Updates

Feeling the chill in the air? Putting away the lawn furniture? Is your home ready for winter? As the days get shorter, we might find ourselves thinking about the coming cold months, dreading that drafty bathroom, worrying about high energy bills, and wondering what all that energy usage is doing to the planet. We know we should do something like get an energy audit, but we also have to get the kids new school shoes, put the kiddie pool away, and get the snow blower into the repair shop. Before we know it, autumn leaves will have turned into winter…

Our partner town Northampton is about to launch a new program promoting high efficiency, state-of-the-art air source heat pumps to its residents. Based on their very successful Solarize Program a few years ago, the town will spread the word about this new technology through neighborhood outreach and hopefully install it in many homes. These heat pumps can both cool and heat more cheaply than oil or propane and in some cases even more cheaply than gas. It goes without saying that if your house is optimally insulated, a heat pump is even more efficient and can be sized smaller. More towns…

PRESS RELEASE, April, 2017: The newly founded Harold Grinspoon Charitable Foundation Energy LLC just completed thermo-imaging 100,000 single family homes in the Pioneer Valley. If you have noticed a strange vehicle with a camera on the roof driving slowly through the streets in the middle of the night, it wasn’t an invasion of some kind! The car, loaded with high-tech imaging devices, was measuring how much heat is being lost from the envelopes of our building stock. This kind of thermal imaging is a non-invasive way that respects privacy and reveals the spots where a home allows heat (or, in…