Tompkins Weekly

Make your home ‘Green & Cozy’



By Guillermo Metz
 
This is the latest installment in our Signs of Sustainability series, organized by Sustainable Tompkins. Visit them online at www.sustainabletompkins.org.
 
Spring is taking its first tentative footsteps, but it’s never too late to consider making your home more energy efficient and reducing heating costs. A new program from Cooperative Extension and Get Your GreenBack offers help with renewable energy while making your home more comfortable—in both winter and summer.
 
Green & Cozy brings together energy contractors and pellet stove retailers, along with a series of presentations around the county on the benefits of combining energy upgrades with conversion to a pellet stove. It’s a winning combination.
In recent years, Cooperative Extension has run a program called Warm Up Tompkins, which asks homeowners who undergo energy upgrades and convert to heating with a pellet stove to provide data before and after they made that conversion. Every participant has either broken even or saved money right off the bat, even after their monthly loan payments. But more than that, they have all been surprised by how much these upgrades have improved their quality of life.
 
According to Lisa Ferguson, who upgraded her circa 1860s farmhouse, “I can’t say enough how much more pleasant it is to live through a winter in Ithaca when your house is warm.”
 
Another participant, Jimmy Cariss, said, “I moved here from a hot climate and I’ve been freezing to death since the day I moved. I’m comfortable for the first time.”
 
The process starts with a whole-house energy audit, or assessment, which is currently free for most residents of New York State (if you make less than 200 percent of the median area income, which for Tompkins County residents means a family making less than $157,600). Conducted by an accredited contractor, this is like a comprehensive physical exam for your house. The contractor will assess your lighting and appliances, make sure your heating equipment is operating safely, and locate areas where your home may be lacking sufficient insulation, is allowing outside air to leak in, or may have water damage you can’t yet see.
 
You may think you know what’s going on with your house, but even if you built every inch of it yourself, there’s no way to know what’s going on behind the walls, where insulation could have settled or been moved around over the years by mice. Energy contractors will use specialized equipment, like a blower door and infrared camera, to locate all of these problem areas.
 
They will then produce a report detailing their findings, along with recommendations for how to best address the issues. It’s then up to you to decide what, if any, of it you’d like to do. Some of it you may be able to do yourself; most of it you’ll want to hand over to professionals.
 
Your newly insulated, energy-efficient home will then be easier to heat (and keep cool in the summer). In fact, your existing heating system is likely grossly oversized for your new heating loads. Which is where pellet stoves and other point-source heaters come in. Traditionally just a space heater, a pellet stove can heat almost any home on all but the coldest few days of winter if the home is sufficiently insulated and air-sealed—saving significant amounts of fuel and money.
And there are now great state incentives to make the switch to a pellet stove. Renewable Heat New York incentives range from $1,500 to $2,500, depending on income qualifications and whether you have an old wood stove to trade in. There are also incentives for trading out a wood boiler for either a pellet boiler or a newer wood boiler—these are very efficient, clean-burning appliances that can effectively heat a whole house or even a large commercial space. And with bulk wood pellet delivery developing in our area, these units can be fed automatically from a large container that is automatically refilled on a schedule like oil or propane.
 
Modern pellet stoves are not your grandparents’ wood heaters—they are highly controlled appliances that deliver even heat at efficiencies of up to 90% and higher, with minimal harmful emissions.
 
Keep in mind that to operate properly, pellet stoves require more maintenance than wood stoves. It isn’t much—a quick daily cleaning and weekly vacuuming-out will keep your pellet stove humming along nicely. On the plus side, they can be thermostatically controlled, left to run safely while you’re at work, and burn something that doesn’t require you to spend hours splitting, stacking and moving it around. Pellet boilers are even more advanced; they can be filled automatically and monitored and controlled remotely so that your house or business is kept warm even while you’re enjoying the Florida sun in the middle of winter.
 
Wood pellets are not only a renewable energy source, they’re about 85 percent lumber yard waste, sawdust mostly. There are ample supplies in our region of wood pellets that come from our region—local pellet mills that source their materials from local mills and local forests. This supports the forest-based economy and cuts down on road miles the material has to travel. And while our forests have not always been well managed, increasingly, good forest management has led to improved forests, including increased biological diversity, control of invasives and increased productivity.
 
To learn more about Green & Cozy attend an informational sessions, where you can have questions answered. They will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. at the following locations (dates and times subject to change): March 30, Ulysses Town Hall; April 5, Lansing Town Hall; April 12, Dryden Fire Hall; April 18, Newfield Fire Hall; April 26, Brooktondale Community Center. On Saturday, May 7, you can meet local contractors and see some of the equipment they use to make your home more energy efficient, as well as some of the best modern pellet stoves available. We are scheduling some home visits.
 
For more information, go to www.getyourgreenbacktompkins.org/green-cozy or contact Guillermo Metz at 272-2292 or gm52@cornell.edu, or Dave Janeczek (dmj59@cornell.edu) or Catherine Hwang (sh928@cornell.edu).
 
Guillermo Metz is Energy Educator for Cornell Cooperative Extension of Tompkins County.

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