The best things in life come right to your front door.Last Friday I was bemoaning having to pick up firewood and put up plastic insulation on my gossamer single-panel windows before any more of the winter entered the living room of my drafty adobe house.
Fortunately, I did none of the above and, at the same time Saturday morning as a woman showed up at my door with a truckload of wood to sell, I found an EnergyWorks flier on my doorknob. The flier proposed that a crew come to my house, free of charge, and install an "energy saving kit." Nice.
According to The Housing Trust's website (EnergyWorks is a Housing Trust program):
EnergyWorks is an integrated residential home energy efficiency pilot program that combines green job training, workforce development, low-cost energy savings installation and youth educational components to address multiple pressing community needs. The primary structure of the program is based around an energy audit and a regime of energy saving items under $100 that is installed in around 2 hours by a three-person crew of green jobs interns, at no cost to the homeowner.
According to The Housing Trust's resource development manager, Daniel Werwath, EnergyWorks—which works in conjunction with YouthWorks, among other organizations—is canvassing in areas of "low and moderate income." Its teams have already worked on at least 150 homes. Werwath says the program, still in its "pilot stage," recently received a $60,000 grant through YouthWorks from the Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Part of that grant will go to install energy efficiency kits on 250 Santa Fe homes.
That makes me approximately lucky No. 175. Quickly after leaving a message with EnergyWorks Monday morning, I got a call from the program's Javier, who set me up with an appointment later this week to have the crew install weather stripping, compact fluorescent light bulbs, hot water heater insulation, window caulk, low-flow shower heads (my environmentalism can only go so far...) and so on—all so I can stop freezing to death and single-handedly destroying the planet with my inefficient old home.
I'll update this post next week, after the crew stops by, to see how much more than free this program is worth. In the meantime, call 470-5892 to set up your own appointment.
