but folks want to thank you all for being here this afternoon my name is peter bogart i'm the residential energy adviser for the city of holland that's a new position here in the city and it's related to the community energy plans intention of helping to make every home in holland more energy efficient so we'll talk a little bit more about that as we go through the program just in terms of housekeeping if you have not signed in please do so on the table over here and then you'll find brochures on the table these are the two handouts that explain what the program is like and we would like you to take one of those home with you so you can hold on to that information or share it with your neighbors  in home energy retrofit program has got as its goal to retrofit every single house in holland so the more people who know the better off we're going to be but again thank you for being here just to let you know how we're going to proceed during this period of time i'm going to share some basic background about the whole manager retrofit program i'm going to present a little bit information on building science so you understand what's going on in the background when we talk about making the house more energy efficient and then we're going to have a representative here allison sells from the holland board of public works and she's going to explain finance option which is a brand new financial option for this kind of work in the state of michigan holland is going to be the very first community to implement this ok we also have three contractors with us george clark is here from west michigan glass block randy villone is here from green fit homes and doug vandermeer is here from why is construction in so we'll give each of them some some time also when they can explain to you what what they do when they actually come to a house and what process they go through so you have a sense for if you're working with them what does that goal like first let me set a little bit of background here i mentioned the program as is new to the city of holland and this is a component within the community energy plan in the year two thousand and ten the city engaged a consultant who went through the entire city and mapped out how much energy different buildings use and then came up with a plan for how to make the entire city in all of its components more energy efficient so the new power plant you see going up on the east side of town is one of those components we're going from a about a thirty percent efficient coal fired power plant to what will be about a sixty percent efficient combined cycle gas turban plant there's other pieces of the puzzle that are being worked out there there's other teams that are looking at commercial and institutional buildings there's other teams that are looking at what's called district heating and we're studying the feasibility of whether or not we can take all the waste water that's at the end of the b b p w as energy electricity cycle and use it to actually heat buildings in town that's being studied we're taking a look at what we can do to make the entire industrial area of town as a as an unit more efficient so all these things are pieces of the puzzle that help us be a more energy efficient city the piece i'm working with and that we invited you to here is the whole ministry retrofit program one of our goals is to over the course of the next forty  make every single house in town more energy efficient we would like to collectively make our housing stock fifty percent more efficient than it is today if we can do that our consultant is telling us that we have the potential to save ten million dollars every year in utility bills so it's it's a big goal but well worth pursuing an absolutely doable in the city council has taken on this goal that you see on the is committed to being a highly competitive world class community supported by innovative energy solutions that benefit the citizens the business community and the environment the retrofit program for our houses has as a basic goal we want to reduce the energy consumption across the residential sector by fifty percent we want we take the approach to this is a partnership between the city and homeowners we all understand that we each individually have an interest in making our own homes more efficient and more valuable and more comfortable but we are recognized too that as a city we have an interest in helping to make that happen because when we become more energy efficient the entire community is stronger and we are offering an incentive to folks in order to gauge in this kind of work that's to be that if you spend in excess of ten thousand dollars on retrofit work on your house the city is going to give a rebate on that of twenty percent  there's a process we follow in getting into this kind of a program the very first step is just education it's what we're doing tonight it's we want you to understand what the potential is what sorts of things could be done what's possible and what's realistic then we would move on to applying to be in the program and at that point you would be selecting a contractor to work with so you would be talking to brandi or dog or george and saying i need to get an energy audit done on this house ok that would create the foundation for how to make your house more energy efficient they would come up with a plan for how to do that that would be the scope of work we'd get back together after that when you've got a scope of work to look at in i want to sit down together with homeowners and be able to say and have you be able to ask what i'm looking at here is this realistic does this make sense you know i heard a lot about building science but excuse me i'm not a scientist so we'll make sense of that together and assuming that you want to move ahead then we'll figure out what the financing is for doing that and there are different financial avenues that can be followed the next move would then he would sign a contract with the contractor they would actually install the work that needs to be done on the house and when that's all done with they would be back to validate that it was done correctly so they're going to run a blower door test before they work on the house to figure out how tight it is they're going to run a blower door test after the work is done we'll be able to measure what the difference is that gives us an ability to determine how successful we've been implementing that actual work you also are going to agree with the program to let us take a look at two years worth of your energy bills before any work is done and then we're going to follow your lead your electric and gas bills for a year at least a year afterwards because we want to be able to