My personal slog through home energy upgrades
FRICTION IS THE ENEMY
This post has been 12 months in the making. That’s how long it took to get our desired home energy upgrades completed (officially done as of yesterday– Yay!) And it’s a long post. If you want to focus on the learnings relevant to the climate tech industry, you can skip to the section on “Friction We Need to Remove”.
TL;DR: I’m happy we went through 12 months of effort and investment to insulate our house, add rooftop solar, and swap out the gas furnace and water heater for heat pumps. [December 2023 update: we also got a battery and an EV.]
Our house is much more comfortable (we now even have cooling via our heat pump for the occasional hot days in SF); our utility bill is down to nearly nothing (my math says payback will be in 10-12 years); and I have the peace of mind that we have reduced a significant chunk of our household emissions.
But… it was neither easy nor fast. Working in climate tech, I was significantly more motivated than the average homeowner, so I put up with the pain. However, unless we systematically take out a big chunk of the friction involved, people are not going to do some of the “no brainer”, cost-saving energy upgrades because it’s just too invasive, time-consuming and painful.
The Gory Details OF OUR PROJECT
For years, I have wanted to make certain energy upgrades to our house in San Francisco, originally built in 1965. The house had huge swings in temperature over the course of a day, particularly the upper level, and some rooms were particularly uncomfortable. We had abnormally high heating bills in the winter as our uninsulated house effectively meant our gas furnace was heating up the air outside of the house as much as the inside. We wanted to get solar installed before NEM 2.0 expired in California. And our inefficient house represented a major part of our household’s emissions.
For older homes like ours, retrofitting the building envelope and ducts was a major project. It was only when I took a sabbatical the second half of last year that I was able to carve out enough time to tackle this project.
Our target scope was to:
Switch almost all the lighting to LED
Get blackout drapes for living room/dining room to help insulate windows (and to watch movies in the daytime)
Insulate the house with blow-in insulation for walls and roof
Redo the roof and install rooftop solar
Replace the 21 year old gas furnace with a heat pump
Replace the 18 year old gas water heater with a heat pump water heater
Things we scoped out, for now:
Get a battery to pair with the solar. Prices had spikes in late 2022 when I was scoping out the project. Also, as we are planning to replace one of our cars which is near end-of-life with an EV soon (pending availability given the UAW strikes), perhaps we will end up with one with vehicle-to-home (V2H) charging capabilities. [December 2023 update— we got a Powerwall battery installed— prices had fallen significantly and the installation was straightforward using our solar/roof contractor. And we got an EV— needed to replace an aging car and prices had fallen steeply so it was a good time to buy.]
Replace the gas stove/oven with an induction range– just wasn’t that high on our priority list and we didn’t have the spare amperage in our panel to squeeze it in.
I started reaching out to vendors in September of 2022. Contracts were completed around the holidays. The actual physical work started in February, and completed in late July, with all systems operational. However, the final inspections and other administrative details were not checked off until this week, 12 months after we started the process.
Also, we were in the very fortunate position to be able to pay upfront for this work. Had we needed financing, that would have added even more work, complexity and time to the project.
Of course, project plans also get adjusted when hammers hit the walls. The actual scope of work ended up being:
Switch almost all the lighting to LED, with the main work being swapping in a dozen-plus LED-compatible dimmer switches. Easy peasy because I have a great electrician. October 2022
Find and vet reliable, high-quality contractors for the bigger projects. September-December 2022.
Negotiate scope and finalize contracts. November-January 2023.
Go through multiple rounds of scheduling for a multi-phase projects coordinating across 4 different contractors (solar/roofing company; home efficiency company that did the insulation and heat pumps; electrician; and handyman that did the patching/painting)
Insulate the house with blow-in insulation for walls. The most painful part of the project wrt the physical work we needed to do and disrupting our lives as we moved out for 3 weeks. February 2023
move all the furniture and empty out 3 closets to make way for the blow-in insulation
add blow-in insulation to walls
patch all the walls to match existing texture and repaint
move all the furniture back (we moved out for two weeks for this portion of the project)
Install new blackout curtains to help insulate windows. Super easy. March 2023.
Upgrade electrical panel. The panel upgrade itself ended up being pretty straightforward. But figuring out which equipment to procure so that it could be squeezed into our 125 amp panel was harder. April 2023
Upgrade the old electrical panel from 100 amps to 125 amps to accommodate the new heat pumps. **Note: We would have preferred to upgrade to 200 amps but that would have entailed a 3 year wait for PG&E to dig a new trench for a wider conduit to the house.
Set up new circuits for solar inverters and heat pumps (and leave room for circuits for future EV charger and battery)
Insulate and redo the roof, and install rooftop solar. Very smooth as we had a great solar contractor who also does roofs in-house. April 2023
Remove old roofing material
Add poly-iso board to insulate the roof during the re-roof (a strange joist set up in our roof made blow-in insulation impractical)
Re-roof
Install the racking system for PV and make sure all penetrations are well-insulated and well-sealed
Install the PV
Run new circuits up to the roof for the PV and connect
Receive PTO (permission to operate) from PG&E
Pass electrical inspection
Replace the 21 year old gas furnace with a heat pump. The hands-on work was pretty straightforward with only about 4 days of disruption inside the house. But this portion of the project was inordinately painful and lengthy due to difficulties coordinating and communicating with the contractor. Physical work was done in July 2023 but final inspections straggled until late September.
