AUGUSTA — John Morrison and his crew spend their days tightening up Maine homes, adding insulation, sealing leaks and generally making the state’s older buildings work more efficiently.
With Maine’s cold winters and increasingly hotter summers, efficiency is providing a huge payback, he said.
“If you own a home and your heating bills seem high, it’s good to contact one of us guys,” Morrison said. “You can have a beautiful home, but if you’re paying double for the heat, that’s not good. You can save $10,000 to $20,000 in a 10-year span. That’s a lot of money.”
Morrison’s Auburn-based Weatherize Northeast is one of many companies in Maine carrying out the type of work the state wants to see: households reducing energy consumption and costs.
With the ongoing government shutdown, Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) and the Energy Crisis Intervention Program funds may not come by early November as scheduled. The programs were a lifeline during last year’s mild winter, yielding $18.6 million in assistance spread over more than 38,000 households in Maine.
Homes that the state is eyeing for improved efficiency — many of the 260,000 built before 1960 among them — rely on these funds to make it through the winter.
Created this summer out of the former Governor’s Energy Office, the Maine Department of Energy Resources leads energy policy, planning and development for Maine. It also serves as a hub for programs helping households cut energy use and costs. Among those partners is Efficiency Maine, an independent and quasi-state agency which plans and implements energy efficiency programs. Efficiency Maine also provides rebates and loans for home updates.
The most common upgrades with the greatest returns are heat pumps, insulation projects and heat pump water heaters, said Michael Stoddard, executive director for Efficiency Maine. Smaller homes usually see faster paybacks. Houses in poor condition, especially those with little existing insulation, yield the biggest improvements, he said.
For low-income households, the trust covers up to 80% of insulation and air sealing costs, capped at $8,000, while moderate- and general-income households qualify for smaller rebates. To help with upfront costs, the agency offers home energy loans up to $7,500 over 10 years at interest rates as low as 5.99%.
While many balk at the estimates of buttoning up their home, professionals like Morrison show them what they may be able to save year-to-year just by getting the work done. Along with the rebates, which have been putting a dent in the high cost of making a home energy efficient, many come around to the commitment, Morrison said.
Modeled examples in the program’s materials show that a $6,800 insulation project could pay for itself in about four years, or as quickly as 2.8 years in some scenarios.
Efficiency Maine rebated 5,539 whole-home heat pumps in 2025, including more than 3,100 for moderate-income and nearly 2,400 for low-income households. Just over 10,000 low- and moderate-income households participate in Efficiency Maine programs each year and participation has roughly doubled since 2020, when 1,250 weatherization projects were supported. By 2024 participation increased to 2,900 projects.
The state, which reached its goal of 100,000 heat pump installations by 2023, recommitted itself to installing another 175,000 units by 2027.
“We’ve seen this happen over the past 10 years, and I’m sure it will continue for the next 10 years: We have consistently seen these investments in heat pumps and in home weatherization to be cost-effective,” Stoddard said. “They have come out cost-effective every time.”
Stoddard said models are informed by real-world data. Periodically going out into the field and putting measuring devices on installed equipment, contractors are able to create near real-time models to show homeowners and prospective customers how much energy is being used or saved.
Morrison, who sees both sides of the equation almost daily, said the state could go even further by concentrating assistance on weatherization before heating system upgrades.
“It saves for everybody, even if people are getting oil assistance,” Morrison said. “It’s great, but if (the state) is assisting with a house that’s not insulated, they’re basically throwing the money away. So, they’ve got to start somewhere, I think … A lot of people say, ‘Oh, I’m going to save money, I’m going to put in a propane heater or mini-splits,’ but if the house isn’t properly insulated, it’s not really that effective.”
While contractors are focusing on tightening existing homes, the state has been tightening building standards for new ones.
The Maine Department of Energy Resources pointed to the Maine Uniform Building and Energy Code, which was updated in April to strengthen energy performance standards statewide.
However, some weatherization projects do not count as renovations and may not need permitting held to the department’s standards. The department helped guide the revisions by providing technical expertise and policy input, while the Office of State Fire Marshal oversaw adoption and enforcement.
Beginning April 7, all new residential and commercial construction in towns with over 4,000 residents must meet the updated code, which is designed to improve insulation, ventilation and indoor air quality.
Smaller towns can opt in and some already have. According to the Maine Office of Community Affairs, around a dozen towns with 4,000 or fewer people have decided to adopt the code, the Penobscot County town of Holden and Chebeague Island among them.
The state has invested heavily in helping municipalities and builders understand the changes, said Jackie Farwell, interim spokesperson for the community affairs office.
“As with any new standard, municipalities want to know what’s different and how to implement it,” she said. “It takes time for local building officials to come up to speed, which is why we offer training for code enforcement officers and other industry professionals.”
Payoffs following the new standards could be substantial, according to state and federal estimates, saving homeowners nearly $1,000 in the first year, with an average lifetime savings of nearly $24,000. The payback period, or the time it takes for energy savings to offset the cost of improvements, for most Maine homes, is about 4.5 years. Farwell said the updates also aim to improve safety, indoor air quality and resilience to extreme weather.
The Office of State Fire Marshal and partners have held over 40 training sessions across the state since late last year, from Waterville and Brewer to Greenville, Machias and Portland, Farwell said. Many courses were delivered by passivhausMAINE and funded through the Clean Energy Partnership.
PassivhausMAINE is helping people understand baseline standards, but is also working toward raising the ceiling, going beyond regulatory compliance. Naomi Beal, of passivhausMAINE, said the organization’s work isn’t just about meeting technical standards; it’s about community integration and practical implementation.
The scaling of retrofits for any income bracket requires being integrated in the community, Beal said. It requires being a partner with local community services groups that have connections with people who might qualify for extra help, or those who might already be known to the community as needing help.
“That’s been a really interesting part of our work because, in the early days, we were really just talking to architects and builders and engineers, and not working on that community level,” Beal said. “But with the retrofits, it’s really imperative to work closely with the communities and gain that trust. Part of our work is also in training local people to do the retrofit work and to do the health and safety work.”
Maine’s housing stock is, on average, the oldest in the country, according to data shared by the Maine Monitor, with most of the homes having insufficient insulation and outdated heating systems. Some 35% of homes in Maine were built before the 1960s and 70% before 1990.
Morrison said anything prior to the 1980s that hasn’t seen an upgrade is almost guaranteed to have poor insulation.
Efficiency Maine plans to extend its programs over the next three years under its Triennial Plan VI, which was approved by the Maine Public Utilities Commission in April.
The plan calls for 9,900 homes to be weatherized — including 1,500 low-income, 1,800 moderate-income, and 6,600 all-income homes — and for 38,000 homes to be fully heated with heat pumps. Some 6,500 of those homes would be low-income units.
The plan carries a proposed $529.3 million budget and forecasts $492 million in avoided electricity costs statewide over time. It also commits $186 million to low-income programs, over double the $85 million in the previous triennial plan.
For Morrison, the new rules and programs are mostly working as intended. Aside from insulation standards that he believes are higher than necessary, he said the codes are ensuring new homes will stand the test of time.
As for older houses, especially those from the 1990s and earlier, a 30-minute walkthrough is often all a contractor needs to let a homeowner know how efficient their home is at keeping comfortable living temperatures.
“All I have to do is stick my head up in your attic and I can tell you exactly what the issues are: if it needs proper venting, air sealing, more insulation, and so on,” Morrison said.
His experience has taught him that many homeowners, whether they’re building new or buying an older home, mistakenly focus on aesthetics instead of the long-term, ongoing costs. “Because,” he said, “that’s what hurts people in the end.”