document that we really did do what we set out to do when we take start to take a look at a house and try to understand what kind of potential it has for making it more energy efficient we started out by looking at the data we've got and that's your electric and your gas bills so when i take a look at an electric bill excuse me a gas bill here's the format that they use at sam go energy here's what i'm looking for i want to know how many therms of gas do you use in a month and then every month throughout the year how does that add up that begins to tell me how much gas you use if it's a whole lot of gas it begins to say to us yes there is potential here to make this house more energy efficient but we want to make those kind of decisions based on some data here's a b p w bill when i look at it this is what i'm looking at and you'll see that graphic that says usage history w actually put thirteen months worth of history on your bill and i'm going to take all of thirteen months and begin to mine that data in order to figure out what's in your house and what your potential is for energy savings we do that this way this is a chart that represents what the b p w calls no your number you can go to their website and click on the know your number calculator and it will do what i'm showing you here but it allows you to take your data and give you a picture of where you may fit in the picture compared to other houses and also if you get a pretty low number you know you can start to pat yourself on the back and feel good to get a really big number you begin to say you know that's a potential for work here ok but it basically goes this way i'll take the number of kilowatt hours that were used in any given month you know it in the chart totals at the bottom the numbers you're looking at i pulled from my own house just because it was the easiest numbers for me to get my hands on but to illustrate for you so i used in the year two thousand and fifteen three thousand seven hundred  is sometimes called one hundred cubic feet of gas sequent to about one hundred thousand b to use but you get build in thirds and the other thing i take then is how much condition square footage do i have in my house in other words if you get registers in the room that's conditioned space ok if you're heating it that's conditioned space so i'll take my eleven twenty square feet in the calculator tells my number is thirteen point four ok what does that mean exactly is the question and we kind of compare it to the chart you see on the right ok we've got in holland the average number across the board is twenty three point three in the midwest it's fifteen and for some reason holland in particular as housing stock that just needs a lot of energy  work we're not doing as well as even the midwest average on a global scale copenhagen denmark is kind of the world's leader if you want to be world class you got to be copenhagen ok so those are the the numbers that tell us compared to the competition kind of where do i fit in the picture right it gives you a sense for how far have you got to go to improve your house number at the bottom you see is just another way of spinning the data the community energy plan measures community fish and sea in terms of tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent gases if a community is putting out lots of carbon dioxide or carbon dioxide equivalent gases it's inefficient it's a traditional industrial way of measuring efficiency my house came in at forty five point eight the midwest average is forty seven holland is in at about seventy five so again it just shows you in two different ways there's good news and there's bad news in holland the bad news is we're not very energy efficient across the board the good news is that if we actually address the issue and fix the homes we then can grab that potential ten million dollars a year the beauty of which is you don't need a government program to redistribute it it's already in your pocket it just stays there here's just a little variation on the theme because i want you to understand that when a house is analyzed it's not exactly black and white and always straightforward ok here's all my dad again the only thing i changed was the square footage i got a basement in the house and in the basement is a workshop in an exercise room my wife has got a laundry room and sewing area we've got a pool table and a t v watching area if we use all of it we use it all year long but there are no registers in the basement so do i count it well i think about that in terms of where did the heat come from and in building science you talk about areas that are intentionally conditioned in areas that are unintentionally conditioned and i'm kind of willing to say in my basement it's condition but it's an intentional because i've got a furnace that kind of read it some heat off of it water tank radiates some heat off of it the duct work radiates some heat and i've got this freezer downstairs and every time it runs it expels heat into the area so i tend to say yeah that's kind of condition space and i tend to say that when i want to feel really good about myself because i'm playing with the numbers you know i had been thirteen point four and knobs six point seven well i just beat the danes you know it's again high was forty five point eight now i'm twenty two point nine and i go through that little exercise just so you understand it's not always straightforward in terms of how you interpret a house there is some art to it there is some science to it in the more experienced the contractor is the more they can help you walk through all of those different variables when they're actually with you in the house this is what the department of energy calls the energy you just take a lake look at all the energy in a house and ask yourself where does it go well the biggest percentage goes to heating the next biggest percentage goes to cooling and then the hot water heating moves on to appliances lighting electronics in the all of the so called other stuff that's in the house sometimes that's called plug load ok the reason we take a look at this kind of a breakdown is it begins to tell us where should we apply our attention you have to focus on where energy is being used the most if you're going to reduce the energy that you consume ok i point this out because you are all susceptible to advertising and i dare say almost everybody in the room has hurt advertising that says if you just change your windows you're going to cut your  big that probably b p w o send you money right or if you just put insulation in the attic that's all you have to do right just like another blanket on the bed you're warmer at night well it doesn't work exactly