Program makes homes efficient

Dan and Teresa McCann’s 100-year-old home in the South Perry neighborhood was like a lot of old houses.

The furnace was a couple of decades old. They had a “little cheapy” water heater, Dan McCann said. Air flowed around windows and doors and through cracks in the foundation.

So when a team from SustainableWorks – a new program that aims to help homeowners make their homes more energy efficient – stopped by, the McCanns were interested.

“We just thought, ‘Great, you know, make our house more efficient,’ ” said Dan McCann, a 58-year-old building services supervisor for the Nordstrom Rack.

The couple were among the first participants in the program, which is set to expand to hundreds of homes in the South Perry neighborhood. With help from a federal stimulus grant, SustainableWorks aims to help around 600 homeowners lower their bills and reduce their carbon footprint, while providing jobs and building an infrastructure to support further work in efficient homes.

The program also seeks to capitalize on utility rebates and tax incentives to bring down costs for homeowners and to offer low-cost financing for projects. The goal is to cut energy bills enough to cover the cost of financing the work, so it’s a wash for the homeowner.

SustainableWorks is a statewide nonprofit that grew out of the Spokane Alliance and the Sound Alliance, which are coalitions of educational, religious and labor organizations in the state. The agency received $4 million in stimulus funds in October; about a third of that is targeted for Spokane.

Wim Mauldin, lead organizer for the Spokane Alliance, said the financing has allowed the organization to hire a couple of staffers and begin meeting with more homeowners. SustainableWorks has hosted a couple of public meetings and now is holding small gatherings in homes around the neighborhood.

Homeowners who are interested give the agency permission to examine their Avista records. Those whose homes can most benefit go through extensive energy audits. If the homes can save enough through a “retrofit” to make financial sense, the work goes forward.

“We’re expecting to start energy audits in December and retrofits in January,” Mauldin said. “When it’s cold like this, people start thinking about their energy bills more.”

The McCanns had the work on their home done in September as one of six pilot projects. They paid for the work themselves, spending about $4,500 for a new furnace, water heater, weather-sealing around windows, doors and vents, and other work. They expect to save about $2,000 in Avista rebates and tax credits.

They also like SustainableWorks for its other goals: cutting the city’s overall carbon emissions, providing prevailing-wage jobs, and helping struggling homeowners cover the costs of a greener home.

“It was such a win-win deal,” Teresa McCann said in a presentation on the program in October, “bringing together labor, faith and education groups for the common good of this neighborhood and hopefully others in Spokane.”

Mauldin said the group’s goal is to expand beyond South Perry.

“We’re hoping we’ll be able to attract funding so we can enlarge the process considerably and go to more than one neighborhood,” he said.