IS THAT GAS?

If you live in Burlington it probably is. Most of the homes in Burlington use natural gas to heat their homes and we're lucky enough to have it for cooking too. Seriously - we wouldn't look at a home that couldn't run a gas stove. We both worked in restaurants and have a hard time cooking with anything else.

We don't have a choice of who we can buy our gas from, it's all Vermont Gas but it's all good since their rates are low and they have this sick program that I love to tell people about. If your home uses too much gas - from the Vermont Gas site, "at least 0.5 Ccf per square foot of natural gas over the past year" then you'll qualify for an energy retrofit. Our bill is pretty low considering the winters we have in Vermont, the scalding hot showers I take and that we cook with gas - it runs about $125/month on their budget plan (we pay the same amount each month all year, which saves us from the $500 bill that you can end up with in February). All the same we live in a 55+ year old house and I'm not one to pass up free things so I called and was surprised to find out that we qualified. The program pays for an energy audit and for 1/3 of any recommended construction costs to retrofit the house, the remaining 2/3 of the bill is eligible for a 0% three year loan from a local credit union.

An auditor (Brian Fisher) came out from Vermont Gas really quickly after I called. He spent a couple of hours examining the full house and did a blower door test to see how much air we're losing from the house and more importantly to have a baseline against the test that runs after the work is complete. About a week later I received a report of the audit which included the recommendation to have about $3k in insulation work - foam boards in the basement, blown insulation on the full first floor and some other odds and ends around the house. He said our gas bill should go down 30-40% - we'll save money and help fight climate change. Awesome!

Brian recommended that before we start on the insulation work that I change my bathroom fans to high efficiency fans to ensure that air can get out of the house after it's all tightened up. He let me know that Burlington Electric Department will pay $110 towards a new one. I bought the Panasonic Whisper Green FX-08VKM3 - it's about $18 less now than it was a few months ago! I guess this is a good model at a great price, because the guy at Burlington Electric (John Lincoln 802-865-7362) said he was going to buy some for his house when I sent him the link. After the $110 rebate, we spent about $60 on the new fan. It's very quiet and goes on automatically. Our close friend came over and installed it with my husband in less than an hour since it replaced an existing fan.

Brian included a list of contractors that Vermont Gas works with. On a recommendation I chose Patriot Insulation in Colchester. I'm so happy that I did - they started work in a couple of weeks, explained everything they were going to do and showed up on time each morning and were very professional. The whole project took 3.5 days. They did a blower door test when they completed their planned work and decided the numbers weren't as low as they would like for them to be - meaning the house wasn't as tight as they would like. They spent another half day doing more insulation work, ran the test and got it to where they and Vermont Gas were happy. An immediate cosmetic improvement are the foam boards in the basement, they covered exposed concrete block that looked a bit scary. The foam boards are white so instead of running down to the basement and running back up as quickly as I can, I'm now more leisurely in my trips to the basement - our laundry room is down there, so the trips are often. It's hard to feel a physical difference since it's still the summer, but I'm hoping that in the winter we'll be much cozier. 

Even if you don't live in an area serviced by Vermont Gas - you can call your local provider or government and see if they offer incentives to reduce your home's energy usage.