Program Overhead Costs Killing Weatherization

In Oregon, program Clean Energy Works Oregon , has overhead cost of at least $5000 per home "served." $20,000,000 of "stimulus" money from US Dept Of Energy Better Buildings Neighborhood Program  has been squandered in 3200 homes. That is administration cost wrongly, illegally ,  not subjected to required cost/ benefit tests. Money spent in program administration only. None employed in the involved loans to home owners to actually, perhaps, do some good. $20 million/ 3200 = $6250 per. $5000? Well, maybe CEWO still had some of the $20 million left when stupidly given another year or so of life in a $10 million illegal gift of State of Oregon funds. Such administration cost looks a little less outrageous if a project costs at least $20,000, so CEWO will push needless furnace upgrades, windows that don't save money, a big photovoltaic array, whatever it takes. If your bid doesn't measure up, say coming in at only $14,000, your contractor, so used to all the fat-to-be-skimmed, won't really be interested. If you buy into one of these bad deals, you will never recover your investment in savings. Paying off your big fifteen year loan at 6% interest, you might not be able to afford things you really need in retaining a home: safe wiring, working plumbing, a sturdy roof, protective paint. It may be all of your maintenance budget, and a lot more, in the hands of that self-biased, hard-selling-schmooz "weatherization" general contractor.

CEWO is not alone in the maladministration. USDOE tells stories of its actions to grow the map, including taught deceptive marketing, gifts of stupid blower doors and more. Good deals need only publicity, never a hard sell.

Weatherization not done well, and so very expensively, is then being reconsidered. Should we just call it quits? Have we already plucked enough of the low-hanging fruit? Sadly, people even including our well intentioned Oregonian reporter , take that question seriously. In fact, we have hardly begun to weatherize our homes. Our wastefulness is growing. New homes are still built with energy bleeds including dozens of leaky incandescent or halogen can lights. More large attic floor defects are hidden every day, under spotty blankets of obstructive loose-fill insulation. Energy is cheap. Cheapest labor and materials must be found. Who cares? We are confused by the counterfeit, rationed weatherization for a random few.

In contrast to the cruel mindset of CEWO contractor-participants, please consider my experience in what a good insulation job should cost.

There is no place in the CEWO, Better Buildings, HPwES, BPI scheme, for the real job opportunities. Among the real job opportunities, each is to be done with full diligence . Instead, it is taught that a $3000 or more purchased BPI-liar certificate is prerequisite, creating a moat about those few, honored participants in the scam. Those participants dominate a badly shrunken and demoralized weatherization workforce, lacking pride. Those working outside the system then are unregulated and fully untrained. A few may be like me, just behaving with better morality, inventing the needed self-education.

Please know that 42 of my 104 insulation jobs include the creative work of inventing safe access with an insulated and gasketed ladder . On average, insulation is less than one third of job cost. Publicly-supported weatherization should provide for the access cost. It should also permit home owners, not those pocketing weatherization Generals, to hire heating contractors, electricians, roofers and perhaps a few other specialists, for associated prerequisite repairs else neglected. We have a common interest in the health of our homes. When someone suffers and must watch an investment decay, no one benefits.


The wastefulness of CEWO and other Better Buildings programs seems awful, but may the standard programs of Oregon's Energy Trust under our Public Purpose Fund, have even higher perceived overhead? The hundreds of millions of dollars spent by Energy Trust shall be strongly focused on residential energy efficiency. Consider the following Energy Trust statement in 2008 :

Market value of savings/generation (2002-2008)

Because of Energy Trust programs, electric utility customers use less fossil fuel generated
power and have lower utility bills. As of 2008, the electric bill savings from customers
participating in Energy Trust programs is estimated at $132 million a year. By sector, the
savings are:
Residential $ 60.5 million
Commercial $ 32.9 million
Industrial $ 38.6 million

Because of Energy Trust programs, natural gas utility customers use less gas and have lower utility bills. As of 2008, the savings on gas bills from customers participating in Energy Trust programs is estimated at $11.9 million a year. By sector, the savings are:
Residential $ 6.7 million
Commercial $ 5.2 million
Industrial $ 0.17 million

The total combined savings value to customers stemming from Energy Trust programs is $144 million annually as of 2008.

