Pat Flint of East Providence didn’t sleep in her bed much last winter. Despite a heating bill that approached $200 a month, her bedroom got so cold at night she often had to sleep on the living room couch.
Then Flint, 42, noticed a phone number to call for heating assistance on the back of her gas bill. A single mother of two just managing to make ends meet as a hospital worker, she called the number not expecting much.
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Energy auditors from the East Providence nonprofit community group Self Help arrived at her neat Riverside home last summer. They found a crawl space under Flint’s bedroom with no insulation and a potentially lethal level of carbon monoxide fumes from the furnace.
Crews took care of those problems as well as adding nine-inches of insulation to the attic and blowing insulation into the walls of the roughly 60-year-old house. The work took a day and a half, and the $2,100 price tag was picked up by the State Energy Office.
”I thought they just came and told you what to fix,” Flint recalled last week, standing in her toasty living room. “When I found out that they paid for the work, I was floored.”
Flint’s home is one of more than 800 Rhode Island houses winterized last year under a U.S. Department of Energy program administered by the State Energy Office and a network of local community action groups.
U.S. Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson and U.S. Sen. Jack Reed last month announced a $685,000 grant for the program while touring a Providence house that was getting the weatherization treatment.
National studies indicate that families of modest means spend 14 percent of their annual income on energy, while other households generally spend less than 4 percent of their income on energy bills.
“The least energy efficient homes are certainly the low-income homes,” agreed Ralph Groves, a weatherization specialist for the State Energy Office. That’s because they are typically older houses and the owners can’t afford weatherize them.
But the owners of homes that have been weatherized through the program save a third on their energy bills on average, according to a national study including Rhode Island conducted by Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1996. The nearly 26,000 homes that have been weatherized in Rhode Island under the program since it began in 1976 have saved the equivalent of 52 million barrels of heating oil.
Flint’s savings so far appear to be even better than the national average.
In fact, her house was so warm during a cold snap in December, Flint was afraid to open her gas bill for the month. She expected to see to see triple digits. But the gas bill came to $92, about half what it had been last December when she had to sleep on the couch.
Self Help’s Melinda Marshall, an energy auditor, expects Flint to save $500 a year on heating costs and another $100 a year on her electric bill thanks to the weatherization and energy-saving work.
Flint, who used to have to crank the thermostat up to 72 degrees just to knock the chill out of the air, couldn’t be happier.
“That couch is not that comfortable,” she said, pointing an accusing finger at the worn piece of furniture. “If we would have had a really cold winter, I don’t know what I would have done.”
Community action groups such as Self Help take applications for weatherization assistance and verify eligibility, which is limited by income. A family of four, for example, would qualify for the program if its annual household income was less than $28,790.
Federal funding for the program was cut in half in 1995, which has reduced the number of weatherization jobs that the State Energy Office can do in a year to about 800. There are about 3,000 homes across the state on the waiting list.
Homeowners on the bottom of the waiting list in Providence can expect to wait as long as a year, Program Director Michael Snitzer said.
“This is a program with a savings ratio of $2.39 for each dollar spent. Show me another government program with that,” Snitzer said from behind the wheel of his Jeep in East Providence. “But, you know, there are different priorities in Washington. It gets harder and harder every year. Every year is a struggle to get funding.”
The $685,000-grant announced last month to fund the program beginning in April is essentially the same amount Rhode Island received from the energy department last year.
Providence Gas Co. also has been providing $200,000 a year to the program as part of a settlement agreement worked out between the utility, regulators and advocates for the poor in 1997. ProvGas’ three-year commitment to the program expires in October 2000, and it’s not clear yet whether the company will continue its support of the program beyond then.
“It’s hard to speculate at this point,” ProvEnergy spokeswoman Judi Iwanski said.
She said ProvGas is currently studying its options for working with community groups and will submit a plan to the state Public Utilities Commission later this year.
“We hope they are going to continue,” Groves said, “because this is a very valuable program.”
