A conversation with Efficiency Maine Ductless heat pumps are one of the most popular technologies for highly efficient heating in cold climates. More than 20,000 high-efficiency ductless heat pumps have been installed in Maine homes and businesses in the past three years. We sat down with Efficiency Maine program managers Dana Fischer and Andy Meyer…
By Heather Chandler THE LED (OR LIGHT emitting diode) bulb is a relatively new entry to the lighting scene, but one that many say has the power to transform the lighting industry with its energy efficient technology. While even just a few years ago, LEDs were unfavorable to some because of the “cool” blueish light…
By Tim King CONSIDERED BY SOME to be something of a novelty just a few short years ago, today there are more than 20,000 heat pumps in use in homes and businesses throughout Maine. While it may be hard for some of us to understand exactly how they extract heat from cold air, there’s no…
By Barry Woods I’VE BEEN AN UNREPENTANT advocate of plug in electric vehicles since 2009. It was then that I realized these cars, and their improbably elegant marriage of clean energy, battery storage and transportation, could heal many of our accumulated social, environmental and economic ills. When I leased my first Nissan LEAF in 2011,…
By Tim King DON’T LET THE name fool you – there’s nothing passive about constructing a high performance building worthy of passive house certification. In fact, achieving what many consider to be the pinnacle of building energy standards requires a substantial amount of activity – before, during and after construction is completed. The payoff, however,…
Considering an electric vehicle for your next car? With recent advances in battery technology and range, affordable lease options, and growing choice in make and models, electric vehicles are quickly becoming a viable option for drivers in Maine. Wondering where you can charge up? Here’s a partial list, current as of April 2019. Check back…
By Heather Chandler & Chris Briley There are a lot of loosely defined terms used to describe how “green” a house is. Luckily some professionals in our industry have worked very hard to find ways to quantify this almost intangible quality, and in so doing, have generated new nomenclature that can often sound foreign to those outside the industry. LEED, for example,…
Editor’s Note: The submissions for homes featured in this post came from home owners, builders, architects and renewable energy professionals across the state. We reviewed data for all of the submissions received and selected the five homes that you will see featured in these pages. As you will see, they represent a diversity of size,…
By Tim King They sure don’t build homes like they used to. And, if you speak with a growing number of Maine home builders, designers and architects, that’s a good thing. Blame it on our high fuel costs, cold climate, old housing stock or increasing awareness about the correlation between energy consumption and climate change,…
By Tux Turkel Going solar wasn’t a big stretch for Serena Graham. She grew up in an environmentally-aware family, with a father and two cousins who had solar-electric panels. So when she and her husband bought a 1962-built house in Waterville, they insulated and air-sealed and dumped oil heat fora wood pellet boiler. They replaced power-hungry lights with LEDs, to…