About half of Energy Trust's expenditure of Public Purpose Fund money shall have related to residential energy efficiency. Say $20 million are spent each year in the cause of residential weatherization, using numbers at program onset in 2002. If only 800 homes per year are served , that is an overhead of $25,000 per home engaged. Am I wrong? Shouldn't Energy Trust and its enabling Oregon Public Utilities Commission be deeply, deeply ashamed?

The answer to high overhead per home served is to increase the number of homes served by a needed number of times-fifty . How shall we do this? That is what the OPUC should be talking about at a hearing approximately September 30, 2014 . Will they?

Better Math On Weatherization

We see in an article in the Oregonian Newspaper, on 8/3/2014   that Energy Trust Of Oregon , my local handler of public funds for weatherization, has found that weatherization doesn't pay, even when computed for a 45 year life of a measure. I prove that wrong, always. There are very good returns even in a home where Energy Trust saw  nothing to be done, with firm no-bid by a competitor. It's a post at this blog generally challenging Energy Trust's policies:
Math Of Under-R12 Attic Floor Insulation Rule, For Incentives 
The good returns are far more than a matter of adding floor insulation and have no resort to a silly blower door. They include attic floor sealing, thorough R30 insulation in attic walls and installing LED lights, all rejected as profitable measures, by Energy Trust. A five-year payback is computed for hard-covered R30 attic wall insulation in a further blog post for this home:
A Skylight Insulated >R30, With Plywood Hard-Covering 
There is similar under five year payback for upgrade to LED lighting in most cases, and even faster payback for air sealing.

As local enabler and enforcer of US Dept. Of Energy’s Home Performance With Energy Star, HPwES, Energy Trust teaches that a blower door is the engine of weatherization, finding energy-saving opportunities and verifying their completion. “Weatherization” is first about tightening our houses in ways that measurably decrease “infiltration.” The tighter, the better. Little-trained fools are building scientists, who infer what must be done from the blower door numbers. Without the numbers, solutions can not be found. The captains of weatherization under leadership of Building Performance Institute, shall be BPI certified  believers in the testing in and testing out every home, with a blower door. Air sealing shall be trusted and supported with public funds, only where done, very poorly, by the BPI liars. This is baloney. It must not continue.

Work under HPwES is done poorly, in part, because a blower door generally reverses flow in leakage paths, inviting repair only in living spaces, along a carpet, say. Repairs must instead be done in the attic, at hidden crimes of windwash encapsulated in walls; never with, or needing, clues from a blower door. Specific needed repairs, perhaps difficult, will never be included in a HPwES estimators' authorized work list. Where a diligent worker might volunteer, unhappily in darkness and danger, and it is not expected, why should he bother?.

Despite the notions about infiltration, Energy Trust does not require  that such "prep" must be done before rebate-offered addition of insulation. This is madness, with "weatherization" very often doing more harm than good. Money to be saved in the prep, then barred for decades, is commonly double that to be saved by added insulation.

Fresh Air Math
One problem in tightening up houses against exchange of fresh air, beyond the obvious in quality construction, is that it does not save much money in fuel costs. That is what Energy Trust is now awkwardly and confusedly admitting. Little energy is needed to raise or lower the temperature of air. All gases have low specific heat .  One might excessively tighten a house, but there is no money in it, that would offset excessive cost in extreme tightening. Further, significant tightening in existing homes, promised with HPwES, has almost never been delivered.

A healthy home should be refreshed with 0.35 air changes per hour, 0.35 ACHnat.  In a 1000 sq ft home with eight-foot ceilings, this is 0.35*1000*8/60 = 47 cubic feet of fresh air per minute. In a Portland, Oregon year with 4400 heating degree days, heating with an old gas furnace, and with $1 per therm consumer cost, this air is heated at cost of $35 per year. Say the real cost of natural gas counting irreversible depletion and environmental ruin, and military adventure, is $4 per therm. The cost of the fresh air is still only $140 per year. Of this fresh air cost, little is controllable. 

In corresponding bigger numbers, times twenty, now consider blower door test numbers. A blower door measures infiltration with the home strangely exhausted at the rate thought to occur if a twenty mph wind were blowing on all sides, driving air inward. The odd air flow measurement is labeled CFM50, cubic feet per minute at fan pressure differential of fifty pascals, 0.0073 psi. CFM50 and ACH50 are roughly twenty times larger than reverse-flow rates at natural conditions. I think that all payback math for weatherization should be computed with natural gas cost of at least $2 per therm, and use that number in my math. The math  of fresh air cost is: Annual Heating Cost = 0.074 * CFM50, $70 per year for that 1000 sf home with 47 CFMnat. I hope you are still with me, and see the consistency and bases, in the math.



