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Agency helps residents fight winter energy bills

Workers weatherize homes and offer advice to homeowners.

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By James Cummings, Staff Writer 1:49 AM Sunday, August 30, 2009

VANDALIA— As fall approaches, Sheila Earley is thinking about what it costs to heat her small Cape Cod style house near the Dayton International Airport.

“It ran about $250 a month last year,” she said. “I’ve been divorced two years, and I’m trying to keep the house going on my own. Anything that would bring that bill down would be a help.”

The Community Action Partnership of the Greater Dayton Area is trying to help Earley and about 2,000 other residents in six counties pay less on their utility bills by weatherizing their homes and cutting down their energy consumption.

The anti-poverty agency will receive federal stimulus fund money this year and next to add about 30 workers and double the reach of its weatherization program, said agency spokesman John Bennett.

The stimulus grants, which total more than $18 million, and other federal funds provide up to $6,500 in weatherization work per household at no cost to moderate income householders. To qualify, household incomes must be at or below 300 percent of the federal poverty level, which works out to a limit of $29,140 for a household of two or $44,100 for a family of four.

Renters, as well as homeowners, can be eligible with permission from their landlords. People receiving Home Energy Assistance Program payments through the partnership are also eligible.

Gene Bourne, energy coordinator for the partnership, said work on Earley’s house probably would cost between $3,000 and $5,000 on the private market.

Earley said she applied to have her home weatherized last year, but her turn for service just rolled around this week. The process started Wednesday when Bourne and inspector Kirk Scearce arrived at her home to conduct an energy audit.

Scearce contorted his body to slip into attic spaces behind the walls of the upstairs bedrooms of Earley’s story-and-a-half houses. Not much larger was the crawl space he inspected underneath the floor.

Scearce also deployed high-tech equipment to assess the house’s energy efficiency. With an infrared video camera he discovered the house’s outside walls lacked insulation between the studs.

A blower door was used to check whether the house was airtight. A blower door is a flexible plastic barrier that fits into a door frame. As a powerful fan forces air out through the bottom of the frame, a gauge measures how quickly air is sucked in through openings around the house to replace it.

“We take a reading before we start working and then do another reading after we’ve done some sealing around the house,” Bourne said. “We usually can tighten a house up fairly significantly, and you can’t do any good with insulation if you don’t seal the leaks first.”

Earley said she learned a lot. Bourne showed her that she had installed her furnace filter backwards, for instance. And he recommended that she use cheaper filters and change them monthly instead of the more expensive three-month filters she had been using.

Bourne said there are dozens of things homeowners can do to lower their energy consumption, and many of them are inexpensive or free.

“I kind of recommend against replacement windows, though,” he said. “They can be really expensive, and there are a lot of things you can do that give you more return on your investment.”

In the case of the Earley house, Bourne and Scearce recommended insulation for the outside walls, increased insulation and improved ventilation in the attic, insulation around the outside wall of the crawl space and lots of caulking and weatherstripping to improve the sealing of windows and doors.

“That’s a pretty typical list of things to do,” Bourne said. “But sometimes we have to replace a furnace or water heater. We can usually do that within the budget we have.”

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2395 or jcummings@DaytonDailyNews.com.

Help available

For information on the weatherization program of the Community Action Partnership of the Greater Dayton Area, call the agency at (937) 341-5000 from Montgomery County or (800) 617-2673 from Butler, Darke, Greene, Preble and Warren counties. Information is also available by going online to www.cap-dayton.org and clicking on “Programs in Your Community.”

For households not eligible for the weatherization program, there are many simple ways for do-it-yourselfers to improve the energy efficiency of their homes. Tips are available at the Vectren Energy site at www.vectren.com; go to the site and click on “Residential Customers.”

Some local companies offer weatherization services for a fee. To find them, visit the Better Business Bureau site or the telephone business directory and look for companies under the heading “Insulation Contractors.”

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