that way you've got to apply the money you're willing to spend in the places where it's going to do you the most benefit in the end here's the other number that's that's nice to work with the deal he says the average homeowner in this country spends twenty two hundred dollars a year on utility bills and what that says to me in our attempt to college more fifty percent more efficient than it is today we have the potential to save people in the neighborhood of a thousand dollars a year you know it's it's of significant amount of money depending on what the needs of your house is in depending on the kind of retrofit work that's done in your house won't be the same for everybody but that's the kind of potential that's there the other thing i'd like to point out is especially for young people just starting out maybe you're buying your first house if you're spending twenty two hundred dollars a year in utilities you can reasonably expect to be living in a house for probably the next fifty years right you just made one hundred thousand dollars decision and from my point of view i would like to hold on to as much of that hundred thousand for me as i possibly could ok here's one other way of mining the data this is strictly electricity but when you do electricity the question is where did it get used k and in the way we look at electricity we try to find what the baseline is so there is there are certain things in the house that are just use day in and day out so you're lighting your fridge aeration computers t v s certain things are just day in and day out not related to the weather they're just always used in the background those items compose your baseload and the question i'd like to know is what percentage of your total actrix consumption is committed to the base load because when we graph it out you can see there there's a seasonal spike there you know my electric use from the base load goes up in august you know prudy likely air conditioning and when you see it on a graph you tend to go you know i got up i got to take that down right but when i crunched the numbers my seasonal variation is only ten percent of everything i use ninety percent of electricity in my house is committed to the base load so if i'm going to bring that down i've got to take a look at the things that are plugged in which means more more efficient appliances l e d light bulbs power strips to eliminate phantom load on the t v in the computer all those things that are just on all the time what can i do to make them more efficient or not have to be on at all the dad is telling me in this particular house that's where the challenge is if you had a base load and huge spikes i'd say we're probably looking at furnace and air conditioning but the dad a kind of directs us in term in shows us how to make decisions kind of hated science i'm intimidated by this you know i want you to understand you don't have to be because if you can understand a shoe box you understand almost everything related to building science  take a look at the box and what do you got four sides the top and a bottom that is very similar to your house inside the shoe boxes air same thing in your house the only difference here is that in your house you condition that air inside the box and then the furnace runs in order to make up for that condition the air when it escapes ok so the question becomes we've got condition there simply how do we keep it in the house where we have to do also and building science you know they'll talk with you about how much money do you spend gives you a picture for how much potential savings you have we'll talk about the building shelve the on below that's the shoe box well talk about the indoor air quality because we have to be aware of the fact that if we seal up all the holes and cracks in a house the air that used to kind of leak in and out on its own doesn't do that anymore if you have had a preexisting program or a problem in the house such as formaldehyde or natural gas leak that could kind of build up in concentration so we want to pay attention to what's happening after we make the house better to h  and the air conditioning is one of the issues appliances there's a kind of sequence we follow here i call it a loading order but when you want to make a house more energy efficient you follow a progression first you do the air sealing work then you do the insulating work then you do the the mechanical work efficient air conditioning and furnace hot water and then you move on to the appliances what's left after that is you and you are a major factor in how efficient your house may be the decisions you make about how to live in the house it's sort of like the decisions you make about how to drive a car if you're the jack rabbit start slam on the brakes stop type of person you know your mileage is not quite as good right it's the same for your house the decisions you make will impact what your bills are and we have seen studies where two identical houses side by side have energy bills that are different by fifty percent the difference is the people in the house and that the way they use the house if you need eighty degrees on christmas day it's just going to use more energy so those kind of decisions are up to you but they do impact what your when the folks come to the house to analyze your house they're not going to guess they're going to use tools in order to analyze the house and we have very good tools that have emerged over the last twenty years that help us understand how to diagnose a house the fall at the top there is using a combustion analyzer and by sampling the flue gases and understand what the composition of the gases is the gauge is going to tell him how efficient that hot water heater is of fascinates everybody because you get these color pictures of your house but we can understand without having to open a wall up where heat is leaking in and out of a house and especially in the winter you get really good pictures that show the heat leaking out of the house the fall on the left hand side there is using the blower door and what that will do is it will depressurize the interior of the home the gauge will hold the pressure steady and then we'll be able to measure how many cubic feet of air per minute are infiltrating the house because we know that for every cubic foot the fan is blown out a cubic foot has got to be coming in somewhere and we can measure how much that is in your house and then we can be begin to take that number and compare it to the engineering standards how much air should be leaking into a house and still maintain healthy indoor air it gives us a measure of how much air sealing we're looking for are going to be talking to you in terms of a whole