and down the coast and all throughout the state. And so I highly recommend looking up window dressers. And they keep the cost really low because they require that everyone that gets the inserts to volunteer their time to help build them. And so it becomes a great community activity as well. Where you're getting together with a dozen or so people from, you know, your town or neighboring towns. And so I highly recommend looking up window dressers and signing up to get these for your house. And they keep the cost really low because they require that you know, so that you're going to meet people from your town or neighboring towns and helping to build these insulating window inserts that you're all there for the same purpose to reduce your energy consumption. And make your home more comfortable. And I had a great experience doing that. You know, just on to meet other immunity members. we put them in 10 or 12 windows in our house and the total cost was 500 bucks. So it's a very affordable way to make windows more efficient. And I mean, if we were to hire someone to replace one of those windows, by the time you pay for the window and pay for their labor, you'd easily be spending 500 bucks for one window anyway. And that same money, you know, covered up for all the windows. And because it's adding two panes on the inside of either a single pane or double pane window, it's actually more efficient than a brand new, highly efficient double pane window. And so, you know, as long as there's not other outstanding structural issues with your windows, you know, clearly if the glass is broken or that sort of thing, you know, or, you know, it doesn't close right. Or, you know, we run into all sorts of issues with old houses, but if the window is in decent shape, these are just such a fantastic way to reduce energy consumption. I just want to say one thing that we, the Portland Cat has organized these. And oftentimes we will be able to do some low income housing without people having to pay even that amount so that it, depending on the situation, if the Climate Action Team organizes it, we usually can do a few of them that are, you know, for a low income house. Yep, that's a great point, thank you. Yeah, for people that can't afford the cost, they do have different ways to offset and make it even more affordable or free. So, at this point, those are kind of the simple do it yourself things that the lowest cost measures that we can all take in our homes. Generally at this point, I recommend having an energy audit done. An energy auditor has tools and equipment that none of us have on our own. And so they can look at things like, like this photo is showing an infrared camera where it can measure the heat flow and show hot spots and cold spots and tell, you know, where walls are insulated or where they're not. And so an energy auditor will use an infrared camera. Typically they'll also use a blower door, which is a big frame that goes in your main entry door. And it has a canvas that goes over it and a big fan in the bottom. And the fan is carefully calibrated to measure the amount of air passing through it. And then they're measuring the pressure difference between inside and outside. And so using the blower door, when they start running that fan as it's pulling air out of the house, it's pulling air in through all the little nooks and crannies and all the leaks everywhere in the house. And it's amazing with it running, you can walk around and just feel like, wow, this electrical outlet has a lot of air coming in through it. Or, you know, different things, like often under the kitchen sink, you know, the plumber put in a one and a half inch pipe and drill a three inch hole and not seal it up. And so often you'll find different places where it's like, wow, there's a lot of air leaking in here. And so when you use the blower door to amplify that air leakage, then you can find a lot of those issues in your home to be able to seal up. And at the same time, because it's so carefully calibrated and they're measuring the amount of air flowing through it, based on the volume of your house, they can also calculate how your home compares to other houses. And they can seal it up to a point that it's much more efficient, but not so tight that there's, you know, you want a certain amount of air coming in from outside. You want a certain amount of ventilation, for if you still live in the house. And sometimes they'll just seal it up to a point where it's still safe. And other times they'll recommend mechanical ventilation to ensure that there's adequate air flow from inside to outside. Most new homes are sealed up super tight and then they'll add in a heat recovery ventilation system to exchange air with outside and also exchange the heat with the incoming air so that you're not bringing in ice cold air in the wintertime. There's some great local efficiency companies here in Maine. I've done a lot of work with Evergreen Home Performance and I know they have offices in Rockland as well as down in the Portland area and they do work all up and down the coast. And then I've also done work with the breathable home in Augusta and they work all throughout Central Maine. And they're both