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Testimonials from our Customers
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More comments from our customers:
Judith A. Martin
Principal
Green Home Consulting, LLC
Hi, Joe,
Ok, so I've had to re-program my thermostats to lower temperatures and shorter heating cycles because the air sealing and attic insulation have made such a difference, even in my leaky old home. I don't usually look forward to getting utility bills but I will be very interested to see the change compared to the same period last year. I'll let you know!!
I've been very busy spreading the word at various Earth Day events, especially on behalf of Westchester County. High performance insulation and air sealing are always first on my list of actions to take.
Judy
Connecticut Post
July 8, 2009
Green Star joins home-energy program
By Sandra Diamond Fox, special correspondent
BROOKFIELD, CT -- Although it may be hard to think about heating your home at the beginning of summer, now is the perfect time of year to do that, said John Mazur, co-owner of Green Star Energy Solutions in Brookfield.
The two-year-old business, which has a second location in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y., provides home energy audits, insulation improvements, duct sealing and air sealing to homes throughout western Connecticut and the lower Hudson Valley in New York.
Green Star recently became part of the Home Energy Solutions program, designed to help state residents make their homes more energy efficient.
The program is now open to all Connecticut Light & Power customers, and sponsored by the Connecticut Energy Efficiency Fund. The Home Energy Solutions program has been available since May to customers of the United Illuminating Co. in the Bridgeport and New Haven areas.
 For $75, a Building Performance Institute specialist will perform a complete in-house energy assessment. This includes on-site diagnostic tests to detect drafts and air leaks, appliance safety, lighting efficiency and installing hot-water conservation measures.
After the inspection and energy improvement work, the specialist will provide a wrap-up session on ways to make the customer's home more energy efficient.
Customers also will be provided with rebates for needed Energy Star appliances, heating and cooling systems and insulation improvements, which can amount to thousands of dollars in extra savings, said Joe Novella of Danbury, who owns the business with Mazur. 
"This program is at least a $1,000 value," said Mazur, of Brookfield. Mazur and Novella are professionally certified building analysts with more than 25 years experience in the industry.
"The customer is under no obligation to use us to perform any additional conservation services their home may need. Our goal with this program is to give the homeowner a good first step towards making their home energy efficient," Novella said.
He said that summer is the best time to enroll in the program because it will get booked up as the colder weather approaches.
"Green Star specialists spent over five hours in my home," Easton resident Michael Wolf said. "They sealed areas where drafts and leaks are coming in, provided me with energy-efficient light bulbs and shower heads that conserve water, and made recommendations that would double the efficiency of my air-conditioning unit.
"I was very impressed with their knowledge and work ethic."
For more information on Green Star Energy Solutions' Home Energy Solutions program, call (877) 275-8770 or visit www.gogreenstar.com.
Brookfield firm audits homes for savings
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Shabnam Mogharabi,
Hanley-Wood MFE
Editor
This is a story about how insulation saved the day. Last year, one of our contributing writers, Jennifer Popovec, was researching products made from recycled materials for the Product Studio section of MULITFAMILY EXECUTIVE. During her search, she came across an insulation product made of recycled newspapers.
Jennifer was so intrigued by the product that she called the manufacturer, Applegate Insulation, and solicited a bid. She ended up buying and installing the product at her historic home in Fort Worth, Texas, and immediately noticed a drop in her electricity bills.
Great news, right? It gets better. A few months later, the city was hit with terrible thunderstorms. Lightning struck Jennifer’s house and traveled through her satellite dish and into the attic, which immediately caught on fire. The insulation, unbeknownst to Jennifer, happened to be a fire retardant-it literally fizzled out the fire and saved her Prairie-style home.
Energy-Tuning Your Home
Audits can detect leaks, suggest fixes
January 19, 2008; Page W1
Five days ago, I got audited.
A man arrived on my doorstep, notebook in hand, and for three hours inspected every room of my house. He asked about my electric bills and scrutinized my home office. But it wasn't tax-filing flaws he sought -- it was fissures in my insulation, doors and window frames. My visitor was a professional energy auditor. His mission: to find my home's inefficiencies and lower my heating and electric bills.
 While energy audits have been conducted for decades, often through utilities, many were free, eyeball-only inspections that noted basic woes (the need for more attic insulation) but didn't go much further. In today's world of costly heating and cooling bills, along with carbon-footprint consciousness, there is a fast-growing industry of analysts wielding high-tech tools such as infrared cameras. They produce comprehensive reports on a home's energy efficiency, along with suggested fixes and contractors.