house approach everything in your house kind of works together even the trees outdoors have a bearing on your energy bill they say a well placed tree  reduce the temperature in your house on a hot summer day by as much as three degrees ok but everything that's in the house kind of works together and you need to understand that in effect it's sort of like the human body you know we've got all these systems inside our body a skeletal system respiratory system pulmonary system and they all kind of work together or you don't feel too good you know that's true for your house too and the folks who come to your house when they talk about building science have experience it of understanding how do these systems work together in such a way as to produce the desired income or outcome you know a comfortable house a safe house high quality air inside the house they may also talk to you about how air moves inside the house there's really two to three things you need to understand about here in the house one is hot is hottest temperature get in and out of a house the first way is through conduction it's just sort of like electricity through a wire heat kinetic energy will just move through solid material even insulation insulation just slows it down but heat will conduct right through solid material in the house or in the summer into the house the other is convection that's if there's open air space for air to move air we talk about with that acronym ham heat and moisture those three things always move together you know if there's a hole in your house somewhere in the air can move through it heat in moisture go with it ok the other is infrared which is a direct transfer of energy through space with no medium in between that is not a big factor when it comes to homes especially in michigan you may have seen some ads for people one install for oil kind of material in your attic that's to reflect the infrared energy out of the house in michigan that's not a big factor in most homes it's not a big factor but the air moves a buoyant rises and as it rises it moves upward in the house until it hits the top and then starts pushing its way out ok so if your electrician drilled a hole in the ceiling in order to hang that ceiling fan you get a hole in your ceiling the air will find its way out if your carpenter framed in a chase way for the chimney and left a gap around it that  space for air to slip up and out of the house and these are the sorts of things we need to look for in an attic chances are pretty good you have that scuttle hole where you get up into the attic if you have to almost every home in holland never insulated or are sealed that hole in the ceiling and what we know from studies is that if there is a five percent gap in your insulation package you'll have about a fifty percent reduction in your r value so do matter how thick the insulation is if you leave a big hole in it those are the kind of things we have to look for at that upper level if you can't quite get out of the attic you'll start pushing out the sides up there well what's happened is there's a column of air moving through the house that they call the stack effect when that column of air rises up stairs it creates pressure and starts pushing its way out there is positive pressure back down at the bottom where the air vacated we now have negative pressure in nature will relieve that negative pressure by infiltrating air from outdoors so as much as possible we want to control that stack ir's the air coming in at the bottom to do effective air sealing the number one place to go is up at the top put a cork in the bottle stop it from leaking out of there so that's where a lot of the work needs to get done initially the second most important place is back down at the bottom so where the house sits on the masonry foundation that sill plate we need to get that here sealed in again the column of air cut it off the top cut it off at the bottom third third place w be then the work on the side walls after that in a lot of times dense packing insulation does a pretty good job at that if we've done a good job here sealing the nest next task is to align our insulation with that thermal boundary we just created i don't want any air space between that sealed thermal boundary and my insulation if there is space that allows that convection pattern to set up again so again we start at the top typically we're going to the side walls and then follow that with the work in the crawl space in basement with the insulation i mentioned earlier indoor air quality is one of things we need to think about if we're doing a d n d job of making your house tighter than used to be we need to pay some attention to the quality of the air indoors now the people who study this kind of stuff are telling us that we now spend ninety percent of our time indoors so most of the air you're breathing in is indoors which raises the question what's the quality of that air and we want to pay attention to that we especially want to pay attention to carbon monoxide there has to be enough air in the house to support the combustion appliances otherwise it'll pollie or down the chimney first carbon monoxide into the house that's potentially fatal we need to take a look at  your cleaning supplies you know euphemistically we call them cleaning supplies or cleaning chemicals right in if i just drop that word cleaning off you're left with chemicals you are stor chemicals in your house and they will get into the air people potentially something you're breathing in that the most obvious way you know this is to magine yourself walking into meyers go to that we're all way in the back where they have all the cleaning supplies and take a deep breath and i think even in your imagination you can tell me that you smell it right well how come you can smell it when every package has never been opened that's what's called off gas same chemicals can work their way through solid material oh it into the air moisture is one of the really big issues in a house we make sure we control it moisture can eat a house up and it's a slow process but it's really thorough so we want to make sure we don't build up too much moisture inside the house number one way to do that is make sure that we have spot ventilation at the points where moisture is being produced so in the bathroom we need a ceiling fan in the ceiling that will take that shower kind of humidity out of the house rule of thumb fifteen minutes run a fan for about fifteen minutes after shower in order to adequately pull that moisture out of the house to the bathroom if you get it in the bathroom to stop it from spreading to the rest of the house  kitchen just as important a lot of cooking produces a lot of moisture