Now talk of the range of control of infiltration. It is rarely more than 1.0 ACH50, 0.05 ACHnat, 7 CFMnat and 140 CFM50, for that 1000 sf home. Annual value in this range of control is $10 per year, at $2 per therm for natural gas. I have known this for years, and have alerted the fact to Energy Trust in hope they would cease promotion of blower door scams. 

In a reasonably tight home where obvious drafts have been controlled, we feel winter cold of air not from infiltration, but from convection of air against cold walls, floors and ceilings. Cold surfaces, felt especially at floors, exist because of poor insulation and because of bathing of back sides with outside air. Stopping that bathing of backsides, and thorough placement of insulation, are what weatherization is about, not some pretense with a blower door.

Where Energy Trust now salutes disappointing returns in weatherization  they fail to understand their error and to be ashamed. They will happily go on with little residential work to do, and more money to misspend on utility and business payouts. Creepy blow and go contractors they love and award their top Three Star rating, who have refused to do air sealing, are hereafter and forever more, defended against criticism.  In all of this there is yet no admission of blower door stupidity. In Portland this Summer we saw distasteful door to door pushing by HPwES/ CEWO  blow and goers claiming to offer free Energy Trust money. I accuse that these kids in new Company shirts with Energy Trust logo, were paid with “cooperative marketing” dirty money, with nothing free for a home owner. It seems HPwES, Clean Energy Works Oregon, EPS, all the programs promoting blower door scams, are alive and well. How can they persist against declared uselessness of actions purportedly guided by a blower door?

The City Of Portland is shamed through endorsement of CEWO, which was hatched in a pilot program of its Bureau of Planning and Sustainability.  BPS stationery has been applied in annual CEWO bulk mailings, a letter, and a follow-up postcard. It appears that Portland taxpayers have paid the cost of this mailing campaign.

I have gotten a letter like this every year, for three years, mailing costs totaling a half-million dollars I reckon. I find the letter scandalous on many counts, starting with offensive foot-in-door threat about deadlines, wanting reckless action. This one arrived 8/13/2014. If a million have been sent, and there are 3500 takers, it proves the offer is correctly judged a very bad deal. We hear instead that 3500 unusually willing and able to take on an inflated $20,000 pile of fifteen-year debt, proves that it is not a bad deal. If you need $3000 of very important work and need up-front financing, you are out of luck. If you are a renter, too paying into our Public Purpose Fund, you can just pay the higher bills, perhaps demeaned with public support. Your landlord knows that helping out, doing the right thing against bleeding of energy and personal suffering, is not expected or rewarded in our City.

So, what shall we do with blower doors? They shall not be used in many of our homes. In our homes, in the matter of sealing wall headers , we have expended the testing budget. There might yet be some academic testing as we defend the real reasons all wall headers must be sealed. I would like to buy mine back , at dimes on the dollar, to be part of the academic effort. My own home is a test lab, testing in at 10.1 ACH50, and probably now down to less than 7.0. I would share my findings on what works. From all of the BPI blower door madness, we have learned nothing about what, in controlling air circulation, contributes to a healthy home. It was only about rewarding and enforcing the reckless HPwES believers, all results confidential for protection of scammers.

We shall go on tightening our houses against attic floor pits and air-barrier encapsulation of all insulation, knowing it is not a game of blower door numbers. We must act with knowledge added insulation does pay, after measures of sealing, upgrade to LED plate lighting and safety modernization of wiring and plumbing are done first. Insulation cost is repaid in much less than twenty years even at modest $2 per therm energy cost. Regulators such as Oregon's Public Utility Commission may be commanded to employ fifty-year cost of energy in the administration of public funds for weatherization. Cheap and evil fracked natural gas will expire in less than ten years , evident to any responsible person, and government must act responsibly. We are not done with weatherization. For the poor especially, and especially for meanly-neglected renters, we have hardly begun.

Fighting The Lies Of Home Performance, In Public Forums

Upon opening, please know this post has a really good following. Readers: let us please talk to each other. This is important. What shall we do to restore sanity in a lively new campaign to work really hard on the low fruit in existing homes, absent any greed? Work certainly to include rental properties, residential and commercial, now generally neglected. We need real training in the needed hard work, done safely and including full treatment of safety matters as in old wiring. We need a many-fold quick increase in the number of workers employed. No moats to be crossed by throwing money to BPI. Acceptance that blower doors are rarely part of the solution, and most opportunities are in small bites of up-front financing. Tilt the pendulum away from grand and wasteful projects for a very few.


