After nearly 20 years in their home in Sandy, Sherie and her husband Jerald had grown attached to the place where they raised their children and built a life together. Their 1972 single-story home had charm and memories, but it could not keep up with the couple’s needs.
Winters were the hardest. The three-bedroom, one-bath layout left all the bedrooms at the far end of the house – making them difficult to heat – and the home’s aging systems forced Sherie and Jerald to rely almost entirely on a seven-year-old pellet stove. Though the stove worked well, it simply did not heat the home evenly or efficiently.
Portable space heaters filled gaps that the pellet stove did not cover. Insulation was minimal and later measured at only R-9 in the attic, so any warmth they created drifted quickly away. “We’d go to bed warm and wake up freezing,” Sherie said. Their energy costs reflected the struggle: about $350 a month in winter for electricity, $160 in summer, and roughly $450 per year for pellets.
When Sherie retired due to health issues, the couple faced increasing financial pressure. Searching for a way to reduce utility costs, Sherie came across a flyer from Energy Trust describing a program they might fit. She applied immediately. “It just felt like hope,” she said.
Sherie and Jerald qualified for Energy Trust of Oregon’s In-Home Energy Services (IES) program. An IES Energy Advisor began with a home energy assessment, uncovering the core efficiency issues: low insulation, improper ventilation, aging equipment, and insufficient whole-home heating. With a clear assessment in hand, the team reached out to trade allies for bids and designed a scope of work tailored to the home’s unique challenges.
A key solution was installing a 2:1 ductless heat pump system with the larger indoor unit placed in the living room to drive warm (and cool) air down the hallway to the bedrooms. For a home with long, uneven heating patterns, this placement was essential. “We had never heard of these before,” Sherie said. “They are absolutely amazing.” The new system immediately delivered whole-home comfort, which the pellet stove could never achieve on its own.
The team also replaced the home’s 18-year-old electric resistance water heater with a modern heat pump water heater, significantly reducing one of the home’s highest energy loads. In the attic, crews performed air sealing, ventilation improvements, and insulation upgrades to bring the home up from R-9 to a much more effective level, reducing heat loss and protecting indoor air quality.
A unique aspect of the project was IES’s Critical Repair incentive, which allowed installation of a customer-provided bathroom fan and proper ducting of both the fan and the kitchen range hood to dedicated, dampened exterior vents. These upgrades helped address long-standing moisture problems that had contributed to mold, fogging windows and persistent humidity.
To resolve the attic’s existing mold, IES partnered with Community Energy Project (CEP), which accessed Healthy Homes funding through the Community Partner Funding (CPF) program. Healthy Homes is not associated with Energy Trust, but funding can be combined for projects like this one. CEP treated the mold, and the new ventilation and insulation work ensured the attic would stay dry and healthy moving forward.
Altogether, the Graff residence received $15,547 in incentives from Energy Trust and an additional $6,000 from CEP. IES coordinated the work with two Trade Allies, Reytan General Contractor and Oregon Healthy Homes.
With the improvements completed in the summer, the couple is now experiencing winter with the new systems. “We wake up and the house is the same temperature we set the night before,” Sherie said. “That has never happened before.”
The ductless heat pump now warms the entire home, eliminating the need for portable heaters. Their attic is properly insulated for the first time in decades, stabilizing temperatures throughout the day. And in the summer, the heat pump’s cooling mode keeps their unshaded property comfortable without the cost of multiple fans and window units.
But for Sherie, the most lasting impression was of the compassion and professionalism of the people involved.
“They made us feel like we were their number one priority,” she said. “We thought managing a project like this would be complicated, but they guided us through every step. They checked on us constantly. I have no words for how wonderful they were.”
The couple now views winter with something they haven’t felt in years: relief. “I can’t wait to see what this winter will be like,” Sherie said. “For the first time, I’m looking forward to it.”