Whenever Shawn Heren heard a heatwave was coming to Oregon, he knew those long, hot days in his apartment would be miserable. Heren, 55, lives in a two-bedroom apartment in Eugene with his roommate and cat. It had no built-in air conditioning, only a portable unit attached to a window and another portable unit attached through a short tube.

On hot days, Heren would think of creative ways to stay cool.

“We were actually taking freezing water in the freezer and putting it in front of the fans just to kind of sit in front of the box fan,” he said. “That only lasts for so long.”

Heren has lived in Eugene for about eight years. He previously lived in the cooler climate of Montana.

Heren, who also has asthma, said he would struggle even more with his portable AC unit when extreme Oregon summer heat combined with wildfire smoke.

“We had an old-style air conditioner, well, the ones with the tube that goes outside, and it would work in one room, like downstairs, but upstairs we didn’t have nothing up there,” he said. “So, a lot of times we’d spend most of the time downstairs or have to sleep on the couch some nights.”

On top of dealing with the heat, Heren was also mindful of how often he was using his portable AC unit to avoid going over budget. In the summer, he was paying about $200 for electricity a month. In the winter, his energy bills were about $187. Throughout the year, Heren and his roommate could never reach the right temperatures and were never comfortable in their home.

Now, all of that has changed. Heren and his roommates have a new efficient cooling and heating device in their apartment — a heat pump.

Through a popular state Department of Energy program that helps renters access heat pumps, Heren and his nearly two dozen neighbors in a small apartment complex were able to get them installed in their homes at no cost. All they had to prove was that they were renters.

The heat pump has made a big difference in his life, Heren said. Everyone is comfortable at home and his outlook during summer has changed.

“It does it fast, efficiently, and actually you’re cold in here, instead of barely and the heat is amazing,” he said.

The Rental Heat Pump Program

The Oregon Department of Energy’s Rental Heat Pump Program was created by lawmakers in 2022. They allocated $15 million to the agency for heat pump installations. The goal was to help renters — who normally have little to no say on what devices and appliances can be installed in their units — get access to cooling and heat devices through working with their landlords.

The rebate program was created after an unprecedented 2021 heat dome hovered over Oregon for nearly a week in late June, with some areas reaching temperatures as high as 118 degrees Fahrenheit. Nearly 100 Oregonians died from heat-related illnesses. Those who died were primarily older and living alone with no AC or cooling devices.

“The best thing about the program is that it does serve renters who typically can’t make direct improvements to their homes like this,” Duard Headley, energy incentives manager at the Oregon Department of Energy, said. “So, in the end, it provides them the efficient, reliable, potentially lifesaving heating and cooling that they might not get without the incentive program.”

Renters are vulnerable to extreme weather events like heat waves because they cannot upgrade their homes without their landlord’s consent. Doing those kinds of upgrades, like installing a heat pump or replacing electrical boxes to handle the power needs of a heat pump, requires a lot of money. On average, installing a heat pump can cost about $6,500, depending on the size of the unit.

That’s where the Rental Heat Pump Program comes in. The Department of Energy works with approved contractors, who in turn work with landlords to install energy-efficient heat pumps and make electrical upgrades to rental properties. Properties eligible for these upgrades include rented rooms, houses, apartment buildings, manufactured homes and recreational vehicles.

“The program is fueled by the contractors,” Headley said. “The contractors are responsible for working with the property owners and developing the installation agreements, and they take the rebate amount directly off of the amount that the property owners pay, and we, ODOE, then reimburse the contractor.”

The amount of the rebate varies depending on three categories — the tenant’s income, affordable housing providers and non-income restricted. Landlords can get up to $5,000 for installing energy-efficient heat pumps in a home. There are additional incentives if a tenant is considered low- or moderate-income.

As they work directly with property owners, Headley said, contractors have an opportunity to build relationships with local organizations, property owners and the tenants receiving the units.

“I talk to a lot of them on a regular basis, and the people who work in their organizations actually generate a lot of personal meaning from the benefits that they’re providing to the tenants — because they see what they do on a regular basis and hear directly from tenants about how life-changing it really is,” Headley said. “Often tenants will even be in tears when they talk about how much it’s changed their life.”

Heat pumps are also efficient, which can help lower energy bills. That’s a perk many are looking for as electric bills have risen by at least 50% in the past five years for most Oregonians.

State rebates can also be stacked with incentives provided by utilities, like the Eugene Water & Electric Board heat pump incentive programs.

Those stacked rebates, along with a high number of approved contractors in the Eugene area, contributed to the installation of 1,334 heat pumps in Lane County rental housing. That’s the highest number of installations of any county in the state.

As of January, the state Department of Energy has received more than 4,200 applications for $17 million worth of rental heat pump installations in 24 Oregon counties. So far, 3,019 projects have been completed with more than $12 million in rebates paid out. Those rebates help support project costs totaling more than $23 million.

About 25% of the funding has been reserved for heat pumps for low-to-moderate income residents, with another 25% reserved for affordable housing providers.

Contractors, landlords race to secure heat pump funds

Like other popular state energy efficiency programs, funding for this program is not enough to meet demand. Funds were exhausted in the first eight months the rental rebate program was open. According to the Oregon Department of Energy, the top seven contractors submitted 3,102 applications, nearly three-quarters of all applications.

Alpine Heating & Air Conditioning, based in Eugene, was one of the top contractors in the state. The company secured funding for 524 projects in the Eugene area, including Shawn Heron’s apartment complex, which is owned and managed by St. Vincent de Paul of Lane County.

