Energy Archives | House and Hammer

Finders, fixers.

subaru solterra charging in driveway - real world range and charging experience

Real-world range, charging, and fun: Our EV experience

Our house has been a power plant since 2017; now it’s also a gas station of sorts. In January, we signed a three-year lease on our first electric vehicle, a 2023 Subaru Solterra. We’ve never leased a car before, but felt it made a lot of sense in this case because a) EV technology is…

cat sitting in cast iron skillet for some reason

I used to love them, but gas stoves are really bad news

(Note: No cats were cooked or otherwise harmed in the creation of this blog post; Athena just likes to sit in a frying pan sometimes, like a total weirdo.) When we bought our house, one of my must-haves was a gas stove. My parents had an electric range growing up, and the first time I…

heat pumps cut tons of carbon - heat pump on the side of a Victorian house

In data: Here’s how heat pumps can cut carbon and save the world

We installed a mini-split heat pump in our home in 2021 — not a whole-home system, just one wall-mounted unit in the living area, because that was all we could afford at the time. (The rebates are much, much better now — you can get $10,000 back from MassSave, plus up to $2,000 in federal…

air source heat pump - converting oil furnace to electric heat pump

Step by step: Converting from an oil furnace to electric heat pump before winter

It’s hard to think about heating oil in the midst of the hottest 21-day period in Boston’s recorded history. But while gas prices started dipping downward the past month, the cost of heating oil in Massachusetts is still up 72% compared to a year ago, at around $5 a gallon. That could leave many New…

poland spring plastic water bottle on the beach - how to reduce plastic waste

10 ways to use less plastic at home

I was listening to Alie Ward’s delightful + insightful Ologies podcast the other day — an older episode about ocean health with Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. There are a million reasons to listen, and to do more to help our marine ecology, but there was one startling statistic Dr. Johnson dropped that I hope will haunt you…

blue recycling bin - how to recycle in massachusetts

How to recycle (without screwing up the whole works)

Recycling is the least we can do to to help our ailing planet. It’s not hard. Single-stream (all-in-one bin) recycling has made the process easier than ever for homeowners. And yet, it’s clear a lot of people just don’t know how to recycle properly. In our neighborhood, I see pesky plastic bags stuffed in blue bins all…

halibut point state park in rockport, mass

Looking for a cooler place to live (literally)

I love our city of Quincy — I think it’s one of the best places to live around Boston, in fact — but when you scour real estate listings for a living, you’re bound to get some wanderlust once in awhile. And that gets especially acute during a heat wave. Here by the ocean, our…

Here’s how much blown-in insulation cost us, and how much it’s saved us so far

Over the summer, we finally got around to doing something that had been on our (lengthy) house to-do list ever since we moved in: We got insulation blown into our walls, at a steep 90% discount courtesy of MassSave. At 90% off, you’d wonder what the hell were we waiting for all these years. Well, we had…

two prong light bulb adapter GU24 to E27 light bulb adapter

Need to replace a two prong light bulb? This gadget is a life saver.

We have a ceiling fan and light fixture that’s slowly grown dimmer as each of its three light bulbs burned out. The first time, I grabbed a new LED bulb out of the closet, unscrewed the lamp, and removed the burned-out bulb — only to find a light bulb with two prongs at the bottom, instead…

The simplest, cheapest, and prettiest way to save on home energy bills

From huge tax credits on solar panels to big rebates on efficient heating equipment and other appliances, there are a lot of financial incentives out there to encourage home improvements that save you both energy and money. This is especially true in Massachusetts, where Mass Save programs sweeten the deal even further; I recently wrote a guide for…

wood stove or fireplace - fire in woodburning stove in hearth

Wood stove or fireplace? It’s no contest.

It’s that time of year, when the weather turns crisp and a young man’s fancy turns to… fire! When we first bought our house, I was excited about a lot of things — the driveway, for example, after circling for parking in the Back Bay for three years — but none so much as the…

roof with solar panels - is solar worth it

Are solar panels worth it? For us, absolutely.

Update, as of June 2023: Yes, solar panels are still totally worth it. There’s one thing I do wish we’d done differently, though: I wish we’d installed more capacity than we needed back in 2017, as we’ve since installed electric heat pumps to use less gas, replaced a gas dryer with an electric one, and…