Climate Connections: Home upgrade hub supports residents
Callye Foster
When it comes to climate solutions, it often makes sense to start at home. Here in Missoula, over half of our community’s climate pollution comes from energy use in our homes and buildings. That means there’s a lot of room for improvement.
Understanding how your home functions as a system is key to planning upgrades, but every home is unique. Where to begin?
Enter Missoula County’s Home Upgrade Hub, a new initiative to support residents in improving the health and efficiency of homes. Housed within Missoula County’s Department of Ecology & Extension, the Hub officially opened its doors to the public this winter.
The Hub is Missoula County’s “Resource for Healthy and Efficient Homes,” with a mission to guide and educate homeowners and renters on how to retrofit their space to improve indoor air quality and comfort and to save energy and money.
The Home Upgrade Hub has five goals:
- Provide customized, whole-home planning (including connections to funding and financing opportunities) to help residents improve efficiency and indoor air quality, leading to healthier and safer homes.
- Substantially reduce the reliance on fossil fuels within all homes in Missoula County by helping people switch to energy-efficient electric appliances like heat pumps, and offering resources around climate resilient landscaping.
- Educate residents and contractors about clean energy solutions for home improvement.
- Eliminate disproportionate energy burdens for low-income and rural residents, inclusive of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities.
- Support the just transition to local renewable energy.
Funded by a one million dollar grant through the Environmental Protection Agency, The Hub hopes to support approximately 250 residents in 2025, host over a dozen public educational events, and continue to gather momentum with the help of our six project partners: All Nations Health Center, Clearwater Credit Union, Climate Smart Missoula, Human Resource Council, NeighborWorks Montana, City of Missoula, and Missoula County.
The Home Upgrade Hub stems from a years-long community need for a centralized “one-stop-shop” where anyone can seek help navigating the plethora of information on energy-efficient appliances, tax credits and incentives, local contractors and installers, and how to plan a home retrofit project.
The creation of The Hub also stems from local data that highlights a projected wave of home upgrades coming down the pike.
An analysis of Missoula County’s housing stock shows that:
- Over half of local homes were built before 1980; 24% were built between 1980-1999; and the remaining 23% were built after 2000.
- According to the Department of Energy’s LEAD tool, most of the owner-occupied housing is heavily concentrated in single family homes (78%), while renter-occupied housing is heavily concentrated in multi-family buildings.
- Finally, 42% of households in Missoula County live at or below 80% of the Area Medium Income.
These statistics indicate that a significant portion of households will need to invest in appliance replacement, building envelope improvements and regular maintenance in the coming years, and that most residents will be eligible for financial support to make those upgrades more efficient through available grants, local rebates and federal tax incentives.
Investing in building efficiency at the onset will help keep Missoulians’ homes more affordable, and we have plentiful data linking efficient electric appliances with better indoor air quality and resident health. (Learn more about electrification and home health at our partner website ElectrifyMissoula.org.)
Crucially, The Hub also supports our community climate goals by helping lower local emissions. Data provided by the City of Missoula shows that 23% of local emissions come from methane gas use in buildings (methane is the primary ingredient in natural gas).
When it first enters the atmosphere, methane traps significantly more heat than carbon dioxide: the comparative impact of methane is 80 times greater than CO2. In order to avoid catastrophic climate warming, we must address and lower our use of methane. The best way to do this as an individual is to phase out natural-gas powered appliances in your home and replace them with efficient electric versions. And we’re ready to help!
The Home Upgrade Hub invites you to utilize our services to analyze your home’s energy sources, consumption trends, housing envelope, and overall energy needs to sustain your lifestyle. We’re ready to walk you through your next home project, offering tools to improve your comfort, indoor air quality, and level of resilience inside and outside your home.
Ready to learn more? Sign up for our first four-part workshop series, Planning a Home Energy Efficiency Retrofit, happening each Thursday in March from 5:30 – 7pm at the G.W. Marks Exploration Center at the Missoula County Fairgrounds.
Topics covered include:
- Session 1, March 6: Assessing & Analyzing your Home’s Energy Use
- Session 2, March 13: Retrofit Planning Basics
- Session 3, March 20: Create Your Home Retrofit Budget
- Session 4, March 27: Low Hanging Fruit: Your Home’s Building Envelope
Join for one or all four, and stay tuned for future events and opportunities. You can also visit us in-person any time and meet Callye Foster, the Home Resiliency Educator, and Corey Dadds, the Home Energy Retrofit Project Manager.
Learn more, schedule a visit, or register for the upcoming workshop series at https://missoulaeduplace.org/what-we-do/home-upgrade-hub
Callye Foster is the Home Resiliency Educator at the Home Upgrade Hub, under Missoula County Ecology and Extension. Climate Smart Missoula brings this Climate Connections column to you twice per month. Learn more about our work and sign up for our e-newsletter at missoulaclimate.org