This story is shared by a young couple renting in Medford, Massachusetts.
We’ve lived in our apartment in Medford for about 4 years. This apartment has fuel oil for hot water and heating. We also use an electric heater to try to reduce the cost of heating in the winter. Our home is older and quite drafty.
Our National Grid bill is under my partner’s name. As an immigrant I was afraid to have bills under my name. I’d prefer to avoid interactions with service providers if I can manage it. This is a shared fear amongst immigrants.
When we first moved into the apartment they advertised the space as having low energy bills. And luckily, the apartment naturally stays quite cool during the summer. We were told that oil was about $2 per gallon, totaling about $300 for the winter at most. But this was during a winter when oil/gas prices were very low. Since then heating oil has gotten very expensive (especially during the Russia-Ukraine war.) Last year we paid over $5 a gallon.
Heating became a major expense in our budget. We were spending $100 per week on heating; between $350 and $400 a month. I had a conversation with our landlord about getting heat pumps but she said it was too expensive.
We learned from our landlord that there is a website where you can get a price match on the heating oil but you have to get at least 100-150 gallons of oil, which means we have to spend about $330 upfront and some of the retailers only accept cash. So we have to think strategically about when to purchase the heating oil. We space out our purchases based on other household expenses like medical bills, credit card payments, etc. It’s a constant concern of ours thinking about whose card we will use to pay for it and when we will make the payment.
Thankfully, this winter season (2023/2024) has been relatively mild. As a result we’ve spent less money on heating oil this year.
Last winter, we talked a lot about heating oil with other young people in a similar situation. Some of these people live with roommates, which makes it a bit easier to divide the cost up. It’s trickier when it’s one family. We’ve considered moving to a new apartment but many of the other places that we’ve looked at in the area also have heating oil. We definitely don’t want to be in this same situation in another apartment.
We were able to get free insulation through Mass Save because our landlord lives in the same building as us. They also changed our windows to reduce noise and lower the energy bills. However, there’s only a one year protection to not raise rents after weatherization updates. This coming lease renewal, our landlord could raise the rent and we’re starting to worry about this. There needs to be more protections for renters so landlords can’t raise rents if they benefit from the incentives to weatherize the home.
Because I’m not a U.S. citizen, I’m not able to benefit from state energy programs like fuel assistance and the discount rate. I pay into them but don’t benefit.
In terms of switching to heat pumps - we need a better system to make this more accessible to everyone. Currently, it’s all rebates so you have to make a downpayment of thousands of dollars. The idea of having to spend this much upfront means this is not an option for many people. I’ve also been noticing that every retailer has a very different range of prices for heat pumps and the state isn’t doing much to put price caps on these appliances.
One final suggestion based on my observations - it seems like there has been a boom in advertising for MassSave programs - like on MBTA, billboards and Youtube. But these ads don’t talk about what the benefits look like for renters or low-mid income households. These ads are also not reaching language isolated households. I’d love to see workshops run with interpretation services and hosted in language isolated communities.