Homeowner Decision Making and Behavior Relating to Deep Home Retrofits, Results of Homeowner Interviews.

摘要

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 retrofitsor 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. This behavioral study complements the technology-oriented deep-home retrofit study by providing a necessary linkage between technologies and their use. Neither the existence of energy-saving technologies nor the capability to achieve substantial energy savings automatically translate into homeowner action. Similarly, the research described in this report did not assume that homeowners decisions are determined by energy savings, monetary costs, or payback periods. Rather, it left open the questions of why homeowners undertake deep energy-saving retrofits, and why they may select some energy-saving measures and not others. This study starts to weave technology and action together by focusing on homeowners responses to the following three questions: What affects homeowners decisions; What do homeowners experience throughout what might be termed the retrofitting lifecycle; What do homeowners recommend for other homeowners; for contractors; for utilities and government agencies.