Green Story

Affordable Weatherization Solutions (AWS) was launched last April by Mike Grecco and his two partners, Pat Young and Jim Allen. Working primarily out of Grecco’s kitchen at his Dover home and often carpooling in one vehicle, the team provides comprehensive energy audits for homes and businesses, helping to both pinpoint areas of inefficiency and elicit the best ways possible to improve the building’s energy performance.

For Grecco, their business is, by definition, a green business; helping home and business owners reduce energy costs, often to the tune of 30 percent, thereby drastically reducing the building‘s overall carbon footprint.

How does an energy audit work? First, a homeowner will contact AWS, at which point AWS sends out a brief questionnaire to get a basic sense of the home, its owners, energy use, lifestyle, and layouts of the house (where the attics or basements are, etc). At that point the team will come to the site and inspect literally every nook and cranny in the house – from the windows and doorframes to attics, basements and crawl spaces you might never have known existed.

One of the methods AWS uses involves conducting a “blower door test”, where they hook up what most resembles a giant, inflatable camping-ready sleeping pad to your door, in order to calculate how much wind is moving throughout the space at any given time. At that point the crew figures out where the source of the “leak” is.

As Grecco puts it, “Nine times out of ten, if you’re standing in a room that’s cold, the problem lies somewhere else in the house.” The job of AWS is to find that problem area.