HEET Has Help For Non-Profits To Lower Energy Bills

Are you running your operation in a cold, old building?  Or, are you concerned about your high heating and electric costs?

The Keweenaw Community Foundation (KCF), partnering with the Houghton Energy Efficiency Team (HEET), has been awarded a grant from the Mott Foundation that brings support to Houghton and Keweenaw 501c3s.

The project starts with an energy assessment to determine the needs of the structure. Your initial role is to provide 1-year previous-improvement utility bills, and 1-year post-improvement utility bills.

Please note: while they anticipate more need than allocated funds, one use for this data is to quantify need for future grant submissions targeted at obtaining more support.

HEET will work with you and Efficiency United to schedule a walk-through to assess the ways that electricity and heat can be saved. The assessment provides a list of measures that can be taken, itemized by cost-saving and least expensive to more expensive, long-term possible replacements (such as HVAC equipment). Efficiency United will also point you to rebates that will help offset the cost to you as you start to consider electrical retrofits.

With these assessments, they can adopt a strategy for each project that will be most effective. The assessments will also help to analyze levels of need and prioritize from that.

In an effort to make the energy efficiency funds go to their farthest, they have designed a thermal improvement component that leverages your volunteers with our training, materials and tools.

Performing thermal upgrades (those measures that prevent heat loss) is expensive if you pay a contractor to do the job. But, the actual work is not too complicated. It is time-consuming. The majority of the cost for a project is in labor costs. The materials are not too expensive, but it is quite an allocation to purchase all of the needed tools.

They are able to provide the materials, tools, instruction and (quite a bit!) of hands on help, but the success of the program relies upon your nonprofit to rally volunteers to sustain the push until it is completed.

Their experience has shown that the best way to do this is to work for three-hour windows.  They can work with you to find out what times best fit with your schedule.

After their work is complete and you have made chosen upgrades, they will continue to collect your utility data for a year to quantify the dollars saved through the investment. They will work to make it easy – with an online form that we remind you about on a monthly basis.

If you are interested, please sign up by clicking here or contact them by July 15.