Applications for REAP Grants or Loans for the fiscal year of 2018 are due on April 30th. The next deadline is in October and will be for consideration for the following fiscal year. There is still time to complete your application and we'd be happy to help you! The first steps are to check your business eligibility, enroll with SAM and obtain your D-U-N-S #. These will take you about 10 minutes and will be your "welcome to bureaucracy" exercise. After that, Responsible House

Imagine if you had no control of the amount, quality, location, temperature or timing of the water coming into your house. Imagine if you were to shower, wash your dishes, do your laundry, and cook based on whatever water was hanging around, from whenever it felt like coming through the pipes or the roof or the basement. In this fantasy/nightmare world you also have to deal with the repercussions of unwanted, dirty water coming through your faucet, walls and crawlspace when y

There seems to be an assumption out there that your high heating bills and drafty house are caused by your windows and the solution is to replace them. The trouble with this is two-fold. First, even the best windows will not perform significantly better than the ones you have. The most expensive, most insanely technical and energy efficient window out there is the equivalent of an R7*. Ordinary windows are the equivalent of an R2 to R4. For comparison, the typical attic with

Ewww! Look at all the nasty insulation being hauled out of my basement. I feel like I can breathe better just seeing it go. Guess what good it was doing me? Not a bit! It wasn’t keeping my floors warm, it wasn’t keeping the damp basement air out of our lungs, it wasn’t keeping my heating and cooling costs down. To be fair, it was a nice cozy home for the mice (I guess the scratchiness doesn’t bother them). #1 Cut off Rodent and Bug Access While we were planning and saving for

Part 2 of 3 (Shadowing an Energy Audit) Quick Fixes The homeowner complained of temperature differentials. Wm asked where the thermostat was located and quickly solved that mystery. It was by the front door, directly in the path of the sun and on the west side of the house, which heats up in the afternoon. Her thermostat was registering the correct temperature and sending a signal to the hvac unit that their job was done. Simply moving the thermostat to the middle of the hous