Weatherization Challenges

Why not do both? We can more efficiently deploy our weatherization dollars and more efficiently identify energy thieves, using the same fully integrated, bench-marking, high resolution, ortho-rectified, fully integrated aerial infrared images and analyses to improve the efficiency of the Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP), reduce costs of the planned “expenditures” per house, and look for natural gas theft at the same time.

Sometimes improvements do not have to be an “either or” proposition. Many, including President Obama and T. Boone Pickens, are pushing to reduce our dependency on foreign oil. The question remains “How?” and here is one answer. (Read more…)

Optimally spend weatherization funding where it matters most, and
Minimize Weatherization Fraud

According to the Weatherization Assistance program Website of the US Department of Energy (DOE), the energy used in the typical low income household is shown in Figure 1. Let’s assume that a typical annual electric bill is $800 per year and a typical annual gas [...]

Figures 1, 2, and 3 are three different aerial infrared enhancements of some actual homes in Boston taken in December 2009.
Many roofs of buildings are partially coupled thermally to the heat loss from the buildings!
The aerial infrared survey was conducted during the middle of a cold night.  The building roofs with the best thermal decoupling [...]

A. Two Verifiable Metrics to Monitor Actual Weatherization Effectiveness
There are only two verifiable metrics to monitor the effectiveness of weatherization improvements:

Conducting aerial infrared surveys before and after weatherization efforts and normalizing those surveys to seasonal temperature variations, and
Comparing the normalized weighted total of all energy bills before and after any weatherization efforts.

We do not believe [...]