Eco Dude: Meet Bedford’s energy coach

Bedford 2030 energy coach Bob Fischman.  DAVID POGUE PHOTO

By DAVID POGUE 

Have you heard about the Bedford program where a guy comes to your house and gives you money?

His name is Bob Fischman. And yeah, his job description does make an attention-grabbing opening sentence, but he really does come to your house and offer ways to get a little bit richer. For free.

Bob is Bedford 2030’s energy coach. Bedford 2030 is the town’s climate-change–fighting force. (I’m a new board member.)

As it turns out, we humans burn enough coal and oil each year to pump 37 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the air. (A metric ton is about the amount of gas needed to fill a hot-air balloon.) And buildings are responsible for about 40 percent of that. 

So if you’re a nonprofit, how do you go about reducing carbon pollution from people’s homes? I mean, Bedfordians are busy people. It’s asking a lot of them to make changes to their homes and routines for an environmental cause, especially when those changes cost time, money and research. You’ve got to make it attractive to them, and you’ve got to make it easy.

What Bedford 2030 came up with is “Bob Fischman.” He’s worked in this exact field, energy efficiency of buildings, his entire career, both for New York state and for his own consultancy. And now you can hire him as a consultant for your very own home — and get somebody else to pay for it. That’s right, Bedford 2030 pays for him to advise you.

My wife, Nicki, and I thought: Well, our house was fairly new when we bought it in 2021 (it was top-to-bottom renovated in 2019), so it should be in good energy shape. But what the hell — money’s money, energy’s energy, and Bob’s free. 

He came over last month. For two hours, he crawled through our crawlspace, flashlighted around in the attic, asked a lot of questions. Then he sat down with us to give us some ideas for cutting down our power use and saving money.

He said that our house is well ahead of the game, energy-wise. The whole place is beautifully sealed with spray-foam insulation, and solar panels are going up next week.

Detective Bob did, however, spot mouse droppings in our crawlspace. To you, maybe that’s gross. To him, they’re evidence that we have gaps in the house “envelope” (the sealed space that contains the heating and cooling). The mice didn’t especially care about our heat envelope, but they certainly were enjoying the cracks as entrances and exits. Find the cracks, seal them up, and boom: we solve both the mouse problem and the leak problem.

Bob had some bigger suggestions, too. Our house generates heat by burning propane, and propane is a fossil fuel, and you know what that means. So one relatively non-disruptive upgrade would be replacing the propane system with a heat pump. (After his visit, he sent over a detailed report, along with lists of rebate programs and vetted installers.)

So, heat pumps. You know how a refrigerator works, right? Its tubing contains a refrigerant — a liquid that can convert back and forth to a gas, absorbing or releasing heat each time. Your fridge pulls heat from inside your refrigerator and dumps it into your kitchen. It moves the heat from a colder place to a warmer one. 

A heat pump works the same way, except that your house is the fridge, and the great outdoors is the kitchen. In cold weather, the heat pump moves heat in the other direction, warming your house by extracting heat from the outside air. (The refrigerant evaporates at very low temperatures, so yes, it can extract heat even from cold winter air.)

A heat pump replaces both your furnace and your air conditioner. And because it just shuttles heat around instead of actually generating it, it can heat and cool your house for as little as a quarter of the cost.

Some heat pumps are those mini split things that you sometimes see high up on a home’s interior wall. They’re easy to install, because they don’t require air ducts. What Bob was suggesting, though, was one that would go in our crawlspace and connect to the existing ducts. 

He also said that if we really wanted to go whole hog, we could also look into a geothermal heat pump. These systems exploit the fact that underground, the temperature is fairly constant all yearlong. Run loops of water pipe down there, let a heat pump to harness its steady temperature, and boom: You get warmth in the winter and cooling in the summer, for free, with fantastic efficiency.

The up-front costs for geothermal are heart-quickening — they can be $100,000 or more. But Bob pointed out that the Inflation Reduction Act will be delighted to pay 30 percent of the cost (as a tax credit), and New York state will kick in thousands more. Eventually, you’ll recoup the rest of the investment through heating/cooling savings. 

Most of the homes Bob visits don’t require such exotic technology.

“People often jump at shiny objects like solar or heat pumps, but that’s a backwards approach,” he says. “Sealing out drafts is the most effective way of eliminating energy waste; number two is insulating effectively.”

Obviously, not everyone is as big a net-zero nerd as I am. The beauty of this whole energy-coach thing is that what you think doesn’t actually matter. Are you in it only for the power and money savings? Totally fine. The carbon-pollution aspect can be only a downstream side effect. I can live with that.

Bob has visited 330 Bedford homes since this whole thing started, and 40 percent of them have made changes based on his recommendations. The energy coach thing is working.

The Pogues are among them. We’re getting our leaks sealed and we’re shopping for heat pumps. (We also bought a no-kill mouse trap. We’ve now caught and released 10 mice.)

“The majority of houses around here are heated with oil, since there is no gas service in this corner of the state,” Bobs says. “People often don’t realize how poorly the house behaves, simply because they can always burn more of the stuff to try to keep warm. Once they better understand and start to look at the details, their eyes open up to the possibilities of lower energy bills and cleaner air.”

On Thursday, Jan. 23, at 7 p.m., David Pogue will appear at the Bedford Playhouse with a talk called “10 Reasons for Climate Hope … And Actions You Can Take Now.” Energy Coach Bob Fischman will be there, too, to answer your questions. Tickets are available at bedford2030.org or bedfordplayhouse.org.