top notch companies that do really great work. And I can speak from personal experience that either Evergreen Home Performance or the breathable home would do a great job for you. And Efficiency Maine has some great rebates. And one of the Efficiency Maine rebates as long as you do an energy audit and a couple hours of air sealing have them have them do a certain amount of air sealing. Efficiency Maine will give you a rebate for $500 off of the cost of the energy audit. And so that covers most of the costs. And so it helps to make it so that you're not spending a bunch of money upfront to just find out what all the problems are in your house but you can actually get some of the work done and then they also have, I think it's a $1,000 rebate for insulation per side of like $1,000 for the attic, $1,000 for walls, $1,000 for the basement or the crawl space. And there's potentially $1,000 for something else too. So the Efficiency Maine rebates really start to stack up if you're doing energy improvements in your house and all of the big efficiency companies in Maine will know about those and be able to set you up for the rebates. And also Efficiency Maine website, you can look and find all the local efficiency companies on there depending on where you're located, there might be better options for you. And so after you've done an energy audit the most important thing for reducing heat loss in the home is sealing up all of the air leaks. For a typical older home, you lose more heat from air leaking out of the house through gaps and cracks than you lose through a lack of insulation. And so sealing everything up first is important. Plus it's a lot easier to do before you've filled the walls or filled the attic with insulation. And so if your house is underinsulated making sure to do all the air sealing first is really important. And again, like the professional, the contracting companies have different, they'll use larger volumes of spray foam and they make professional guns for air stuff and the spray foam for filling holes. But a lot of it comes down to spray foam and caulking and just sealing up all of those little gaps and cracks and things all around the house to make sure that the warm air is staying in. And then a typical home, most of the air leakage is at the ceiling level and at the floor because warm air is rising and as that warm air rises up it's finding any holes or anything that can leak out through the top. And as that warm air is rising up and leaking out it's pulling in cold air at the bottom of your house. And so it's most important to seal at the attic level and then at the basement or crawl space or foundation level because that's where the most air leakage is happening. But then other places like in the walls you tend to get a lot more air leakage in the walls on a windy day. If it's blowing 25 miles an hour outside I've certainly been in older houses where you can feel that breeze coming right through. And so it's important to seal things up so that you're keeping the heat in the house. And once you've sealed things blowing in insulation and I generally recommend cellulose insulation it's made from generally from recycled paper either old newspaper, old phone books and then it's treated so that it's fire retardant and it also resists insects and mice and stuff like that pretty well. So I generally I would recommend cellulose insulation over fiberglass. And then rock wool is another great insulation. And particularly if you're blowing insulation into your attic space, you know just blowing in fluffy insulation makes a huge difference. In other areas this is our crawl space. And we did a couple of things in our crawl space on the floor you can see plastic and that's a vapor barrier. That's to keep moisture from the ground from getting up into the house. And one of the things that an energy auditor is looking at is other issues that will be magnified by air sealing things up. And so if you have a lot of moisture in your basement and then you seal up your house that moisture is now getting trapped in and you can cause rot and mold and other issues. And so the energy auditor really wants to control the moisture first to prevent making existing problems worse. And also things like they'll test combustion appliances to make sure that you don't have a carbon monoxide issue or back drafting from your appliance or that sort of thing. Because if you're sealing up a house and keeping all the air in, if there is carbon monoxide or another issue you've now trapped that in and I've made the problem much, much worse. And so in our crawl space they did a vapor barrier to keep moisture from the ground from getting up into the house. And then we did spray foam on the walls. The walls in our crawl space were all fieldstone foundation. And it's just, there's no other way to seal and insulate fieldstone other than spraying and insulation. And if you are doing spray foam there's two different types. The older type is more toxic and also has a much higher global warming potential. So the older spray foam is 1400 times worse than carbon dioxide in terms of the global warming potential of the chemicals that are in it. The newer spray foam is much less toxic. They