Case Studies

Making Home Quiet, Comfortable, and Enjoyable

Tom & Jennifer never meant to live here. They bought the 1850s cape as a landing pad while they figured out where they really wanted to be. They didn’t paint the walls, and they didn’t worry about the drafts that kept the house cold and uncomfortable no matter how much oil and wood they burned. But after nearly a decade, “we came to the realization that the best thing for us was to try to make this house work.”

Helping Renovations Work Efficiently Together

Marianne & Steve’s Cape Elizabeth home was “a bit of a mishmash” – a 1939 log cabin with additions completed in 1998 and 2011. The result was beautiful but drafty – and expensive to heat. “Our bedroom door would rattle when the wind blew,” reports Steve, and the upstairs office was “either stifling hot in the summer or freezing in the winter.”

Insulating a Summer Cottage for Year-Round Comfort

This lakeside cottage was the first of three identical summer camps built in Camden in 1909. It took 2.5 cords of wood and almost 800 gallons of propane to make the mostly uninsulated home livable year-round.

Creating Even Temperatures – and a Toasty Toilet Seat

As Lee showed Evergreen’s President, Richard Burbank, around the house she’s lived in for twelve years, she realized how much energy efficiency has shaped the way she uses her home. “The consult revealed issues I hadn’t anticipated… I thought Evergreen would come in and tell me things, but they asked questions other people wouldn’t have known to ask, and they really listened to my experiences. I got to express my preconceptions, and my misconceptions, and to make sense of my home.”

Managing Costs with Energy Efficiency

Beth and Jon knew their energy bills would go up when they moved to a larger house, but “the amount of oil we used in a mild winter was really concerning.” To learn where their money was going, they scheduled a free one-hour consult with an Evergreen Energy Advisor.

One Old House, Two Efficiency Maine Loans, and Three Local Companies

This 1830s farmhouse in Rockport, Maine came with period charm and an overwhelming fuel bill: 750 gallons of oil, plus 6 cords of wood, plus all the electricity it took to power an inefficient old water heater. Even worse, all that didn’t even keep the house warm.

Making the Educated Choice

This lovingly maintained 1840s home in Belfast, Maine was cold – even when the homeowners spent a fortune trying to heat it – and complicated – especially in the cellar, where many of the comfort and efficiency problems originated.

Combatting the Elements for Comfort & Savings

John had been living with a cold house and high energy bills for so long that it felt normal, but when he heard about Efficiency Maine’s rebate program, he decided to call. “In Maine, anything we can do to combat the elements is worthwhile,” says John, “so I figured it would be worth looking into.”

Cutting Costs and Improving Health

This Greek Revival home in Belfast, Maine was built in 1842. Even with the thermostat set at a moderate level, it took 1500 gallons of oil, 150 gallons of propane, and “a whole lot of money” to heat the place. There were shallow puddles in the basement whenever it rained hard, which of course encouraged black mold.

Financing Comfort and Efficiency

This 1900 Gable-front home in sits on an acre of land in the middle of Camden, Maine. Burning 3 cords of wood and 550 gallons of propane kept the 1430 sq ft mostly warm, though some rooms were freezing while others boiled. Plus, “a furnace that ran all the time to heat the water” wasted much of that energy.

Treating a Tricky Gambrel Roof

When Diane and her father built this house in the 1970s, they used state-of-the-art materials for that time and built with efficiency in mind. But over time, things that had been tight weren’t so tight anymore. It took four cords of wood to keep the house warm, and they often had to stoke the fire in the middle of the night.

Turning a Full-time Project into a Cozy Home

The basement of this 1835 Rockland, Maine home was something else. There was the 70 year-old woodstove – “it heated the cellar really well, and eventually some of that heat filtered upstairs” – and the coal boiler fueling a DIY radiant heat system. There was also water – almost a foot of it several times a year, soaking the five cords of wood that had to be lugged inside in the fall. The furnace had to be stoked six times a day.