The nonprofit manages 1,600 affordable housing units. When it found out about the program, it quickly jumped on the chance to access heat pumps to install in older units, St. Vincent de Paul’s real estate development director Kristen Karle said.

“Most of our older units did not have cooling. Most of them utilized just electric resistance heaters,” she said. “We have units that were built in the late ’90s, early 2000s, when a lot of Oregonians didn’t have cooling at all.”

Karle said the organization also worked with Eugene Water & Electric Board’s heat pump incentive programs to maximize the state incentives. In the end, St. Vincent de Paul was able to secure 180 heat pumps at no cost.

And the quick pivot to secure the units paid off, not only to the organization but to its tenants as well.

“It makes their unit more comfortable, and it makes them feel more secure that when we do have some sort of event, they have access to cooling and don’t have to worry about a window unit or making plans to be able to leave their unit for a cooling space,” Karle said.

Alpine Heating & Air Conditioning General Manager Cody Calavan said more people are starting to install heat pumps in their homes. Before, people were concerned about how they looked in their homes, but once people saw how efficiently they worked, more people began to want them.

“It’s become so normalized that a lot of that opposition of adopting a technology that they didn’t understand, or you didn’t like the looks of it, or all of these kinds of misconceptions have kind of gone away,” he said. “Because what we hear now is ‘My aunt has one and I really like it and it’s great, and she thinks it’s the best thing since sliced bread’.”

And as more people want them, the state program has become more popular.

After the first round of funding ran out, lawmakers allocated an additional $4 million in 2024.

That money was claimed for new rental installations in less than 48 hours.

Alpine was able to secure an additional 126 units during that second round of funding, Calavan said. That’s because the company had a list of qualified people ready to submit their applications once funding was available.

“I had all of my office staff there at 6 a.m. in the morning when the application was going live, and we were all hands-on deck submitting applications to try to get as much of that funding as possible for our customers,” he said.

Calavan said Alpine Heating & Air Conditioning recognizes the value of the program and the cost reduction it offers to the community, as does St. Vincent de Paul.

“Two minds came together, two companies came together to figure out – how can we maximize these programs to provide the most cost-effective way to heat and cool St. Vincent DePaul properties,” he said. “And that’s what we did.”

This legislative session, environmental and climate organizations are asking legislators to allocate $30 million to fund the program for the next two years.

Previously, they asked Gov. Tina Kotek to include the program in her budget recommendation. But Kotek chose to prioritize a different state Department of Energy program that focuses on a wide range of renewable energy projects.

According to Anca Matica, communications and policy advisor for Kotek, the governor expects the federal funding Oregon was awarded last year, $197 million, to support Oregonians’ access to heat pumps through a new Oregon Heat Pump Purchase Program. That program caps the incentive at $2,000.

But it’s unclear if either federal or state funding for heat pumps will continue. The Trump administration has repeatedly attempted to limit congressionally-approved funding for programs related to climate change. And in Oregon, lawmakers face multiple competing demands on limited state financial resources.

It is unclear if the current Rental Heat Pump Program will be funded by legislators during this year’s session. State House Bill 2567 A would attempt to extend the rental heat pump program through 2032, but the bill does not include any funding for the program.

Keeping manufactured homes comfortable

In addition to Alpine Heating & Air Conditioning, another Eugene-based company is also a top contractor in the state’s rental-heat pump program — Adaptive Heating and Cooling. The two-person company has completed 217 projects.

Mitch Baker, who started the company in 2022, said his focus when he found out about this program was to install heat pumps in manufactured homes.

For a manufactured dwelling or RV, incentives can go as high as $7,000.

These homes can get higher incentives because it’s challenging to cool them in the summertime due to how they were built, according to the Oregon Department of Energy’s Headley. Last year, the agency did a study that found people living in manufactured dwellings are some of the state’s most vulnerable populations during extreme heat events. These homes often lack proper insulation, ventilation and safe electrical wiring to install AC or heat pump units.

When the second round of funding became available last year, Baker submitted 75 pre-filled-out applications.

“When it came time, it was like 6 a.m. on the day, I just basically just transposed numbers from an application into the portal, submitted it and just had all the files that needed to be uploaded to the pro portal saved in my hard drive very specifically so I could access them,” he said. “I knew it was going to be a race, and I was just a machine for 20, 30 hours.”

All but one of the applications were accepted.

One of those successful applications benefited Susan Ray and her husband in a small mobile home park in Springfield.

Ray, 73, has a double wide home, so she needed to get a bigger heat pump unit installed. That deterred her from getting one for a long time.

“We had given up,” she said. “We thought they were really, really, really expensive.”

Once she signed up for the program, Ray only had to pay $500 for her unit.

“I think we were the first ones on the list, and so we started off right away,” she said. “We knew that would be a wonderful way to do it, and it brought it down to our expense. I’m not going to spend thousands of dollars, not happening.”

Ray said she was tired of her old furnace, which took up a lot of space and did not heat her home efficiently. She also struggled in the summertime because she had small window units that only cooled down certain areas in her home. She’s sensitive to heat and has had to learn tricks to keep cool, like showering before bed.

Now, she’s living more comfortably with her heat pump.

“We like it,” she said. “It’s quiet and there’s less dust in my house because it’s not blowing up out of the vents. And I like that. I wasn’t prepared for it, but I was very pleased when I realized that that means less pollen and all that other junk flying around the air. And so yeah, I really like it.”

And in the space where her old furnace was, Ray now has room for her new pantry.