don't even require you to leave the house where with the older stuff they'll ask you to leave for three days so it can air out and ventilate. And with the newer stuff it's called HFO and it stands for some long complicated chemical name but HFO is the newer spray foam and it has a global warming potential of one. So it's equal to CO2. So it's 1400 times better than the older spray foams in terms of the global warming potential of the chemicals in it. And so most of the companies in Maine are using the newer formulation primarily because you can spray on a thicker amount at once. And so you can get a better R value, a better insulating value just per one pass with the machine rather than having to let it cure and come back a second time. But in other climates, in warmer areas a lot of companies are still using the older product. But anyway, trying to minimize spray foam it is a fossil fuel-based product but I've had a lot of conversations with energy geeks and different contractors. And we all pretty much agree that spray foam is the highest and best use of fossil fuels if we're gonna be using oil and petroleum products in any way, using it as insulation that's gonna prevent other energy usage and last for decades and decades is the best way to use it. And this has allowed us to significantly reduce our energy consumption and we haven't even burned any heating oil in the last two years. And so we've been heating our house now, we put in Mitsubishi heat pumps and so we use the heat pumps for all of our heating in the winter time and then they also have the benefit of providing cooling in the summer. This was one of the conditions that my wife set when we moved to Maine is that we had to have air conditioning. She grew up out in Reno, Nevada where there's no humidity in the air and that's the one thing that she can't stand in Maine is just the really humid days that we get in July or August or September it seems. And so having the heat pumps and being able to use a little bit of cooling on those really hot humid days makes a huge difference but it heats, I mean, we're close to the coast. The coldest temperatures that we've seen in the last couple of winters, we've had several days where it was minus 10 and a couple of days where it was minus 12 or minus 13 early in the morning. And the heat pumps were keeping it 67, 68 degrees in the house. So they run right through the coldest temperatures. If you live really far inland, if you're in Karabasset Valley or Kingfield or something like that, you probably want supplemental heat but we've been using the heat pumps and find that they work right through the winter and are a fantastic source of heat. Working for revision energy, I design heat pump systems and a lot of times what we'll do is we'll design them to provide about 80% of your maximum heating load. And so on those coldest days using your oil or your propane system as backup to supplement with the heat pump doing the majority of the work and then they provide all the heating on more mild days throughout the winter. But it really depends on the layout of the house and the size of different rooms. And so every house requires a different design and a different configuration for heat pump systems. And a lot of people ask me, well, does it actually provide hot air? Cause there were older heat pump systems that didn't work below 30 degrees and there were some that just kind of blew lukewarm air at you and it never really felt warm. And I can tell you that this is my cat's favorite place in the house is sitting right in front of the heat pump with the heat blowing in his face. And I measured the temperature coming out of ours last winter and it was like 105 to 110 degrees coming out of the heat pump. So it's definitely hot air and it really feels comfortable as a heating source. And so I highly recommend once you've made your house more efficient, once you've had an energy audit and sealed and insulated things, the heat pump becomes a really, really efficient way to heat your house. But unfortunately, for all these older homes in Maine, if all your heat is leaking out, you just can't get a big enough heat pump system to make up for all the heat loss out of an old farmhouse. And so you've got to do the air sealing and insulation first to maximize the efficiency gains. And we do have a wood stove for backup heat and the new wood stoves are so much more efficient than older ones. I think this one is 85% efficient converting the wood into usable heat in the house, whereas older wood stoves are more like 50% efficient. And what that means, I mean, that's the difference between needing eight cords of wood and needing five cords of wood in the winter for a house. And for us, our heat pumps did most of our heating and we had fires on a few occasions and during all the power outages this winter. And I think we burned half or three quarters of a cord of wood total. I burned nearly as much boiling sap this spring as we did in our wood stove through the winter. Yeah, gotta keep that usage in mind too as we're ordering wood. And so for hot water, the oil boiler in the basement had been providing the hot water for the house as well. And we put in a heat pump water