Unfortunately, that information doesn't come cheaply -- typically, $300 to $700, though aid often is available for low-income homeowners and some utilities provide audits free. Plus, almost anyone can call himself an "energy auditor," making it tough to know who is legit. Some suggest products and services to fix energy flaws -- but don't always disclose that they have ties to the products' makers or sellers. That has sparked a push by two nonprofit groups to develop a single certification standard, to be announced this year, defining what these intensive audits should include as well as training and ethics criteria for the auditors.
"That's the challenge we are facing," says Claudia Brovic, a director with the Residential Energy Services Network (Resnet), one of the two nonprofits. Her group, along with the Building Performance Institute, help certify companies and individuals who offer energy audits, working closely with the Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Department of Energy. "People need to know what they are getting."
 Interest in home audits is rising in tandem with energy prices. Traffic has climbed 53% in the last year on the Energy Department's audit-information Web page, which gives links to reputable auditors. Resnet now has 3,000 certified raters, and Ms. Brovick says interest is "growing fast." One utility, Connecticut Light & Power Co., says that some 4,400 customers received audits last year, double the number in 2006. And many states and utilities make available financial incentives for energy upgrades. For instance, under the PA Home Energy project launched in August, residents of western and central Pennsylvania can get $200 to $1,000 for improvements that lower energy bills.
Auditing could become a year-round gig thanks to a movement to mandate audits during home sales. Last week, the Massachusetts Senate passed what could become the first state requirement that home sellers provide prospective buyers with an audit scoring the home's efficiency; several other states are mulling similar moves.
Realtor groups oppose the plans, saying they will slow home sales in a weak market. "There's a lot of momentum to have some type of rating done at the time of sale, and it's a very touchy issue," says David Lee of the Energy Star program, an initiative between the EPA and Energy Department.
For now, most consumers simply want to know whether it is worthwhile hiring an auditor. While you can find some of the most obvious air leaks yourself, the more advanced exams look at everything from appliance efficiency to potential health hazards like carbon monoxide. They also compute annual savings from suggested fixes. The energystar.gov site estimates that sealing air leaks and adding insulation, for instance, can reduce energy costs 10%.
For my part, I vaguely knew where problems lie in my 30-year-old, two-story house in rural New York: in a breezy entranceway and a long swath of glass doors. My annual cost of heating and electricity had leapt nearly $900 last year to about $3,500. But I wasn't sure of the cause or proper remedy. So I called in the pros.
My auditor, Chris Puleo, works for BPI-accredited Green Star Insulation in Danbury, Conn. Green Star sells cellulose insulation, which Mr. Puleo discloses on his business card. He calculated my home's interior volume in cubic feet, wrote down model numbers of my appliances and examined my heating system -- an oil boiler that pumps hot water through pipes along the floor.
The good news: Since I don't have an attic, recessed ceiling lights or an unfinished basement, and I don't have forced-air heat, which requires ducts, I lack several of the typically leakiest items. But my boiler is old, my industrial freezer guzzles kilowatts and costs about $200 a year to run (a surprise to me), and the hand-me-down washer/dryer set from my parents is horribly inefficient.
 Afterward, Mr. Puleo attached a fan contraption called a blower door to my front entrance; that pulled air out of the house, letting the higher outside air pressure flow through cracks. He marched around the interior with a smoke stick, which created white smoke that flickered around offending electrical outlets and windowsills. "This is mostly smoke and mirrors," he conceded. "I can walk in here and tell you most of what needs fixing, but it makes a good show for consumers." But the real "aha" came when Mr. Puleo's boss, Joe Novella, arrived with an infrared camera that produced thermographic images of warm and cold areas; it's a tool Energy Star recommends along with the blower door. Dark spots indicated where cold was creeping in: It turns out the metal frames of my sliding glass doors are terrible insulators -- a culprit I'd never considered. Both men had flagged this earlier, but seeing it in Technicolor drove the point home.
That night, Mr. Puleo emailed me a 27-page report recommending fixes, many of them costly -- replacing the boiler, buying new appliances and doors. All told, the upgrades totaled a whopping $45,289, which the report cheerfully noted would result in an annual greenhouse-gas reduction equivalent to not driving a car for 11.1 months.
Still, he pointed out cheaper ideas, like wedging a bat of mineral wool against my fireplace damper to quell drafts. And he gave me a short list of priority upgrades totaling $2,647 that would yield an estimated $578 in annual savings, such as sealing air leaks, tuning up my furnace, installing a programmable thermostat and replacing my clothes washer. The audit itself cost $299.
I'm glad for the new info about my house, and I'm already doing some of the simple solutions myself. Meantime, I'm hoping this is the only audit I will face this year.
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