3 Things with GreenSavers
Portland has an amazing sustainability community, and we want to highlight the people and work that shape our unique city. We’re sharing their answers to questions we posed.
Founded in Bend in 2007, GreenSavers is a mission-driven home performance contractor helping Oregonians make their homes healthier, more comfortable, and dramatically more energy efficient. The company takes a whole-home, building science based approach to home improvement, combining weatherization, high-performance HVAC, electrification, solar, and net-zero energy retrofits. GreenSavers is a certified B Corporation and eight-time ENERGY STAR® Contractor of the Year.
Now, we’ll hand it over to GreenSavers to share their perspective on sustainability, Portland’s future, and the projects and collaborations that inspire them.
1. What does sustainable mean to you?
To us, sustainability starts with making better use of what we already have. New high-performance buildings are important, but Oregon is full of homes and buildings that have already consumed the materials, labor, energy, and carbon required to build them. Extending the useful life of those structures while making them perform better is one of the most practical sustainability opportunities in front of us. Research supports that approach: retrofitting an existing building can result in substantially less embodied carbon than replacing it with new construction because much of the foundation, structure, and other carbon-intensive material stays in place.
That means sustainability isn't simply replacing old things with new, efficient things. Building science asks us to understand the building as a system first. Air sealing, insulation, moisture management, windows, and reducing thermal bridging can decrease energy loss while improving comfort, durability, and resilience. Then we can electrify intelligently with high-performance mechanical systems—at GreenSavers, that means carefully designed equipment from manufacturers we trust, including Mitsubishi and Quilt—before looking to solar to generate the remaining energy a home needs. Done well, a net-zero home can produce as much energy as it consumes and potentially generate enough additional electricity to help power personal transportation or contribute to the grid.
Robert Hamerly, our Founder & CEO, also reminds us that sustainability has a cultural dimension:
“A building doesn’t begin with us; it has a history. The materials, craftsmanship, people, and place all make a building what it is. When we can honor what’s worth keeping while improving how that building performs for the next generation, that’s sustainability too.”
2. Name a Portland (or Oregon) project or collaboration that has inspired you, and tell us why you are inspired by it.
Some of the projects that inspire us most aren't the ones that look radically different when they're finished. They're the ones where an existing Oregon home gets another chapter. One example is a 1912 home in Bend where our team took a whole-home approach to electrification rather than treating the HVAC system as an isolated piece of equipment. The house had significant air leakage, inadequate insulation, and aging gas appliances. We started with the building itself, performing air sealing and adding insulation, then upgraded the mechanical systems with a high-efficiency Mitsubishi heat pump and heat-pump water heater while making the electrical improvements necessary to support them. After the project, measured air leakage had been reduced by 70%, and the home had eliminated gas for its primary heating and water heating while becoming more comfortable and consistent inside.
What inspires us about a project like this is that the 1912 house is still a 1912 house. Sustainability didn't require erasing its history or starting over. It required understanding what the building needed to keep serving people well more than a century after it was built. Oregon's existing housing stock represents an enormous reservoir of materials, embodied carbon, craftsmanship, and community history. When building science allows us to preserve those things while dramatically improving energy performance, indoor air quality, comfort, and resilience, preservation and decarbonization stop being competing goals. They become part of the same project.
That idea scales beyond a single house. Oregon is already recognizing adaptive reuse as an embodied-carbon strategy through its Low-Embodied Carbon Housing Program. The more our industry learns to see existing buildings not simply as inefficient problems to replace, but as resources we can improve, the more carbon and history we can keep out of the waste stream.
3. What can Portland (or Oregon) be doing better to be more sustainable?
We'd like to see Oregon put even more emphasis on reducing energy demand before simply adding new energy supply. The cleanest kilowatt-hour is the one a building doesn't need in the first place. Every poorly insulated attic, leaky building envelope, inefficient furnace, or oversized mechanical system creates demand that our electrical infrastructure has to meet. As Oregon electrifies buildings and transportation, efficiency becomes an increasingly important part of grid resilience not an alternative to electrification, but something that helps electrification work better.
For homes, we think about that transition as an order of operations:
First, reduce the load through air sealing, insulation and other building-envelope improvements
Second, electrify efficiently with properly sized, high-performance heat pumps, heat-pump water heaters and other mechanical systems
Third, generate clean energy with rooftop solar where appropriate.
From there, a home can move toward net-zero energy and potentially produce enough electricity to support an EV or contribute excess power back to the grid. ZERO Coalition's own zero-energy guidance similarly places a high-performance envelope ahead of high-efficiency mechanical systems, reinforcing the idea that efficiency should precede equipment.
Ultimately, though, buildings aren't science projects. They're where people sleep, raise families, work, recover, gather, and grow older. As Oregon experiences hotter summers, wildfire smoke, winter cold, and other stresses on our buildings and electrical system, we need indoor environments that remain healthy, safe, comfortable, and affordable to operate. To us, that's the promise of better building science: using less energy to create spaces that take better care of the people inside them, while asking less of the systems outside them.