A Pocket Guide to All-Electric Retrofits of Single-Family Homes
This booklet is intended to be a simple “how-to” guide to help homeowners, home renters, and utilities and policy makers who want to replace existing gas appliances with efficient electric alternatives, many of which are simple and require no home modifications.
By Sean Armstrong, Emily Higbee, Dylan Anderson, Diane Bailey, and Tom Kabat
Published by Redwood Energy
February 2021
This content is provided by a partner organization and may not represent the views of Sonoma Clean Power or its employees.
Topics covered in this guide:
- Benefits and strategies for electrifying your home.
- Cost to electrify your entire home, as well as costs to electrify specific appliances.
- How to calculate your home’s electrical load on your panel and ways to reduce the power demand of your home.
- All-electric retrofit case studies from around the United States.
- An extensive product guide for space heating and cooling, heat pumps for water heating, laundry dryers, cooking equipment, energy management systems, solar panels, electric landscaping equipment, and more.
Introduction
Welcome! This booklet is intended to be a simple “how-to” guide to help homeowners, home renters, utilities and policy makers who want to replace existing gas appliances with efficient electric alternatives, many of which are simple and require no home modifications (e.g., countertop induction ranges, condensing washer/dryers, portable space conditioning heat pumps). This booklet has three sections, the first to explain the costs, benefits and strategies for electrifying a home, the second section is lessons learned from case studies of retrofitted homes, and the third section is an extensive product guide to help choose your electrification appliances.
You are not alone in this project of electrifying your home! And it can be affordable and easy—see our discussion of the Watt Diet and how one can avoid electrical upgrades. Since 1993 Americans have been progressively using more electric appliances, and 1 in 4 homes nationwide are now all-electric: electric stoves are now 61% of annual sales in the U.S. and electric laundry dryers are 88% of annual sales, while the majority of homes built since 1950 have been built with electric water heaters, and since 1970 the majority of homes have been built with electric space heating. Electrifying existing buildings, often paired with low-cost solar power, is a growing industry nation-wide.
This guide was written to accelerate this existing trend to use electric appliances because the global scientific community says that fossil fuels burned in our buildings are causing 28% of climate change, with natural gas leaks upstream of our appliances responsible for another 25% of global climate change. As our grid power grows cleaner by including more clean, renewable energy, a concerted effort is underway globally to use cleaner grid electricity to replace polluting fossil fuel appliances...
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