How Energy Efficiency Upgrades Pay Off for Manufactured Home Owners

It was a hot summer day in Corvallis, Oregon, when the aging air conditioning unit in Alice Davis’s manufactured home finally quit. “It was horrible, I don’t wish that on anybody,” Davis says. “We took lots of cold showers. We borrowed an AC unit from somebody—one of the ones that just sits in your living room—and then we went down to Safeway and got one of those Styrofoam buckets and filled it up with ice and put a fan in front of it.”

The HVAC unit had been original to the 1992 home—making it more than 30 years old, just like the aluminum-framed single-pane windows that barely kept out the elements. Davis was on a waiting list to get an energy efficiency retrofit through a state program for low-income residents, but in the meantime, she was able to enlist a partner organization called Seeds for the Sol to replace the old HVAC unit with a cold climate heat pump to restore cooling.

The difference in her electric bill was shocking: “When they installed the heat pump, that alone reduced my bill by $80 a month,” Davis says.

Despite their relatively small footprints, which help reduce overall heating and cooling loads, manufactured homes use 50 percent more energy per square foot than site-built homes, often due to poor insulation, air leaks, and inefficient equipment. More than half of manufactured home residents experienced some form of energy insecurity in 2024, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), many forgoing medication or food to pay their energy bills.

That’s one reason federal energy standards and state or local programs designed to retrofit or replace older, less-efficient manufactured housing can make a huge difference in the lives of residents, lowering their utility bills and increasing their comfort and safety.

Eventually, Davis’s name was drawn for the state retrofit program, and an organization called Community Services Consortium (CSC) added insulation, sealed leaky ductwork and gaps beneath the home, swapped out its single-pane windows for dual-pane ones, and installed vapor barriers and ventilation fans, among other measures. The upgrades lowered her electric bills even further. Davis had been paying between $200 and $300 a month for electricity. “Now it’s hovering around $119 a month,” she says. “It’s crazy. My kids are like, ‘Can we keep the AC on?’ And I’m like, yeah, you can!”

‘You’re Basically Inside of an Oven’

In Oregon’s temperate climate, efficiency updates help with comfort, air quality, and savings. But in the desert heat of an Arizona summer, home efficiency can be a matter of life and death.

When temperatures routinely reach triple digits Fahrenheit during the day, and then stay above 90 degrees at night—which happened 29 times in Phoenix this summer—living in an inefficient mobile home or park model recreational vehicle can be life-threatening, says Kath Noble, president of the Arizona Association of Manufactured Home Owners (AAMHO).

“The old metal ones, it’s harder to cool them in the summer,” she says. “Even if you have a really good AC system, you cannot get the temperature more than about 10 or 12 degrees below what it is outside. So if it’s 110 outside, you could maybe get it down to 100 or 98 degrees inside … and if the power goes out, you’re basically inside of an oven.”

In Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, manufactured homes and RVs account for just 5 percent of the county’s housing stock, but roughly a quarter of all indoor heat-related deaths in recent years.

“A lot of people who live in park model RVs are winter visitors,” Noble says. “But with housing costs the way they are, with people getting older and living in senior parks like ours, many people are starting to make Arizona their only home, so they’re now spending summers here, too. And in a park model, your electrical costs can really skyrocket.”

For seniors or others on a fixed income, that can lead to some hard choices. “What a lot of people are doing is they’re turning off their air conditioning,” Noble says, “even if it’s still over 85 or 90 degrees every night—that’s the low, not the high—so it’s really dangerous.”

In some older mobile home parks, outdated electrical infrastructure presents its own challenge. Until recently, some park owners would forbid tenants from installing air conditioners, even in deadly heat, because of the strain it placed on dated electrical equipment. Arizona had to pass a law in 2024 guaranteeing tenants the right to install cooling devices.

Meanwhile, in a manufactured home community, the park landlord is often the direct customer of the electric utility, while residents pay their utility bills to the landlord. That means residents can’t always qualify for utility company programs designed to help them, such as low-income fuel assistance, energy audits, efficiency rebates, or even balanced billing arrangements.

“We don’t qualify for many city, county, and federal programs that would help us do upgrades,” Noble says. “Even if one of the big companies offers, for example, energy assessments, where they come out and look at your home to see if they can help you with energy efficiency, we don’t qualify for that. They don’t know who we are, because we’re not individual customers.”

Utility companies are often a main source of funding for residential retrofits. In Oregon, for example—as in more than 30 other states nationwide—small ratepayer surcharges on utility bills help fund rebate programs for upgrades such as insulation, air sealing, and high-efficiency heating and cooling equipment.