One public forum engaged is that of Saturn Resource Management, SRMI, in Helena, Montana. SRMI is an honest and affordable source of training for those who submit to BPI Certification, under the intense pressure of a mad national "industry."

SRMI maintains a Public Forum, where my entry is the last word on thread "air leakage."  
In summary:
A blower door can not guide or measure consequences of weatherization. It is never "home performance" testing.

Readers at SRMI might want to prove me wrong. They can't.

I was introduced to SRMI about four years ago, and own and have studied, their textbooks. Chris Dorsi, then a principal of SRMI,  spoke at Earth Advantage Institute, in Portland. I admire his integrity, and wish we could talk again. He will be in Portland in the first week of December, 2012, throwing credibility to nemesis Energy Conservation Training Company, ECONTC. I can't attend the conference. Who can afford $1095 for the fruitless stew? Yes I know, there is much fat in the skimming of weatherization, for and by, a privileged few.

At 12/23/2012, I remember to report here that the Habitat X 2012 Portland Conference was cancelled without fanfare. That fact is not evident in my Google search now. I blame Portland sponsors for, among many other things, letting the cost be so great. I have asked Energy Trust of Oregon to explain the event failure, and get no response. My question is charged, where I infer sign of deserved collapse of HPwES.

I am grateful to site InspectionNews, for sharing on many topics that concern me, with contribution mainly by professional home inspectors. I have contributed to threads on attic areas, including this:
http://www.inspectionnews.net/home_inspection/attic-areas-home-inspection-commercial-inspection/30867-attic-stair-insulation.html 



The lies of home performance are addressed in this blog, a public forum offered through the kindness of Google.

Energy Conservation How To: HPwES Origin

Jul 21, 2012

HPwES is not accepted in all states. We CAN drive it away, by alternative development in resistive states. I think few nations will follow our bad example, in telling lies about what a jerk can do with a blower door, in a clean ...

http://energyconservationhowto.blogspot.com/

Energy Conservation How To: What is Home Performance with ...

Apr 28, 2012

But, never while lies persist, that they are needful. Trained eyes find every problem, where I have done the hard work of developing attic access. In every case where I have followed a HPwES tester, I find large savings ...

http://energyconservationhowto.blogspot.com/

Energy Conservation How To: Fresh Air Is Free

Oct 04, 2012

Tell lies, and then go on to commit fraud through conflicts of interest and the can of foam trick, evidently taught and sponsored by the HPwES program developers. The HBA News lie is expressed verbatim in a release by ...

http://energyconservationhowto.blogspot.com/

Energy Conservation How To: PACE Up-Front Weatherization Funding

Apr 27, 2012

Good contractors like me excluded from the delivery, where I declare a lie the notion that that weatherization can be guided by blower door testing, and must be aggregated under home performance contractors, HPwES.

http://energyconservationhowto.blogspot.com/

Energy Conservation How To: Playing The Game: For Shame

Feb 14, 2012

All who participate in "performance-based" weatherization, the game in question, tell a lie. The lie is that the prep work for upgrade of residential insulation must be guided "scientifically," with a blower door. The participant player sets this nylon garment into your front door, with a clever aluminum framework that seals it ... To be continued. Posted by Phil Norman at 9:23 AM · Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to Facebook. Labels: BPA, HPwES, Policy Revision ...

http://energyconservationhowto.blogspot.com/

Training The Green Workforce, Whole House Air Leakage Control

Feb 17, 2012

Training aims are based on the lie that weatherization boils down to "Performance," measurable in reduced readings in blower door tests. Beware of any program described with this P-word. The installer(s) will demonstrate ...

http://energyconservationhowto.blogspot.com/

Energy Conservation How To: PTCS Air Sealing? I Sold My Blower ...

May 22, 2009

As author of the post, I have been troubled by the accusation of lying, deliberately giving false information. With knowledge that my service of ducts for consumers is quite mature, as demonstrated in an especially thorough and ...

http://energyconservationhowto.blogspot.com/

More Freshly-Minted Building Science Professionals

I am able to recall and report something that offended me yesterday, with help of Google. Search "bpi certification 100% Pass".

