What Are Energy Efficient Home Improvements?

When people hear the phrase energy efficient home improvements, most of them picture one thing, usually a new furnace or a set of solar panels on the roof. In reality, the term covers a much wider range of upgrades, and some of the improvements that make the biggest difference in a Wisconsin home have nothing to do with equipment at all.

At Green Homeowners United, we talk to Milwaukee homeowners about this almost every day, and the question we hear most isn't whether efficiency upgrades are worth it. It's where to start. Understanding what actually counts as an energy efficient home improvement, and which ones are worth prioritizing, makes it a lot easier to plan a project that actually lowers your bills instead of just feeling like a good idea. Here's a practical overview of the categories that matter most for Milwaukee area homeowners, along with the rebates and financing options currently available to help pay for them.

What Counts as an Energy Efficient Home Improvement

Broadly speaking, an energy efficient home improvement is any upgrade that reduces the amount of energy your home needs to stay comfortable. That includes obvious equipment swaps, like replacing an old furnace with a high efficiency model, but it also includes improvements to the building itself, such as insulation, air sealing, and even how a home is financed.

The most effective approach usually addresses the building first and the equipment second. A high efficiency furnace working inside a poorly insulated house is still fighting an uphill battle, while a well sealed, well insulated home lets even modest equipment perform better than it otherwise would. With that in mind, here's how the major categories break down.

Insulation and Air Sealing

Insulation and air sealing are often the highest impact, lowest visibility improvements a home can get. Since most homeowners can't see inside their walls or attic, it's easy to overlook insulation gaps that are quietly driving up energy bills every month.

Attic insulation keeps warm air from escaping straight through the roof, while basement and rim joist insulation stops cold air from creeping in underneath the house. Air sealing closes the smaller gaps around windows, doors, and utility penetrations that let conditioned air leak out and outside air leak in. Together, these improvements form what's often called the building envelope, and getting it right is usually the single best return on investment a homeowner can make.

Focus on Energy currently offers rebates of up to $1,200 for attic insulation and up to $1,125 for wall insulation, and these can often be combined with the City of Milwaukee's Basement Insulation Grant for even greater savings. We'll cover the specific signs that indicate your home needs more insulation in an upcoming post, but if your house has cold floors, drafty rooms, or heating bills that feel high for its size, insulation is usually the place to start.

Heating and Cooling Upgrades

Heating and cooling account for nearly half of the average home's energy usage, which makes this category one of the most impactful places to invest in efficiency. High efficiency furnaces, boilers, and heat pumps all fall under this umbrella, along with smaller upgrades like smart thermostats.

Heat pumps have become an especially popular option for Wisconsin homeowners in recent years, since modern cold climate models can handle both heating and cooling in a single system. Focus on Energy offers instant discounts and mail in rebates on this equipment, ranging from around $50 for a smart thermostat up to several hundred dollars for higher efficiency furnaces and heat pumps, depending on the equipment tier and your income eligibility.

Through a partnership between Green Homeowners United and Action Heating, qualifying low income homeowners can also access no cost insulation, air sealing, and heat pump air conditioning upgrades, funded through Focus on Energy and federal Inflation Reduction Act incentives. We go deeper into heating specific strategy in our companion post, "Energy Efficiency and Heating Your Home."

Electrical Panel Upgrades

Electrical panel upgrades tend to get overlooked in conversations about energy efficiency, but they're often a necessary step before other upgrades can happen at all. An older or undersized electrical panel may not be able to support a new heat pump, an EV charger, or other electrified equipment, which makes panel capacity a quiet bottleneck for a lot of home efficiency projects, especially in Milwaukee's older housing stock.

The federal HEAR program, part of the IRA Home Energy Rebates initiative, includes electrical panel and service upgrades as an eligible improvement. If you're planning heating or appliance upgrades down the road, it's worth having your panel evaluated now so it doesn't become a surprise cost later. You can see more about our approach to this on our Electrical Panels page.

Financing Through a Green Mortgage

Not every energy efficient improvement has to be paid for out of pocket or through a rebate application. Green mortgages let homeowners roll the cost of qualifying energy improvements into their home financing, often at favorable terms, which can make larger projects like a full insulation retrofit or heating system replacement significantly more manageable.

We've walked this road ourselves. Green Homeowners United also partners with Forward Together Wisconsin on a revolving loan fund, giving homeowners another path to financing that doesn't depend on waiting for a rebate check to arrive. We'll cover green mortgages in more detail in an upcoming post, but it's worth knowing this option exists before assuming a bigger project is out of reach.

Where to Start: A Home Energy Assessment

With so many categories to consider, it's worth asking where a homeowner should actually begin. The answer, almost always, is a home energy assessment. Rather than guessing which upgrade will make the biggest difference, an assessment identifies exactly where your specific home is losing energy, so time and money go toward the improvements that matter most.

Qualifying Milwaukee and Waukesha County residents can currently access a $0 home energy assessment through a partnership between the City of Milwaukee's ECO Office and Focus on Energy, unlocking up to $20,000 in available incentives. You can learn more or schedule an assessment here, or take a look at our Energy Savings Report to see what an assessment actually uncovers.

How to Pay for These Improvements

Between Focus on Energy rebates, IRA Home Energy Rebates, the Basement Insulation Grant, and green mortgage financing, most Wisconsin homeowners have more funding available than they realize. The programs are designed to stack, meaning a single project can often combine several sources of savings at once rather than relying on just one.

Nationally, somewhere between 700 and 800 HOMES projects have been completed since the program launched, and more than 300 of those have been right here in Wisconsin, with our team leading the majority of that work statewide. That experience means fewer surprises and less paperwork stress for homeowners navigating these programs for the first time.

Ready to Find Out Where to Start

Energy efficient home improvements cover a lot of ground, from insulation you'll never see to financing options you may not know exist. The good news is that you don't have to figure out the priority order on your own, and we'd genuinely like to help.

Schedule a free Home Energy Assessment with Green Homeowners United and get a clear, specific plan for your home instead of a list of guesses.