Awardee Profiles

The Gray Home

As Snug Planet’s last client before the lockdown, Jennifer Gray truly lucked out. Since 1974, she has resided in her older Victorian farmhouse in Trumansburg, heating with fuel oil and firewood. However, after being introduced to the idea of heat pumps through her work at Cornell Cooperative Extension, she learned that programs were available to help people like her afford and install a heat pump and get off of fossil fuels! With Snug Planet’s help, she applied and qualified for the Climate Fund, and after stacking on our state incentives, was officially the last person in March to install a new air source heat pump system and heat pump water heater before everything got shut down! Now that she was working from home through the summer, she thought she had signed herself up for a boiling hot home office. Little did she know, the new heat pump system came with an unexpected perk! Air conditioning! For the past 45 years, Jennifer had just accepted that the second floor of her home would be stifling in the summers and freezing in the winters, but this new heat pump put all that to an end. She said that was the icing on top of the reduced energy bills! Unfortunately, Jennifer can’t do a whole furnace overhaul just yet, but that’s on the back burner, she says. Thanks to the Climate Fund, Jennifer Gray is our proud 50th grant winner of $3,454, preventing 46 tons of CO2 from her old system from entering the atmosphere!

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