There it is:
http://www.environmentalenergyconsultants.com/BLOG.html

Congratulations Jan. 2012 Dual Cert class held at John Logan College, Carbondale, IL for a 100% written exam pass rate for both certifications!!!!!!!!! 10 students - 20 exams - 100% !!!!!!!


Maybe ten extraordinary wits, though dumb enough to pay $40 per hour for the fruitless knowledge-stuffing, twice the hourly rate of competent state university education.  The diploma mills are everywhere. The high pass rates are everywhere, evident in other findings of the Google search. So much money pouring to BPI.

BPI Flu

The nature of the illness is throwing around the word "performance" and stating that improvement of "performance" is so key, that its practitioners should drive the weatherization wagon. Performance improvement, as used in acronyms BPI and PTCS, is only the little good someone in a clean shirt can do in an hour or so of attempted tightening of a house envelope against infiltration or HVAC duct leakage, rarely for energy savings of more than $20 per year. The performance practitioners blessed with "certification" attend classes, pay large fees and maybe take tests, and can then call themselves "professionals." There is no checking back to show they are honest or do good work, as any employer would require.


The performance word, as blower door reading, is so indeterminate, that in fact only change of reading has meaning. This then mandates a "before" test, fudged as much as possible to be a high number, and, worst, serves as a preventive of air sealing. Someone seeing a problem can't fix it until its blower door consequence is recorded, and won't fix it, or does at five times the cost. If the fix will have no consequence to a blower door test, as with an attic floor pit, why bother? This is absurd. It is very costly in maintaining waste of energy.


I am heartened at finding a large majority of HVAC contractors warning of the misbehavior of BPI, and others, attempting to corrupt HomeStar legislation, for self-interest. I now feel freer to speak out.


I thought Bonneville Power Administration, Oregon and Washington had a lot to do with the BPI/ Home Performance phenomenon, nationally. I'm right about Oregon. Oregon is third in the nation, just a little worse than Virginia, in per-population acceptance of BPI certification. Most states have none.

And who is spreading it?


In Oregon, forced by publicly-funded BPA and its child, Regional Technical Forum, pressure to get with the program is intense. In Washington, it is only PTCS that has been enforced. I will hope to understand the forces for conformance in New York and New Jersey.


The claimed-biggest "trainer" is Everblue Training Institute, location unknown, perhaps Charlotte NC.


Numbers in red above include "service providers" franchised by WellHome.


WellHome, Masco Brands:

Isn't that scary regarding intent to steal public resources through HomeStar?

Building Performance Madness

Letter to the City of Portland person responsible for Clean Energy Works, sent 8/20/2010:

You saw the full depth of the problem in the well-meaning man who spoke with you, just before I did, at August 3rd Green Drinks. "I have nearly finished my BPM (sic) training. How can I become part of your Program?" I imagine his "training" is with  ECONTC , upon which I comment.

I took little of your time, mentioning that I have construction skill and insights useful to Clean Energy Works, in my opinion. As a sole proprietor, I can't be all things, rejecting BPI investment, properly the realm of full-time professional furnace mechanics. The real skill of fixing things is missed when money and project control is directed only through BPI-Certified contractors. I mentioned "diligence," and other ways of administration.

You saw that BPI Certification very often is unrelated to the ability or wish, to fix anything.

I am trying very hard, to have a voice and a role in state and national implementation of up-front financing, as the progressive way to do weatherization, putting the money in the hands of consumers, for qualifying projects of the very greatest worth and integrity. My Insulation Math is far more useful than a blower door.

Diligence En-Masse

The skylights slideshow supporting the previous post, notes $94 per year heat-cost savings in one row home of a large complex, with investment payback in only two years. Diligence in application to neighboring units would net this same savings more than thirty times over. I have the method, and the interest of one neighbor who oversees the maintenance of all units. How shall society efficiently get the work done? 


Here is my pie-in-the-sky. I imagine real implementation of Oregon's HB2626, where I could clear a project for all residents, with 100% up-front financing. HB2626 was NOT imagined as a tool to empower select big businesses (regardless of their record of diligence) and to hand over any profit to overseer BPI general-contractors as "aggregators." The money must be available for any Oregon RESIDENT or resident association, not contractor, for diligence-proven qualifying projects.


We have hardly begun to define a working version of HB2626, and seem to have abandoned leadership for the nation, of Oregon Senator Merkley's S1574.