It can be overwhelming to think about all the ways you might improve your home. There’s the long-planned kitchen renovation, the appliance upgrades — and oh, maybe solar panels on the roof.
But you probably don’t have unlimited time and money, so you have to prioritize which upgrades are most important to you. And if you’re renovating with the idea of sustainability in mind (increasing efficiency and reducing fossil-fuel use), it can be even harder to choose which projects make the most sense.
Thankfully, you don’t have to make all of those decisions alone. An online tool from the nonprofit Rewiring America, called the Personal Electrification Planner, can help you figure it out. It allows you to enter information about your home, and delivers personalized recommendations on how — and when — you should make energy improvements to your house.
As a certified electric coach trained by Rewiring America, I recently helped two of my homeowner friends use the tool and figure out their plan. Here’s how it went and how you can do it, too.
How to use the Personal Electrification Planner
The Personal Electrification Planner from Rewiring America is, thankfully, easy to use.
You’ll start by selecting your type of home (house, townhouse, apartment or mobile home), and creating a free account on the website. This account will allow you to come back to your planner later, and keep all of your recommendations saved.
Once you’re in, the planner will ask for your address, and then zoom in to a satellite view of your specific house. (This is a pretty cool feature. When I showed it to my friends, their faces lit up.)
Once the planner zeroes in on your house, it’ll ask you to fill out some basic information like square footage and the type of heating system you have. In the case of my friends, this information was prepopulated and mostly accurate, so they just had to correct a couple of things.
At the next step, the planner will ask you to rank your top two motivations for electrifying your home. You might choose “Improve health and comfort” or “Future-proof my home.” My friends chose “Lower my energy bills” and “Lower my climate impact.”
Then, you’ll fill out some information about your primary vehicle and the type of fuel it uses, with an eye toward home EV charging.
And in the final prompt, you’ll enter your annual household income and household size, so that the algorithm can match you with any financial incentives you might qualify for.
Click “Complete,” and the site will direct you to a page called “My electrification plan.” From start to finish, this process took my friends less than 5 minutes. And now they were staring at a deeply detailed, personalized stack of information about how to electrify their specific home.
What’s in a personal electrification plan?
The result of using the Personal Electrification Planner is a personalized game plan that walks you through every step of each project you might choose to tackle in your home.
The project list for my friends started with some low-hanging fruit, like getting a home energy audit, to bigger projects like installing solar panels or upgrading to a heat pump. In between were some midsize suggestions, like swapping in an induction stove or buying an electric lawn mower.
Within each project suggestion was another trove of information. Click into any of them and you find a complete breakdown of the costs and benefits, rebates available, step-by-step instructions and potential contractors.
Better yet, for each project, the planner will estimate how the new technology could affect your utility bills. For my friends, who live in upstate New York, switching to electric appliances might actually increase their bills, due to the ratio between electricity and gas rates from their utility.
What my friends plan to do with their electrification roadmap
My friends don’t plan on staying in their current house long-term. They’ve lived in their suburban single-family home for a couple of years, but they’re nursing dreams of building an uber-sustainable forever home someday.
With that in mind, I wasn’t going to recommend they spend tens of thousands of dollars on heat pumps and solar panels, which might not pay off financially in the short term.
Instead, we focused on a less sexy (and less expensive) home improvement that could help meet their goals of lowering energy costs and fossil fuel use: Insulation and weatherization. I told my friends about my recent experience (as a renter) getting free insulation installed in my home, fully subsidized by financial incentives in Massachusetts.
And then I left them with a small, but important, next step: Getting a home energy audit. These assessments, which state energy agencies will often pay for, allow a contractor to come to your home and do an inspection of your current energy systems and insulation. They can then recommend, and sometimes even perform, upgrades like improved weatherization or new heating systems.
Why you should make a personal electrification plan
No matter your budget, or where you are in your home electrification journey, using this online tool is a great way to learn more about your options.
If nothing else, the planner can give you some ideas you might not have thought of before. Or, it could help you see that you qualify for discounts and rebates. And the step-by-step guides, which you can log in and access any time, can help you stay on track with each project.
If you’ve got even 10 minutes to spare, it’s worth your time.
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