Remove old ducts in the lowest level of house; asbestos tape is on some of the oldest ducts, requiring asbestos abatement team
Empty out two closets where new ductwork is being run inside
Add 3 new vents, enlarge the existing air return and redo 70% of the ductwork, adding some new ducts hidden inside closets
Run new electrical circuits for the heat pumps through the garage and up to the roof
Install the heat pump compressor on the roof and the air exchange in the garage
Put everything back into the closets where new ductwork was added, minus several cubic feet lost to the ductwork itself
Pass electrical and mechanical inspection.
Replace the 18 year old gas water heater with a heat pump water heater. Ditto above– was the same contractor as the heat pump. July -September 2023
Run a new circuit to the back of the garage for the compressor
Install the heat pump water heater system, including compressor and storage tank
Pass electrical and plumbing inspection.
[December 2023 update] Install a home battery. Very smooth as our solar contractor was able to handle this and we had already left room for the battery when we upgraded the electrical panel.]
Handle several ball-drops, i.e. things that fell between two contractors that each thought the other had done, such as filing permits and scheduling inspections
Handle multiple reschedules due to: heavy winter rains, crews being called onto other projects at the last minute, and staff turnover at the contractors (the office manager at the insulation/heat pump company quit ⅓ of the way through the project– causing a 3 month delay).
Work through handoffs, scheduling and communications between myself and my husband
Part of the reason it took so long is the normal stops, scheduling issues and delays of a house remodel or construction project, particularly in a market like San Francisco which has severe shortages of contractors as well as onerous permitting requirements. But if we really want to do all the energy efficiency and electrification work that we aspire to, in order to both save people money and to reduce carbon emissions, things have to change.
Friction We Need to Remove
WHERE DO I START?? There are so many different options in home energy efficiency, electrification and resiliency, and also different motivations. Homeowners are confused about what they should actually do (even those of us who are in the industry.) And buildings have a nasty habit of being idiosyncratic. Even someone who has lived in a house for decades may not know what is inside the walls, basement or garage; and plan docs and permits on file are often inaccurate. While there are apps out there to walk homeowners through some of these decisions, they’ll generally only be able to provide rule of thumb starting points because they won’t know the quirks of a given building. So until there is tech to quickly scan a home and create a digital twin (anyone working on this?), final decisions will still require the homeowner and a contractor or other skilled tradesperson walking through the house and deciding what is needed.
THE BORING OPTIONS E.G. BLACKOUT CURTAINS. Solar and heat pumps may be cool tech, with lots of incentives, at least in the U.S. But it’s easy to neglect the highest impact changes that are simple, cheap and decidedly low-tech. Getting blackout curtains for our living room and dining room did almost as much to keep our upper floor cool on hot sunny days as adding blow-in wall insulation. But there’s not a ton of incentive for folks like developers who are creating a consumer energy app to include things like blackout curtains because there’s no referral money to be made from a contractor.
THE HUNT FOR GREAT CONTRACTORS. A whole book can be written about all the challenges of finding highly-skilled, reliable contractors who are knowledgeable on the latest tech. A lot of local mom-and-pop contractors– the ones who are often the most reliable because they’re built their business on word of mouth referrals– are often laggards when it comes to adopting the newest technologies like heat pumps. There are many organizations like IREC and BlocPower tackling this from various angles, from workforce development and training to contractor-focused automation tools to marketplaces matchmaking consumers with contractors. All of this tech can help, but we also need more skilled tradespeople in the U.S. It will be interesting to see the impact of the American Climate Corps program on this front.
DUST, DISRUPTION AND HOLES IN THE WALL. Some energy upgrades are invasive. Insulating our leaky walls, lower floor and roof was arguably the highest impact change we made (other than the blackout curtains) wrt carbon emissions. But it was a totally pain in the a**. We had to move out for 3 weeks; move every single piece of furniture away from the walls so they could drill the holes and blow in the insulation; empty out most of our closets; patch and repaint afterwards; and move everything back. And we chose a ducted heat pump, which meant redoing the ducts in the house– more dust, more inconvenience, and less closet space (since we ran some new ducts through closets to hide them.) Most people would not do that to themselves, no matter how much money they might save on their heating & cooling bills.
We have to keep advancing ductless heat pumps and other technologies that eliminate redoing ducts, like what Quilt is pursuing.
We have to make it standard to do these upgrades (particularly sealing the building envelope) when people buy/sell a house or when they are doing other major remodeling.
We need to create more building envelope solutions that are less invasive. The easiest part of our insulation work was the roof. We learned that blow-in was going to be nearly impossible given the quirks of our roof, so we ended up adding polyiso board from the outside– which took just a few hours to install. We need more solutions like this that are less invasive and easy to install.
THE UTILITY BACKLOG. If you are adding solar, storage, EV charging, or doing major home electrification, you probably need to upgrade your main electrical panel, in addition to applying for interconnections. Service/panel upgrades can be expensive, and you may have a very long wait depending on how backed up your local utility is. We were only able to move up from a 100 amp to 125 amp panel; getting to 200 amps would have meant a 3 year wait with PG&E. Lots of good advice in this article from Canary Media; and providers like SPAN have promising solutions. But this will require more than cool tech– this will require utilities to make process and distribution system changes in order to reduce the time and uncertainty around service upgrades and interconnections.
There are even more barriers for rentals and multi-unit dwellings and rentals, which are being tackled by several organizations. Financing is also trickier now given higher interest rates.
NET NET
In the end, I’m glad we did the project both for our own comfort and peace of mind. And I learned first-hand about the need to transform this friction-full process to move from early adopters to mass market adoption, which folks like Rewiring America are taking on.