Homeowner Decision Making and Behavior Relating to Deep Home Retrofits
- Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
Existing homes present an enormous, largely untapped potential for energy savings. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), utilities, and other organizations around the country have launched many initiatives intended to achieve significant energy savings through home retrofits—or energy-saving home improvements. Retrofit programs vary in their specific objectives, the kind of homes or homeowners targeted, their approaches, the metrics for their “success,” and various measures of their effectiveness. Each initiative explicitly or implicitly reflects ideas or assumptions about “what it takes” for homeowners to participate in energy-saving retrofit programs, go through with audits, install recommended energy saving measures, and/or achieve desired or predicted energy savings. Yet, there is not enough research to identify with certainty the approaches likely to work best for a particular population in a particular setting. The interrelated tendencies to focus on actions homeowners take (e.g., via participation rates) and/or to make assumptions about homeowners’ motivations contributes to this knowledge gap. This report seeks to shrink this knowledge gap by focusing on homeowner decision making. In particular, it focuses on a set of homeowners who agreed to participate in a technical deep-home retrofit project wherein they would implement a variety of measures (at their own personal cost) and have the effectiveness of those measures monitored for a year after installation.
- Research Organization:
- Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC05-00OR22725
- OSTI ID:
- 1105920
- Report Number(s):
- ORNL/TM--2012/498; BT0101000; CEBT114
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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