How Contractors can use Rewiring America Electrification Calculator
What is Rewiring America?
As part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act passed by Congress, Rewiring America is a program that helps homeowners and renters find applicable rebates and tax deductions for using electric and energy efficient appliances in their home.
Click here to see the Rewiring America Electrification Savings Calculator - https://www.rewiringamerica.org/app/ira-calculator
The website linked above is a publicly available tool to help homeowners and renters identify upgrades that come with tax credits and rebates. It allows the homeowner to enter information about their property, income, and household in order to provide customized suggestions and details for specific projects.
Why Contractors Will Love This
Providing this web tool to your customers is extremely easy, and does not require you to register or do any additional paperwork. Simply include the link to this tool in your Clear Estimates boilerplate language, along with some text that helps describe the tool to your customer.
Here's an example of some text you can send to your customers in your email or on your estimates:
Are you interested in getting tax credits or rebates for electrifying your home? Click this link below to Rewiring America’s free calculator for available incentives. (https://www.rewiringamerica.org/app/ira-calculator)
Rewiring America even has detailed pages that describe the benefits of these specific upgrades to the homeowner, so you don’t have to be an expert on the pro’s and con’s of each item. If your client has a question about specific upgrades or incentives, you can easily answer their question just by sending this link over to you. For example, here is the page all about the Electric Stove Upgrade Incentive.
Increased Buying Power
The incentives listed on the Rewiring America calculator can help your clients have more buying power when working on a project with you. If the client does not need to pay directly for a specific appliance or upgrade, then they may be able to acquire higher grade finishes or other upgrades to their project.
For example, if a client needs a new furnace as part of their project, you could show them the options available for using an electric furnace instead of a gas one. This would mean the furnace portion of the project is financed (in part) by the tax credits or rebates available through this program.
Clear Estimates is Ready to Help!
Templates & Parts Built In
For some of the upgrades available through Rewiring America, Clear Estimates already has parts and/or templates built into the default Library for you to use on estimates. This can help you show the client not only any potential credits or rebates, but also the costs for each project.
You can use the built-in parts or templates, customize the ones we have, or create your own to help win these jobs. You might consider creating packages based on these incentives that you sell to customers when meeting with them. For example, a heat pump AC/Heater, an electric panel upgrade, and weatherization sealing could be a singular package that you offer for your clients to add onto any other work you’re doing for them.
Here are some of the electrical upgrades that Clear Estimates has built into the software for you:
- Electrical Panel Upgrades
- Heat Pump AC/Heater Upgrades
- Weatherization sealing
- Electric Stove Installation
- Elecctric Wiring
- Efficiency Upgrades
Using Components and Alternates
Some features built into Clear Estimates are already set up for you to easily show your clients different options on their estimate.
For example, using a component would be a great way to show the customer only the items that are related to a particular electrification upgrade listed by Rewiring America. That component, which is just a sub-section of a project, will show only the costs related to that work and can be used on its own for getting a rebate!
Alternates can also be used to show your clients different options. Using the furnace example from above, you can easily give your clients an estimate that includes a gas furnace but then also include an alternate for an electric heater instead. The alternates can help you show the costs of that work as separate from the rest of the project.
Misc. Items
If your client is going to get a tax rebate or similar benefit from the project, you may want to include that rebate in your Misc. Items section of your estimate, lowering the overall cost of the project.
For example, you can show that a project costs $25,000 but with the $2,000 rebate from an electric hot water heater installation, the total project is only $23,000.
How you display this information is completely up to you, and you can easily adjust it on a project-by-project basis to fit that client’s specific needs.
Final Thoughts
Programs like Rewiring America help fund home upgrades and you can use that in your sales process to help your customers understand all the options they have available to them.
The Rewiring America website is free to use for anyone, so feel free to include it in your sales process however you would like!
