Sustainable Spaces: Helping Homes Get Greener

Among clean tech solutions, we often hear about wind, solar, geothermal, and then “energy efficiency.” This one large category rarely gets the specific treatment–other than a mention of compact fluorescent lightbulbs–that the other segments of the market do. But one company we found, Sustainable Spaces, has taken on residential energy efficiency head on and can offer a quick analysis of your home and sell you services to make it greener.

The company seems to be striking a cord, and they are in the process of scaling up. Since Matt Golden, the CEO of Sustainable Spaces founded the company in 2004, they’ve grown to several dozen employees, and took seed capital from angel investors Blueshift Partners earlier this year. They’re already a profitable company and now they are looking for several million dollars of venture capital to build out their labor-intensive business.

They’ve also found some surprising results. For one, those fancy Energy Star windows? They’re not worth much without a properly insulated house with an efficient heating and cooling system.

It’s not often that you hear someone advocate the low tech cleantech solution that simply a better HVAC systems can offer a solution for climate change, but that’s exactly what Golden does. In fact, the way Golden figures it, with houses responsible for about a quarter of US emissions, leaky heating and cooling ducts account for a staggering 2-3% of electricity used in the US.

That’s because the HVAC system, which he calls the heart and lungs of a home, is responsible for a lot of a building’s energy usage. Any problems in it are directly reflected in the overall efficiency of the house. In that way, a home’s HVAC system is like a micro transmission grid. All in all, Golden says his company can reduce an existing home’s energy expenditure by 10-50 percent. (Imagine if we could retrofit cars to generate those kinds of energy reductions?)

The problem is that fixing a home’s HVAC system can still cost thousands of dollars, and even if the payback is measured in months, not years, many homeowners don’t have that kind of excess cash sitting around. To fix that, Golden would like to see solar-style incentives for gains in energy efficiency. (We would too!)

Even without government help, fixing all those leaky ducts is going to take a lot of “green collar” workers.