so at that spot where moisture is being produced we need that hood fan to pull the moisture out of the house that progression i talked about air sealing insulation now we're moving on to mechanical equipment if the house is in good shape then let's make that condition beer with the fishing equipment we need the most efficient air conditioning and furnace we can get and again your heating going to be about twenty nine percent of your energy bill your cooling about seventeen percent and your water about fourteen percent so those are kind of the big hitters that's why we need to pay attention to a rule of thumb for innes's got a lifetime of about somewhere around twenty years water tanks got a life expectancy of somewhere like seven to  fifteen the new equipment is far more efficient than what we had from years ago you know i can tell you just my most recent example is the hot water tank i changed out of my own house last december had a forty gallon gas fired water tank we replaced it with a fifty gallon gas hot water tank but it's the new more efficient style and i have found that my gas for that one appliance has been reduced by forty three percent it just simply is was way more efficient than the old appliance so moving on to more efficient equipment cuts down on our energy consumption makes us more energy efficient those anymore what we do like to use are the new programmable thermostats ryan cotton our city manager put in the nest thermostat which is the image you see at the top and he says his gas bill went down by ten percent what this really does for us as a make the house any warmer put it what does do is it makes up for your bad memory because you should turn the heat down when you leave the house and you know we've all been sitting in a meeting somewhere and thought oh darn it i forgot that well it's run in the house and nobody's there what you can do with a programmable thermostat is get it to do what you want it to do and then you don't have to remember to do it ok and it does actually save in case ten percent of his gas bill the other issue that's becoming more significant is heat recovery ventilation it's a potential that could be done in a house to where we need fresh air in the house we'll bring it in from outdoors from a special dedicated duct running through a mixer box which then exchanges the heat that's going on the year going out with the air coming in so that we can hold on to that heat but still get the fresh air we need in the house and so there's a lot of technologies that are coming on the scene that help deal with these issues says we've talked about refrigerators tend to be the big one you know maybe thirty percent of your electric bill is going to be in the appliances the refrigerators rule of thumb if you're more than ten years old it may well be worth your while to replace it because you'll make it up in the energy savings ok lifestyle choices i take a look at this and i can hear my dad's in my years turn lights off you know close the door you know well lighting is about twelve percent of your bill and as much as i hate to admit that after all these years dad was right  if you don't need it turn it off you know but these are lifestyle choices the kilowatt police are not going to knock on your door at eleven p m to see if you've got your lights out you know these are things you need to do on your own but they do impact your bill there's a perception out there a sort of a mythology that when we ask you to make your house more energy efficient we're asking you go back to living in a cave where you just have to sort of freeze all winter and feel virtuous about it ok the people who study comfort tell us that in the winter most people report being comfortable somewhere between sixty eight and seventy three in the summer most people report being comfortable somewhere between seventy five and seventy nine what's significant about that is for every one degree you're willing to adjust seasonally up or down they say that's worth about forty five dollars a year and again nobody is coming to your house to check your thermostat but opinion on the choices you make that will impact how much energy use and your bill so if you're this guy and you've got to spend a michigan winter in your shorts and t shirt in turn the heat up that's your call but it will impact the efficiency of your house and how much energy you use if you're willing to put on the sweater can endure a little bit less it'll lower the energy bills and again lifestyle choices it depends on the decisions we make about our even with lifestyle choices i want data you know if i'm questioning how much energy something uses measure it you know especially electricity the picture you see is a w meter and i show this one because these are available for checkout at herrick library if you're unsure about how much electricity something's using plug it in and measure it in that will help you make a decision about whether or not you want to replace it you know because you'll be able to tell from the tank at the appliance store how many kilowatt hours a year the new one is using compared to what you measured on your own this is not an unusual sight you bought a brand new high efficient refrigerator and you put the old one in the basement or out in the garage ok sometimes there is nothing more than a can of pop in their refrigerator sitting out in the garage keeping that thing going all year long means you've got about a two hundred dollars can a pop you know and again if we don't need that let's get that out of the system you know but that's a lifestyle choice somebody's got to kind of get up and do it other thing is when you are ready for new appliances we want you to shop for energy star rated appliances if you're going to spend the money anyway let's get the most efficient appliances we can get so that's kind of the big picture for building science and we want you to understand when george or brandy or dog come to the house or the people who work for them come to the house this is what's going on in the background of their training this is what they're thinking through in and how they try to analyze a house ok the more you know the more intelligent questions you can ask of them when they are actually there so at this point is we talk about the home energy retrofit program like to turn it over to alice and cells from the board of public works we have a new finance tool that's available to us to use in this program and allison is going to kind of help explain that a little bit about me i work in the conservation apartment at the holland board of public works so all of the energy efficiency rebates kind of come by my desk and that's one of the programs i administer so i'm