The Hood River Conservation Project (HRCP) is a major residential retrofit research and demonstration project. The project is being conducted in the community of Hood River, Oregon, will cost $21 million, and take three years (mid-1983 through 1986). HRCP's primary purpose is to determine the size and cost of conservation resources in existing homes in the Pacific Northwest. The project seeks to install as many cost-effective retrofit measures in as many electrically-heated homes as possible.
HRCP offers a package of "super" retrofit measures and pays for installation of these measures up to a cost-effectiveness limit roughly four times that in other residential retrofit programs in the region. Thus, HRCP offers the chance to determine levels of retrofit installation when cost to the household and prior retrofit activities are largely eliminated as barriers.
This paper documents the extent to which measures included in the Project are actually installed in participant homes. The paper also examines the reasons for noninstallation of measures --the barriers between potential and practice. Almost 90% of the measures recommended during HRCP energy audits were subsequently installed by the Project. However, almost half the measures hypothetically available in the HRCP package were neither recommended nor installed, generally because the measures were already partially or fully in place or because of physical barriers to installation.