Grateful

We have suffered our last night without heat, yippee! This morning it is -12 and I am having a new furnace installed as I speak/type this. The dogs had us up during the night as they were cold, against my better judgement I obliged by turning on a small heater and letting it run near there kennels, I know that it wasn't safe but it was really cold!
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Our saving grace through all of this was that the State of Alaska has a weatherization/home energy rebate program. The state set aside a good chunk of money for homeowners to make qualified upgrades to there home to increase the efficiency. The current wait list is over six thousand homes in the city of Anchorage. Anchorage has 6-7 energy raters with each of them able to rate up to 300 homes in a year (the rating takes 4 hrs per home). When we lost heat last week I called the AK housing corporation to get on the wait list, not realizing how long it was, and I ended up speaking to a nice man (obviously high up in the program as he authorized me on the phone), who bumped me to the top of the list since I was without heat. An energy rater visited our home on Saturday and was able to have our paperwork to us on the spot via his portable office, this I sent in on Monday and could finally get a furnace installed.
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The way the program works is through a point system. The standard home rates at a 4 stars with newer construction homes coming in around 5 stars. I am sad to say that our current home rating was a 1 Star plus, how depressing! The program pays you a higher amount for the repairs based on how many stars you increase your rating, so our furnace won't be covered 100% but any assistance is better than having to cover it completely out of pocket. Besides the need for a new furnace we found out that there is NO insulation in the crawl space and we have massive drafting issues around the outer walls of the home, and our current windows offer no insulation value as they are original to the home and it was built in 1983. The good news is that making even half of the improvements will at least double our efficiency.
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aaaYikes, 1 Star Plus

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aaaBlower door test

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aaaOut with the old

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aaaIn with the new

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I snuck a quick shot of the new furnace being installed, the installation tech still has a lot of work to do as he has to cut an access into our attic to attach new duct work for city code compliance.

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