going to tell you a little bit about financing loan program it's an innovative financing mechanism to help finance home energy efficiency improvements so this is part of our energy plan in the sense that it will help us all of these new improvements the reason why we're able to do this legally is because in two thousand and fourteen and act passed act four zero eight that said municipal electric providers like ourselves are able to provide our customers with financing mechanisms through your existing bill and so for the last two years we've been kind of developing and implementing this program and we're looking forward to a launch late this summer it is the first program like this in michigan so surrounding cities are kind of looking to us as pioneers to see how they can do their own program so it is really exciting and a new thing for us but we are excited the primary difference between this loan in other traditional loans is that it is directly through your electric bill so it'll be another line item right under your electric service there are three main players implementing the program the holland energy fund the board of public works and michigan saves the hollin energy fund is a nonprofit corporation that was created to help implement the forty year community energy plan so that's a funding source for these improvements the goal i know we talked a little bit about the community energy plan but just to reiterate it's to be a thriving world class energy efficient city that generates energy cleanly uses it efficiently and distributes it reliably and affordably and this is one of the ways that we're trying to do that holland energy fund dot com goes live i think at the end of next week so that will be a good resource too for both the program and for the home energy retrofit program of public works which is where i am from we are the billing kind of tool for this program so we'll be doing all of the payment collection will be your first source for questions will be a resource for you that way michigan saves is a nonprofit organization in michigan that helps kind of authorize contractors for programs like the fund other energy of pretty efficiency improvements things like that they've been a really huge help in helping us guide through this program and go through the necessary steps to really make it happen so we sat down with a bunch of people and we want to talk about what the program goals would be for this program we want it to be good for everybody so we kind of narrowed it down to three main goals using that triple bottom line kind of mentality of environment equity and economy so we wanted to strengthen community and neighborhoods by encouraging deep energy retrofits so going beyond just the first steps sorry about the noise  k increase access to financing so we wanted this to be accessible to those who might not usually be qualified for a traditional loan we wanted it to be open to a lot of different people and then hurt is to create an administratively efficient and cost effective program we didn't want to have to bring in a whole new team of people a whole new building we wanted to be able to smoothly integrate it into what we already do and have it be really cost effective and we think we've figured out a way to do that and then the benefits of the unbuilt program what do we want you guys to kind of gain from it it's simple to qualify the main qualifying criteria is twelve months of on time bill payment history so if you've paid your bill on time for twelve months there's a good shot that you're qualified for this loan we don't rely on a credit score to qualify for this loan which is a big differentiator between th traditional the second is it's really convenient and easy it's going through your existing bill so you're not going to get a second bill in the mail for this it will be on your existing one you're already familiar with the people and how to pay your bill and you know right to you know who you're going to call ask questions and all of our customer service reps are going to be well versed in this program and available to help attractive terms the length of this long can be up to fifteen years and the interest rate is four point nine nine up to ten years and then five point nine nine between ten and fifteen years the loan payments can also transfer this is also really unique to the program the loan is tied to the meter in your property not necessarily to you so if you have somebody who buys your home that new buyer can assume the rest of the loan that you owe this is a negotiation between the buyer and the seller during that selling process but in our research around the country similar programs have about a fifty percent transfer rate so about half the time i have four slides of program details there's a lot of words a lot of information on here so feel free to ask me any questions the customer eligibility means if you are a city of holland or resident and you own a single family home then you're eligible for this program we haven't expanded the program to the surrounding townships yet so it is just within the city of holland the minimum loan amount is five thousand dollars maximum loan amount is thirty thousand the maximum loan term is up to fifteen years you can you know choose to bill landlords if you have more than one meter more than one house you can have a separate loan for each meter there is no penalty for early repayment so sometimes if you get a traditional loan you try to pay it off early you've got to pay that interest that they would have you know usually collected there is no penalty for early repayment there is a penalty for late payment five percent same as the electric service again if you have the same rules as electric service so if you don't pay your electric bill eventually you'll be eligible for a shutoff same thing with the loan so that is the same penalty for late payment underwriting criteria there is that one month's of on time bill payment history and then there are three things that we look for that are just kind of protect ourselves most people won't run into this no delinquent taxes no bankruptcies in last three years and no outstanding collections or money judgments and just to know the lender is the holland energy fund so that's where the loan will come from and so the loan agreement will be between the homeowner and the holland energy fund and the board of public works is just kind of that mechanism to collect the payments so to qualify energy saving improvements we require a couple of things the whole home energy assessment which peter will talk more about and then after that assessment is complete your contractor will file a report and so you require that as well and then the diagnostic