For decades Americans have relied on wood, oil, and gas to power, heat, and cool our homes, and the water we use to drink, cool, and bathe in. But these things have helped fuel our climate crisis – by some estimates, residential energy use accounts for about 20% of US greenhouse gas emissions.

That’s a lot.

Not to mention, burning wood inside and using gas stoves and fireplaces, and water heaters are just straight-up terrible for our health.

Great news though.

An electric future awaits us, and now, having passed the IRA, there are a huge variety of rebates to help you electrify your home, to become less dependent on the grid, to save money over time, and breathe cleaner air inside AND outside.

But where do you start? It’s a great question, and one I’ve been wrestling with recently.

I want to make my home reliable, resilient, and healthier. And together, with you and millions of other Shit Givers, I want to take a huge chunk out of US emissions, to slow the climate crisis.

But in order to do so, I needed some help.

So I called John Semmelhack.

John is co-owner, with Neil Comparetto, of The Comfort Squad LLC, a home performance contracting + consulting firm serving Charlottesville, VA, and Richmond, VA. John is a pioneering practitioner of the "electrify everything” movement and is the self-declared “Minister of Heat Pumps” for the Southeast U.S.

And his company, The Comfort Squad, helps clients create healthy, comfortable homes that run on clean electricity.

Today we’re going to take you on one of his standard home performance assessments and paint a picture for you of the healthier, all-electric home.

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INI Book Club:

All We Can Save edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katherine K Wilkinson
Find all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-club

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Edited by Anthony Luciani
Produced by Willow Beck
Intro/outro by Tim Blane: timblane.com

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