Home Star

In the final stages of its tortuous path through the House and Senate, the details of the 6 billion dollar Home Star program have become mostly clear.  In a nutshell, Home Star is a federal job creation stimulus fund that presumably will create jobs by making home energy retrofits and improvements more affordable to homeowners.  Though the details are still being worked out as of this writing, it will do this by providing strong, short-term homeowner incentives for air sealing, insulation improvements, new appliances, and possibly other improvements.  This will be a win-win for our economy: one estimate is that it will create 168,000 new construction related jobs while reducing the energy use and utility bills of homeowners who take advantage of the Home Star rebates. There are two main incentive tracks to choose from, named  the Gold Star and the Silver Star.

The Silver Star incentive track is a direct payment for the purchase and installation of certain proscribed items: insulation, high efficiency furnaces and hot water heaters, and other measures that directly reduce residential energy use.  These payments are based only on the appliance or installed measure, require a proof of purchase or invoice of the installation, and pay up to 50% of the cost of each measure up to a max of $3000.

The Gold Star is a performance based incentive, requiring a full energy audit prior to any work being done and then a test-out afterwards to quantify the improvements.  It pays up to $3000 for demonstrated improvements in energy efficiency of 20%, determined by the modeled difference between the test-in and the test-out.  For the homeowner who wishes to go further, the Gold Star track pays a further $1000 for each additional 5% of modeled energy savings up to a total of $8000 or 50% of the cost, whichever is less.  Being performance based, this track will push homeowners towards measures that offer the biggest bang for the buck; these are often the more labor intensive ones such as air sealing, crawlspace measures, and insulation improvements.  The contractors who perform the improvements must be licensed and specially certified, so you can't claim the Gold Star rebates if installed by your uncle Joe the plumber. 

As you can see, the Gold Star track has higher requirements including tested numbers that show (at least as far as the modeling software can) the expected energy savings. It also has the possibility of higher payouts.  The Silver Star track is available to any homeowner and *may* even be available at the point of sale for certain energy saving purchases.  Homeowners who buy and install measures themselves can only claim the cost of the merchandise towards Home Star rebates, while those who pay a contractor to buy and install can use the total contractor invoice when claiming rebates.

Home Star has a planned roll out of this month - April - so stay tuned.  Hopefully, homeowners will realize monthly cost savings immediately.  I'll let you know as soon as I hear.