heater. And what this does is it has a small heat pump unit on top of it. You can kind of see the top foot and a half with the grills and the big fan in there. And it's got a heat pump unit that's pulling heat out of the air around it and using that to heat the water in the tank. And so these are incredibly efficient. You don't really notice the decrease in temperature in the basement. Our basement with the spray foam that we did down there, our basement held like 46, 47 degrees last winter. And this heats our hot water. I think we have it set at 130 degrees but you can turn it up to 140 if you wanted to which is too hot, it will cause scalding. But the heat pump water heater is super efficient and uses like a third of the energy of a typical electric water heater. So a much more efficient way to heat water. And if you don't have a basement or if your basement has a really low ceiling height, these can also go in a mechanical room or laundry room or something like that. So there can be, there's different options for how these can be installed. But it's like heating your hot water with the heat pump water heater is about one-third the cost of either heating oil or propane or an electric water heater. You have a question in the chat there, David, from Michael. Yeah, I didn't pull up the chat today. So let me open that up. Here we go. Oh, so in terms of recommendations for wood stoves, we put in a hearthstone wood stove which is lined with soapstone. And the soapstone absorbs the heat and then continues to radiate the heat for hours after the fire has burned out. And they're more expensive, but it's kind of a calmer heat because it doesn't get up to the same temperatures as a typical wood stove because a soapstone kind of modulates the heat that's coming out. But EfficiencyMain actually has a list on their website of the most efficient wood stoves. And they have a rebate of $200 or $400, I forget, for, they have a rebate for high efficiency wood stoves that you can get, but it does have to be installed by one of their companies on their website. And we messed that up. And the company that we bought ours from that installed it wasn't rated with EfficiencyMain, so we missed out on that rebate. But they have a list of like a hundred different models from different manufacturers. And most of the big name wood stove manufacturers, Yodel and Vermont Castings and Hearthstone all have high efficiency models that meet those recommendations. And also, I think the EPA just came out with new standards for wood stoves as well. And so, you know, clearly you want them to meet the EPA guidelines as well. And so, once you've sealed and insulated your house and transitioned your fossil fuel consumption over to electricity, then you can design a solar array to meet the new usage of your house. And so, to me, the first step, the most important thing is reducing your consumption through efficiency, efficient appliances, efficient lighting and sealing and insulating the building envelope. And then once you've done those steps, then putting in more efficient systems for producing the heat, whether it's your hot water or your heating for the house. And if you put in high efficiency electric appliances, then you can power them with solar. And we got solar within six months of when we bought the house and so I didn't have a full year's worth of energy usage. And I was a little bit overly optimistic. We've got 24 solar panels and they provide probably around 70 or 75% of our electricity throughout the year. And I really, we should have gotten six more and I think it would offset all of our usage. But I was just a little overly optimistic in how much more efficient things would be. And there was just a lot of estimation going on because we'd only lived in the house for a few months when I designed the system. Typically as a solar designer, we look at your past year's energy usage and design the solar ray based on your past usage as well as discussions of future changes. If you're planning to get an electric vehicle or other big increases in your usage, we can account for that. And in terms of transitioning our homes to clean energy, it's pretty simple. It's the same steps in every single house. But what I find is that there's two reasons that people don't move forward. Either they don't know what they can do. They think that they're locked into this old, inefficient house in these high energy bills or they can't afford the upfront costs of it. And so I highly recommend starting with the lowest cost measures first, reducing your consumption as much as you can. And if you're saving, if changing your light bulbs to LEDs saves you 20 bucks a month, put that $20 a month towards your next project and start saving up for the energy audit or the insulation or that sort of thing. I've also been working a lot on creating new financing programs in Maine. Efficiency Maine does have low interest loans that are available for insulation and air sealing and heat pump projects. But they're limited. I've run into a lot of situations where people don't have a good enough credit score to qualify or their project is too expensive. The loan is capped at 15 grand and it's also not available for solar at