blower door testing so they test and test out we do require that and the eligible improvements are any energy saving improvement in the michigan energy measures database in your contractor will be really familiar with that  it's available on line and it's you know pretty excessive will we're noble energy some people get really excited about this night renewable energy measures are able to be financed through the program but your home has to meet a certain energy efficiency rating first the department of energy has a home energy score and if your home scores that are higher than solar panels p v panels you can finance those on top of your home  non energy building performance improvements so things like specificity basement or there are having not been to wiring replaced those things can be financed through the program as long as they're coupled with appropriate energy and then last side this is just some contact information if you have additional questions we have and sell yours our community energy services manager who couldn't be here tonight and then myself we're both at the beach and happy to answer any questions you might have about this or get you more he knows a little bit about everything so feel free to reach out to any of us if you have more questions and i'll be around at the end as well he answered questions  the noise you hear in the background is renovations that are being done to this building the city isn't all you wanting to make your homes for a fish and we've said you know what we own a lot of property too and we need to lead on this kind of an issue so there's a lot of background work being done in changing not lighting systems and making city municipal buildings more energy efficient thank you allison i'd like to give the contractor story here a chance to talk to you and i want to brandy would you like to share with folks that if they call the green fit homes how does that process go in order to get you to come over and kind of work on take a look at the house when you were to call us we would set up here initial consultation two of our building science specialists would come out and perform the audit on your home an od it typically is going to range between two and four hours i'm going to say depending on the size of the home while they're there they're going to use a diagnostic equipment like peter showed the blower door the infrared camera the combustion analyzers and they're going to go through your house from the attic to the basement or crawl space and they're going to check everything going to check insulation levels going to check the condition of the windows they're going to check you know insulation in the walls floors crawl space all of that in there also going to check out the appliances if you have combustion appliances they're going to check them to make sure that everything's burning efficiently there's not any possibility for carbon monoxide leaks there's no potential gas leaks at the gas meter outside everything like that i'm completion of that they will write up a full report in give you your findings usually you get them from the guys depending on the day twenty four to forty eight hours afterwards and they will they will list every single thing that they found in the recommendations and how to fix them in kind of what order they usually say hey we would do this this this first but give you an idea and kind of a plan of what to do during that a lot of people lot of things are different to different people so the guys will talk to you and ask you to any parts of the house that are uncomfortable for you some people might not like but there's a draft at their feet in the bathroom you know the wife might say every time i'm getting ready in the morning i can feel it cold on my feet or the husband's more concerned about in the back you know by the dining room table he can feel draft and those kind of questions and being able to tell them that kind of thing will help in diagnosing everything in your house what needs to be changed what's the best route for you guys to go after that and the guys will present the the report to you and go after it to schedule an appointment to go ahead and do the work i think then you'd go ahead to meet with peter and talk that over and if you want to go forward the guys would schedule in go out depending on how many days will depend on what you're having and your house whoever does the audit is a lead auditor at your house from our company will be there on the day that the work is installed contractor working with us at that point if you're going to do any of that as far as green fit goes we have i have two primary auditors that are that would be out here working again we have all of our own staff working on the houses working on the crews and we are located in rockford which is just north of grand rapids because are familiar with that and we have the guys have been doing this for  years full time we've had about hundred and forty jobs last year retrofits and so this is an area also holland that we've been pretty familiar with we've done quite a bit of audits out here so the guys are familiar with a lot of the older housing stock that you guys have here and does anyone have any questions about the process or anything like that you want us to do another full like this i think we talked about this at the last meeting how you wanted this handled well yeah yeah i would like to kind of hold some of those questions for after because all the folks are going to be here for you to kind of say hey what about my house ok it's sort of like that human body it was showing those kind of common systems and then there's you that we want to make sure you can ask specific questions i wonder what george would you like to say a few things about west michigan last block and we're going to ask you to stand by the podium because you may not be aware of it but we're filming this oh you are going to be answering yes you can all right well now not so well first off thanks for having us  for a little perspective i've been doing this for about the same time that randy brought up about seven years our company is west michigan glass block been around thirty two years got an a plus rating with the better business bureau in a number of awards from a different civic organizations including angeles but you might ask what in the world is a guy doing here that sells glass block well this is an area that we've decided to really expand into and we have an awful lot of experience on our crew we've we've implemented and done over three thousand audits and over a thousand retrofits over this last seven years we've got a number of people that have done this but i've also had the privilege and pleasure being to at the