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Home Energy Magazine Online March/April 2000

Home Performance Contracting

Doing the Right Thing Finally Pays Off

by Deborah Evans

Diligence and occasional sacrifices eventually made it possible for this small company to do the kind of work it really believes in.

This Habitat for Humanity home was the first Energy Star home in South Carolina--a project we were very proud of.

Debi Evans measures a window so she can input the dimensions into her load calculation program.

Eddie Evans caulks around the edges of a supply air register.

Debi uses an electronic tape measure to measure the dimensions of a room for her load calculations.

We are a mom-and-pop business of 18 years, currently with three employees along with our three sons, who work part-time. Our success in home performance contracting work has been slow in coming and is just beginning to bear fruit, but as we make plans to build our own energy- efficient home, we couldn't be happier that our path took this direction.

Today we use our building science knowledge to engineer and install energy-saving upgrades and to guarantee our customers' yearly heating and cooling costs. In the early days, though, we concentrated just on quality installation of high-efficiency HVAC systems. My husband and business partner, Eddie, has always been the first to implement new technology, so when he heard about blower door testing in about 1995, he got in line. He took a couple of miniclasses from the South Carolina Heat Pump Association that were just enough to whet his appetite.

The two-week long certification training offered by Advanced Energy in Raleigh, North Carolina, was too long for Eddie to be away from his truck. So in April 1997, he sent me off to Advanced Energy for training in duct diagnostics. Technical classes were not new to me; I'm the "tech-head" with the computer, running load calculations and duct designs. The price was right, too: Carolina Power & Light sponsored the $3,500 course for free to their Quality Dealers, which we are.

First Steps

We got certified, bought our blower door and duct tester, changed our signs and the signs on our trucks, and added home performance to our yellow pages advertisement. Only no one called. We realized that we had to educate our public. We went to home shows, sent direct mail, and stuffed all our outgoing mail with flyers. We even did testing for free. We sold a few jobs, but not what we had imagined.

We had a tough time finding anyone interested. We couldn't interest builders in doing the air sealing and upgrading HVAC; they said customers wouldn't pay any more. The Model Energy Code was all they thought was necessary. Few homeowners were interested enough to pay for the labor of air sealing and a top-notch HVAC system. We wanted to build a portfolio, but we had a hard time getting prospects.

Finally, we did some jobs way too cheap, just for the advertising possibilities. The first house we worked on, a 2,000 ft² single-story brick home, was completed in December 1997. The homeowner was a longtime customer of ours and insisted that her builder use us for the heating and cooling. We ran the load, did the design work, and squirted lots of caulk. The plumbers and electricians would knock it out, and we would fill the holes again (this happened three times). The house has fiberglass batts in it (we weren't set up for cellulose back then), but we got it tight. That house had an average electric bill for the heat pump of $27.87 a month over the first year. Finally--our first portfolio house!

Moving On Up

We wanted to be able to offer cellulose insulation to our customers, and there wasn't a company in our area, so in July 1997, we invested $1,400 in a machine to blow cellulose into attics. In June 1998, we discovered the ParPak Drywall system (this consists of a reinforced plastic sheeting that you staple up on the wall, which serves as a vapor barrier and holds in the insulation). Now we dry-blow attics and walls in all the homes we guarantee, although we are moving into wet spray in the future.

In 1998 we read in Home Energy about the HERS program. "Ah-ha," we thought, "another way to sell the package!" However, it turned out that HERS was not set up in South Carolina. I called Washington, D.C., and was put in touch with Linda Perry of Energy Rated Homes of Mississippi. I signed up for training and was certified by Southface Energy Institute in Atlanta and joined Energy Rated Homes of the South (Linda expanded the service to Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina) just this past August.

We spent $550 on the HERS training, but it has given us the advantage of accurately rating a house's energy efficiency. Another $120 went for sublicensing of the Rem-Rate program, the software that allows you to calculate a HERS score for the house and get financing for an Energy Star home.

Success with Energy Star

I soon found out that, all along, the work we had been doing on homes allowed them to pass for Energy Star standards. And our portfolio of such homes continues to grow: We have completed four other houses of up to 3,000 ft²each, and we have two more houses in progress. We have been able to get more money for the jobs, and the energy bills for the heating and cooling in the houses we have finished are looking good. We found that breaking down the costs of air sealing, insulation, energy-efficient equipment, and planning and testing a house helps to justify the costs for the customer. We recently joined the Energy Efficient Builders Association (EEBA), as well as the Southface Energy Institute, to continue our education in home performance diagnostics, and we are constantly looking for building science classes.

We knew we had reached the point of success when our company certified the very first Energy Star home in the state of South Carolina on September 11, 1999. We also engineered and monitored the home's Energy Star features. The house, located in Lugoff, was built by Habitat for Humanity of Kershaw County to be 30% more energy efficient than the standard home. We are pleased to be a part of establishing the Energy Star program in our state, because we believe that it is a crime to waste money and resources. A little extra care exercised during the building or remodeling of a home can save thousands of dollars over the life of a house. Yes, we gave our services away for this one, too. But it feels good to do that occasionally.

I am now in the process of rating the four houses we have finished, and I have recently done plan ratings on two others. Rem-Rate has a great added-value report I can use to show homeowners what their utility bills would be with our energy package or without it. One 2,700 ft² house showed a difference of $700 a year in utility costs, and added $7,500 to the value of the house with only $3,500 for the upgrades. That's pennies a month to save dollars each year!

Deborah Evans is co-owner of Evans Heating & Cooling in Elgin, South Carolina.

For more information:

Evans Heating & Cooling
306 Sessions Road
Elgin, SC 29045
Tel:(803)438-1902
Fax:(803)438-1005
E-mail: evansheating@sumter.net

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