all. And so I've been trying to create a statewide green bank working with the legislature and now the climate council to try to create a separate entity that would specifically be financing, efficiency and clean energy for all of us. And so hopefully we continue to improve on that front in the coming years. But anyway, if any of you have questions for me, I'd be happy to answer questions for a few minutes. Sure, and Becky, go ahead. What about settling in the walls with blowing in cellulose? Does that happen over time? That used to happen a lot. There's a lot of homes that they blew in insulation in the walls and now it's settled and the top third of the wall doesn't have any insulation in it. And with the newer practices, they've changed the way that they blow in insulation in the walls and so they dense pack it and they force it in there and it fills up the whole thing and it's much denser than before when it's just blown in loosely. And so that prevents settling and now it's no longer an issue like it was. Yeah, I know that happened in my parents' house whenever it was insulated, probably in the 80s or early 90s or something, but that's definitely been addressed in the more recent years. Does anyone else have questions and feel free to type them in the chat or if you wanna turn on your microphone. So when you were talking about heat pumps, I live in a 10 room, 200 year old farmhouse and it's hard for me to envision how those would work efficiently. Like do I need heat pumps in each room or are there ways to install them so that they can actually heat more than one room? Yeah, no, we definitely don't recommend putting them in every room. It's not an efficient way to heat the house and it's not very effective. It depends on the layout of the house and homes that have like a great room or a living room or open concept homes are great because you can put one heat pump in that whole space. And so in older farmhouses, it can get trickier, but usually what we do is we try to put them in the areas that are used the most where you want it to be warmer. So like your living room or your kitchen or that sort of thing where you spend the most time. And I find that most people prefer their bedroom to be a bit cooler anyway. And so often it's not necessary to put one in the bedrooms or just put one in the master bedroom or the space that would need it the most. And particularly if the house is fairly well-sealed and insulated, the heat tends to disperse through a house pretty well. And often if it's not effective to have just a couple of heat pumps, it's more an efficiency issue than an issue of adding more heat into the house. And so doing that air sealing and insulating and that sort of stuff first, you'll find like if doors are left open, the warm air will move around through the house pretty well. And it really becomes more of an issue if doors are closed with families that have kids and the kids all want to keep their door closed at night. Well, their room is going to get colder and it can either be an incentive to leave your door open or putting in small electric baseboard heat or that sort of thing to just supplement in those spaces can be a really efficient way to do it where a small amount of electric heat just in that space when it's needed, especially for guest rooms and things like that where they're not used very often. But if someone's staying over, they might want it a little bit warmer. But typically, I mean, it depends on the size of the house and the layout, but usually, I mean, either a single heat pump in the main living space or sometimes two or three with smaller ones in some of the accessory areas. So for our house, our house is about 1,800 square feet. It's an old farmhouse, so it's all broken up. And it's all on one floor, but it's so it's about 80 feet long and 25 feet wide. And just with the layout of it, we have the main one in the living room, which is kind of in the center of the house. And then we have smaller zones. We have a bathroom at one end of the house. It's like a bathroom, laundry room, like a pretty big space. So we have one in there to heat that end of the house. And then we have one in our master bedroom at the other end to just, because there's no way to disperse the heat through the whole length of the house very effectively. But it depends on the layout of the house. And often with two-story homes, it makes sense to have one upstairs if you want to have air conditioning for the bedrooms and stuff in the summertime, because the cold air wants to sink. If you're not worried about air conditioning in the summertime, usually just having them downstairs and letting the heat rise upstairs. If you've insulated attic and done that type of work is usually a pretty effective way of doing it. And for revision energy, we do free home consultations. And so our designer will come out, well, except right now due to the pandemic, we're not doing anything in person, but otherwise we'll come out and we'll measure your house and we'll walk through and just kind of assess the space. Because it's the sort of thing where it's really helpful to just walk around and get a sense of the space to be able to recommend where the heat pump