Blog

Sorry, Kid: The Truth about Insulation

It’s hard not to bring your work home with you – especially when your work focuses on homes. That explains why the dinner-table conversation at my house tends to include insulation, basement encapsulation, and the potential of PACE and PowerSavers to transform Maine’s energy landscape.

Evergreen in the Community

Starting a business comes with plenty of headaches, but one of the many rewards comes from building an organization we’re proud of. At Evergreen Home Performance, that means responsible business practices like family-friendly wages, on-the-job training, and health insurance for all of our employees. It also means supporting the community organizations we care about.

Practical Wisdom

One of our customers sent this our way. It’s about workplace rules, and how they bolster bureaucracy and undermine innovation. They end up interfering with – even impairing – our progress towards core, mission-critical goals. Barry Schwartz, who studies the link between economics and psychology, argues that the only solution is to encourage and embrace the practical wisdom that comes from doing.

Come for the Art, Stay for the Energy Efficiency

When the head of the National Endowment of the Arts visited Rockland, Maine last week, he probably didn’t expect to hear about energy efficiency contracting. But in the story of Rockland’s renaissance, art and the economy are intertwined, and Evergreen Home Performance has one of the staring roles.

Prioritizing Efficiency – and Moving Forward

Lowering our energy expenses is a far bigger priority for most of us than getting the newest iPhone or iPad – but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to do. A survey by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research asked people to rank their energy usage priorities and the challenges to changing those usage patterns.

What Comprehensive Really Means

Comprehensive: Complete; including all or nearly all elements or aspects of something

#1 Party Conversation Topic: Home Energy

Sometimes being a building science geek means knowing when to bite your tongue. Not everyone wants to hear about beautiful basement encapsulations or the pros and cons of different kinds of insulation, after all. Except when they do.

Flood Watch in Your Basement?

There are basements where people enjoy spending time. They’re warm, dry, and cozy, and they make great playrooms, or guest rooms, or media rooms. We imagine they’re something like Shangri-La: happy, idyllic, and – let’s be honest – fictional.

3 Reasons We Work All Summer

Happy June! We’re as happy to see warm, sunny weather as the next guy, but it’s not because we’re headed into three blissful months of vacation. Home performance is a year-round endeavor. Here are the top three reasons we spend the summer in hot attics instead of on hot beaches:

The Future of Hot Water

This is a guest post from ReVision Energy, Maine’s leading installer of solar hot water and solar electric systems. Evergreen frequently partners with ReVision on efficiency/solar projects

We’re Small Business of the Year!

We’d heard that we should really be at the Penobscot Bay Regional Chamber of Commerce awards dinner Saturday night, so we had an inkling that something was up. Still, we didn’t dare think we might be named Small Business of the Year. Not until the presenter referred to this year’s winner as “geekishly committed to their mission,” with the aside that “it’s on their website, so I’m going with it,” did we even consider it.