Colorado School of Mines project hopes to warm houses, lower bills in mobile home communities

LEADVILLE — It gets cold in Lake County’s high country, and getting warm when you live in a mobile home is expensive. Just ask Armando, whose monthly utility bill for his two-bedroom manufactured house heads toward $300.

“It’s the biggest bill,” said Armando, who like other residents of the predominantly Latino home park asked to be identified by only his first name out of concerns about the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

That bill, however, is dropping thanks to a pilot project spearheaded by the Colorado School of Mines aimed at bolstering energy efficiency across the community through a combination of improvements to the units and a switch to electric appliances.

The upgraded homes are going through their first winter in the three-year project, with more retrofits to follow in the spring. Armando says he is already seeing an impact. “It looks like I am saving about $35 next month,” he said.

“It is a big difference,” Armando said. “It stays warm all day. … Hopefully it will get even better.”

One of the updates was a smart thermostat that enables Armando to use his cellphone to turn down the temperature when he and his family are out and turn it up before they get home — saving natural gas. “It really works,” he said.

The goal of the project is to bring energy efficiency to low-income families and communities, said Paulo Tabares-Velasco, a Mines associate professor of mechanical engineering and the project’s lead researcher.

 “How can we produce technologies that can work for everybody, not only for people that make $500,000?” Tabares-Velasco said.

The project got jump-started with a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, but has drawn support from the Colorado Energy Office and Energy Outreach Colorado, which helps low-income households pay their utility bills, as well as a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.

New doors, windows and efficient appliances slash bills

A key element of the program is upgrading a group of homes at one time. Fifteen of the park’s 28 homes are participating in the pilot. “We are trying to demonstrate that when you retrofit and electrify an entire community you get more benefits,” Tabares-Velasco said.

Last summer, the first upgrades were made. These included low-flow shower heads and LED lighting. The floors were insulated and the homes were air sealed. The gas furnaces were replaced with high-efficiency gas furnaces.

In some cases, doors and windows were replaced or a new refrigerator was added. These are the kinds of steps that are already cutting Armando’s utility bills.

Next spring, the electric installations will be done, including new 100-amp electric panels, a 16.4-kilowatt battery, induction stoves, electric water heaters and cold-climate mini-split heat pumps.

Cold-climate heat pumps, which squeeze heat out of even very cold air, are rated to work to 13 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, well below Leadville’s average winter low of minus 5 degrees.

Leadville temperatures, however, have slipped below minus 25 at least 24 times in the past 60 years with a record minus 38, in February 1985. The high-efficiency gas furnaces will serve as backup.

Most of the work is being done through the Weatherization Assistance Program, which is a federal initiative administered by the Colorado Energy Office.

Since 2018 the state program has been helping homeowners and even some renters individually upgrade their properties, but is now interested in the opportunities communitywide improvements might offer.

“Is it more efficient for us to weatherize and electrify a group of homes all at once?” asked Michelle Butler, a senior engagement manager for the energy office’s weatherization program who is working on the Lake County pilot.

Butler said the office also wanted to see if there are economies in bulk purchases and bigger contracts with installers. “We wanted to see what the benefits are in scaling up, how do we do that at scale,” she said.

The energy office has budgeted about $1.3 million for the Lake County project.

Only mobile homes in resident-owned communities are eligible

The energy office helped homeowners fill out the application for the weatherization grants, which are long and ask for personal details, including citizenship and immigration status and financial information.

“That may have been a reason some people decided not to join,” Tabares-Velasco said.

Most manufactured homes are not eligible for the weatherization program because the families don’t own their homes or own them but lease land in a park to put them on.

“More than 90% of manufactured homes are split-tenure,” said Zachary Lamb, an assistant city and regional planning professor at the University of California Berkeley, who is studying manufactured homes as an underused housing resource.

“There is this general reluctance of state and government programs to deal with these parks,” Lamb said. “They don’t want to give funds to landlords.”

In his research in California, Lamb said manufactured home parks have been more susceptible to blackouts and brownouts. In Arizona trying to cool a manufactured home is a challenge. “There is no insulation, poor wiring,” Lamb said. “It is a huge issue from an energy justice perspective.”

The Lake County park was able to tap into federal funds because several years ago the residents — many of whom work in construction and at quarries in the region — got together, bought the park and now run it as a cooperative.

Of the 40,000 manufactured housing communities in the U.S. less than 3% are resident-owned.

“A major benefit of co-op ownership is that it can unlock government and philanthropic funds,” Lamb said. “An indirect benefit is when you have a resident ownership model, residents are more secure in making investments in their homes.”

In 2020, Colorado passed a law to aid homeowners to buy their parks. In 2023, Senate Bill 160 created the Mobile Park Resident Empowerment Program with a $23 million revolving loan and grant fund to help mobile home owners organize and finance their mobile home parks.

The fund, administered by the Department of Local Affairs, has financed three mobile home acquisitions, in Dumont, Milliken and Littleton, with a fourth pending, according to Shannon Gray, a DOLA spokeswoman. Four more purchases are planned for this fiscal year.

Residents in four other parks — in Lafayette , Durango, Glenwood Spring and one near Boulder — have purchased or are working toward buying their parks with the help of two nonprofits, Thistle Community Housing and resident-owned community organization ROC USA.

Data helps residents make better decisions about energy use

While being a cooperative has enabled the Lake County park to access dollars and new hardware, an equally important part of the project is putting more information and more control in the hands of the homeowners.

On a February morning, Tabares-Velasco was knocking on doors in the park distributing electronic tablets, or dashboards, that will help residents monitor their energy use and the air quality of their homes.

In addition to the upgrades, the Mines researchers had added so-called smart plugs, which can monitor energy consumption from specific appliances, such as a refrigerator, a meter measuring electricity flow at the breakers, and sensors monitoring radon, carbon dioxide and particulates.  

“One of the benefits we want to quantify is when we electrify a home and remove a gas stove, furnace and hot water heater how much do you improve the air quality,” Tabares-Velasco said.

Tabares-Velasco showed Armando how to navigate the tablet and access the data — in either Spanish or English. “There is a lot there,” Armando said.

With a touch of a finger, they could tap into the home’s energy use by day, week or month, the current utility bill, a forecast for next month’s bill, the home’s biggest electricity users, how it compares with neighbors in the program and all the air-quality readings.

The goal of the dashboards is to put knowledge and control in the hands of the homeowners so they can take steps to manage their energy use and air quality, Tabares-Velsaco said.

“If they see a high carbon dioxide reading, they’ll know to switch on a fan or open a window,” he said. “And if they see that their energy use is higher than their neighbors’ they will have an incentive to curb their use.”

“We hope we can get people to make the right choices with the right information,” Tabares-Velasco said.

While the pilot is working with a handful of manufactured homes in the Colorado Rockies, the hope is the lessons learned can have broader implications. 

“It doesn’t have to be a home park,” Tabares-Velasco said. “If we can go into a neighborhood and do an entire block, say 80 homes, get them on board to retrofit, there is a lot of leverage there.”

A home park in Lake County is a start, he said. “If we can fix it here, we can fix it everywhere else.”