can go and how the heat will be best distributed in the house. David, there's a question from Tom in the chat. Is there any solution to having the fan unit along the wall at the ceiling? That's the most typical location for the heat pumps, but they also have a floor-mounted unit. They can be low in the room and then is blowing the air upward. With the wall-mounted ones, it's just recirculating air in the room. They use refrigerant to move heat from inside to outside. So the heat pumps aren't actually exchanging any air between inside and outside. And so the ones that are mounted on the wall, they pull in air from above and then they blow it out at the bottom. Yeah, they're just aesthetically really not pleasing. Yeah. So there's no solution to that. They have some different colors. Well, but it's still this massive thing on the top of the ceiling. I mean, I saw the one in your house, you showed the picture. Yeah. And I've seen them in other people's houses and you still have to have this unit sitting on top of the... Yeah, I mean, the floor-mounted ones are pretty similar to a monitor heater or that sort of thing. So having it mounted on the floor can be less visually obtrusive. For new construction, they have the option of mounting them in the ceiling. So it's just recessed in the ceiling and it's a grill that then the air is blowing out of. We've found that those are nearly impossible to install in existing homes because the studs aren't the right spacing apart or there's just so many complications with older homes that make those really complicated. But yeah, the other primary option is having it be floor-mounted and having a little unit low on the wall. But yeah, no, that's definitely... I mean, it's a question of personal aesthetics and we get that a lot. And yeah, if you can't stand the look of it, then we find that that's... And how noisy are they? They are pretty quiet. Yeah, I mean, the loudest part of it is the fan. If you have the fan turned up really high, it's louder. But otherwise, I don't even notice it at this point. Becky, did you have a question or comment? No, I was just gonna mention that in my on. In my house, my heat pump was in my dining room, which is becoming my kitchen, but I basically have put it in so that it looks like a corner, the top of a corner covered. So it's sort of angled into the room and integrated into the cabinetry with a little opening at the bottom so we can manage to do the servicing on it. But I've had it in there for a long, oh, what, three years now, I think. And I am extremely happy with it. I live on North Haven, so it's a little warmer here than it is where David lives. But it has been fantastic. The noise, the fan noise is not significant at all. And at first I thought, oh, do I want that gami thing in my dining room? But I really love it. And especially how much I love not using fossil fuels. It's like, and the noise of it is nothing like an oil burner coming on. So anyway. Yeah, and I had one customer who was an artist and she was planning, like the whole front of it is a plastic cover and she was gonna pop that off and paint a painting on it and then put it back on. So there could be other ways to get creative and have it look a little bit nicer. Right. Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. Can I ask another question? Sure. I had insulation blown in about eight years ago which reduced my wood usage by two quarter year. So I now use like six cord versus eight and maybe 50 gallons of oil. So I've, you know, I would like to decrease my use of wood and the oil is just backup for, you know, from a way or something. But my neighbor says that his heat pumps are really expensive and cost is something that I have to consider as well. So can you comment on that? Like the upfront cost of them? No, the running of them. The, I mean, what I found is the cost of running them, it's about half as much as, you know, the equivalent amount of heating oil or propane, you know, when oil is at three bucks a gallon, the heat pumps are about half the operating cost in terms of the electricity for them. If you're burning wood, it's probably gonna be about the same cost as what you're spending on firewood. Wood is a pretty affordable way to heat our homes. But clearly the big benefit is in time savings and not having to, you know, depending on whether you get your wood cut split and delivered and how many times you have to stack it and move it, that's usually the bigger savings. And for people that heat with wood, more often they're interested in reducing the time and effort and having to haul wood in in the middle of winter rather than the dollar savings. But the cost, in terms of the cost for electricity, it should be comparable to the firewood. Well, thanks everyone for joining today. I know that Matt put some links in the chat. So if you want to look at the EfficiencyMain website, that's the best resource to be able to find a local energy auditor near you or find out information about the rebates available or any of that sort of stuff. I highly recommend checking out EfficiencyMain and going from there. Thank you so much, David. Great job. Yeah, you're welcome. Thank you. Yeah, thank you all for coming.