residential

Fostering building science research and helping to drive energy efficiency innovations into our programs is part of my job at PECI, and it affords me the opportunity to work with many talented teams on several residential programs.  Utah Home Performance with ENERGY STAR, which wound down operations at the end of April, is one example of so many innovative things coming together to deliver results that we like to think of it as a paradigm for successful home performa

Courtesy of energystar.gov

If you’re in the biz, it’s a hot topic – how do you effectively market energy efficiency to consumers? Maybe you offer some tips: turn down your water heater, install a low-flow shower head, replace your lights with CFLs – but what do you think of when you hear that? I imagine cold showers with no water pressure and unreliable lighting.

Last winter, we ran a green envelope contest called It's a Win-Win-Win-Win-Win Situation! to encourage contractors to submit rebate applications on behalf of their customers.

Here’s how it would work: a contractor would install an energy-efficient appliance. They would help their customer fill out the rebate application and submit it in a green envelope for a chance to win. We wanted all contractors to participate big and small so we included a few prizes.

By Karen Healey, PECI Associate Director, Marketing Services

I am fortunate enough to be attending this year’s AESP conference in San Diego, California.  The rain kept us all inside today, but that was okay – there were some fascinating presentations.

During the years I lived in Europe, I fell in love with the vegetated or “green” roofs I saw throughout The Netherlands and Germany. The concept seemed simple and logical; use otherwise unused roof space for vegetation that lends to environmental, economic, and aesthetic benefits. After further research, I learned that building vegetated rooftops is more complicated than it looks, but nonetheless there are excellent benefits, and it’s great to see their growing popularity within the United States.

Working in the energy efficiency industry means - much as it does in other industries - that I deal with a lot of acronyms on a daily basis.  One of my favorite subjects, in fact, is an acronym that is just starting to gain traction in the EE "lexicon": HEMS, which stands for Home Energy Management (and/or Monitoring) Systems.

There is a village, once every two years, where you can not only see, but take a tour of, 20 of the world's most technologically advanced and energy efficient high-performance homes.  This village is not, as you might imagine, at Epcot Center (although who doesn't love a spin through Spaceship Earth) or at the highly-publicized World's Fairs.  This magical village appears on the National Mall in Washington, DC, for the US Department of Energy's biennial Solar Decathlon.

My work at PECI has mainly been in the grocery industry, a sector swimming in energy efficiency opportunities.  As a result of this experience, I tend to favor stores that I know are energy-conscious, I nerdily examine refrigerated case gaskets and motors at any opportunity, and I've had the occasional urge to moonwalk down a frozen food aisle where LEDs with motion sensors have been installed.  But generally speaking, this work - while very important and rewarding - is not directly tangible to me on a day-to-day basis.