national convention that we have and i convention and i've actually been a speaker and a present of their so we've really been exposed to some of the greatest programs around the country i've also been involved in a number of pilot programs here in the state actually brandi has administrative some of them one of them david meter here my friend david administrated and those were great programs but for your folks perspective i've never seen anything like this the value proposition that they're offering is just unbelievable and far surpasses anything that i've been around in saying that our process is is kind of similar this is my son my retirement job and it's only about sixty hours a week i just love what i do and i think most of the people in this industry and i know these guys over here share the same thing we're really passionate about what we do our approach is to be very consultive with yeah when you get to know you a little it we want for you to share with us what's going on in your home and we have a way of helping draw that out from yeah and then we become to tact is we use all that same equipment that brandy is speaking of and we really want you right there with us we want you looking through the infrared gun we want you seen where there are sleek and with that small pencil on the blower doors going if you're brave enough to get up in the attic well you're welcome to do that i don't recommend that this time of the year however we did three last week and i'm getting too old to do that let me share but we're going to take pictures of those sorts of things if they're tough spots to get into in crawl spaces and it's it's just amazing the things that we find i've been in a lot of other businesses myself i've never been in a business that we've seen so much change in the environment in the house ours is a very educational piece we really go through a checklist on all those things that peter kind of kind of gave you before and try to help you know how to tune that hot water here a little bit change filters and lights and i think we can really speak to that we have found in the many that we've done that there's a whole big hunk of money you can save by those behavioral things and it's not  ding the one that if you have teenage kids taking showers as i got no help for you to get those twenty minute showers down to seven minutes but if you can and you've got three of them you'll save a hundred bucks on your water bill that i can tell you but the excess reach we do sell for those teenagers if that would be of any help at all we really enjoy what we do we have a lot of fun with people doing at most of the people when they're done with the show and you know i  know what the on its look like and you know i call fish greatest show on earth you're going to learn so much about what's going on in your home and it's really imperative and important a habit there we're really honored to be involved in this we've seen how and work on this since before the days i got in it and it's just amazing how they pull this together it we've laughed a little bit with how long it's taken quite honestly but man what a deal this is and and you folks just haven't a great opportunity to really make history and i can gradually the city and yourself for being here you guys are the early adopters nobody's more important than the first people that move forward with this so thank you for the time and the opportunity pier thank you george i like to give an opportunity  eight years this is our thirty eighth and a little history here used to be a social worker and i couldn't solve any problem so i got into this and that's what really it's all about we're trying to listen to you as much as brainy went through all this great talk and we do the same thing and george does too we're home performance contractors we look at your house before and after and see if we can make a big difference and if we don't we're not doing our job and i've been blessed with a very good crew that two crews that we can insulate the house we can put new windows in we can make improvements that are going to be sustainable and i hope they're go enjoyable for you because you'll be warmer and cooler in summer and you'll be able to live there knowing that you're using a lot less energy just last week i got a call from my auditor my  auditor usually comes after i'm there i make the initial visit when you call your wife's home trueman you're going to see me and fortunately nobody else so i like it that way because i'm kind of a control freak i want to make sure the job is done right and we make sure that if it's outside siting or roofing matters and we can handle it too we used to do a lot of that and we know there's different ways to get into houses just yesterday i found in the area of this woman had this  she never even knew she had an attic there so all this happens more frequently doesn't it so you're going to find things out about your house and how and seems to have a housing stock that can produce a lot of challenges for an insulation contractor  we find that there are slope ceilings up stairs that are wholly inadequate to today's energy needs it's going to make your house solar often and we have ways to make sure that that will happen involves a lot of restoration so we've been very successful in that regard like granny said you know we're trying to listen to you try to connect the dots and see where the issues are and then come up with the solutions so we've been doing the a long time and we want to make we hope you have gotten a picture here of holland's intention to make holland a world class energy efficient city our homes are a big piece of that puzzle and we know we can do this we know the technology is there you know the people who know how to do it are there we know we've got the scene in place to help make it possible for homeowners so we're hoping you have got the information you need to make a decision to move forward the very first step in the process would be for you to call in if you have one of the brochures there from the table you'll find the number for the community the neighborhood services department and call that number and get an appointment i want to meet with you first we will talk our way through what the next steps are it help you put a program together that is what we have for tonight's dog and brandi and george are spending time here yet so i know tim you had some specific questions i'm sure others you may have questions they're going to be here to kind of answer questions for you if you did not sign in please do so because we'd like to be able to follow up with you and sign up sheets on the table over here other that any questions that i can help ok thank you all for being here