A Systematic Review of Energy Efficiency Home Retrofit Evaluation Studies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We systematically review studies evaluating the energy savings and cost-effectiveness of residential energy efficiency retrofit programs. We review 39 evaluations of 23 residential retrofit programs that were evaluated between 1984 and 2021. Our sample is restricted to program evaluations that used postretrofit household energy billing or consumption data from 140,977 retrofitted households. We report four primary findings. First, none of the studies in our sample reported deep energy savings (e.g., 50% or greater) from retrofit programs. The mean reduction in measured electricity and/or fuel consumption due to energy efficiency retrofits for all programs included in our sample was roughly 7.2%. However, because many households use both fuel and electricity, total household energy savings from the retrofit programs evaluated in our sample are probably smaller. Second, reported program savings decreased as the internal validity of study design increased. Third, as measured by realized savings and cost-effectiveness, the most promising retrofits were insulation and programmable thermostats, whereas the least promising retrofits were storm windows and doors. Fourth, programs with high reported savings and low costs of conserved energy served low-income, fuel-heated households exclusively.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".