They Don’t Make ’Em like They Used to (Sometimes That’s a Good Thing)

Early mobile homes were built to varied and often subpar standards. But since 1976, all manufactured homes have been constructed to meet a national building code set by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

That code has been revised many times over the years, with HUD issuing major updates as recently as 2024. But the last time HUD substantially overhauled the code’s energy efficiency standards was also the first time—over 30 years ago, in 1994. As an indication of the prevailing attitude toward air quality at the time, at that point one could still smoke on international flights.

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act that Congress passed in 2026, however, may finally deliver long-awaited energy efficiency updates to the HUD code. The law requires HUD to produce updated standards for manufactured homes within one year, and subsequent updates every three years, says Arica Young, director of housing access and affordability at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. “It gives deadlines, and it means hopefully the code will be evergreen.” (The act also did away with a 1974 rule requiring all manufactured homes to have a permanent steel chassis—even though only 10 percent of them are ever relocated—which is expected to reduce prices by up to 9 percent.)

Ensuring that all manufactured homes coming off the factory floor are more energy efficient will result in lower utility bills for homeowners, year after year. And it’s something the industry can easily handle, Young says, because companies are already building two types of energy-efficient manufactured housing. “There’s the Energy Star certified homes, which are probably more energy efficient than a lot of site-built homes,” she says, as well as the DOE Efficient New Home program. “So there’s already a template. It’s not like they have to reinvent the wheel.”

Some builders, such as Clayton, the largest producer of manufactured homes in the US, have already updated their factories to be able to meet higher efficiency standards in response to a since-expired tax credit that was in the Inflation Reduction Act.

Purchasing an Energy Star–ready manufactured home adds about $6 to $24 a month to a homeowner’s monthly mortgage payment, depending on the region and size of the home, but will save between $12 and $63 each month in energy costs, according to EnergyStar.gov estimates, essentially creating positive cash flow for owners.

And those savings are compared to the baseline HUD code; for older mobile homes built before HUD added efficiency standards to its code—especially those in poor condition—it can be more cost effective to simply replace the home. So in addition to funding retrofits, some states, including Maine and Oregon, offer programs to help low- and middle-income residents replace an old manufactured home with a new, energy-efficient one.

In Oregon, for example, about 60 percent of manufactured homes were built before HUD’s first energy standards took effect in 1995. “The way those homes were built can make energy-saving improvements more difficult, expensive, and less effective,” says Scott Leonard, senior project manager at the nonprofit Energy Trust of Oregon. The wall cavities in such homes are often too thin—just two inches deep—to add a meaningful amount of insulation, for example, and the electrical systems may require major upgrades before new HVAC equipment can be installed.

Instead of putting more money into a home than it’s potentially worth, it can make sense for some homeowners to replace a pre-1995 manufactured home with a new, energy-efficient one. “We’re lowering costs for families now and in the future,” Leonard says. “They see lower energy bills right away, and they’re also not having to pay for other repairs needed for an aging home.”

As a program navigator with Energy Trust of Oregon, Eddie Sepeda works directly with homeowners who are interested in replacing older, often deteriorated mobile homes. He helps them apply for the state’s forgivable loan program, manage contractors, and sometimes acts as a counselor during what can be a stressful few months. “I really enjoy helping seniors, because they’re living on limited income and they can’t do much more, they’re barely surviving,” he says. “At the end of the day, it’s life-changing for them.”

Sepeda recalls a woman whose mobile home was built in the 1970s. “During the summer, she couldn’t be in her home because it was too hot—she had to go over to the community room to cool off,” he recalls. In addition to efficient heating and cooling systems and a tighter building envelope (“insulated at R-41 in the ceiling, R-33 in the floor, R-21 in the walls,” Sepeda notes), her new home also had wider doorways and closets to accommodate her mobility issues.

She was beaming when Sepeda came to check up on her in the new home. “She was just going through, showing me around: ‘This is my kitchen, this is my laundry room,’” Sepeda says. “And all I could do was smile. I said, ‘I’m so fortunate that I was able to help you with this, I really am.’ And she started crying.”

‘Too Good to Be True’

In communities where Sepeda has helped residents in the past, people are now on the lookout for him, eager to learn about the program from someone who has earned their trust. But when he first started his outreach in 2023, “it wasn’t like that,” he says. “The state program was new, and nobody had heard about it, so it just sounded too good to be true.” People would ask him, with no shortage of skepticism, “‘What are you getting out of this?’” he says.

Elise Foerster, energy projects specialist at ROC-NH, knows the feeling. When she hosts pop-up events at resident-owned communities (ROCs) around New Hampshire to explain the energy efficiency rebates and other available grants, she says, “There is a lack of trust sometimes, where people think the opportunity is too good to be true. Like, what’s the catch?”

Others simply don’t want someone coming inside their house to do an energy audit, feeling it’s too intrusive. But those who pursue such opportunities—like Len Stuart, resident of the Medvil Cooperative, a 55-and-older community in Goffstown, N.H.—are typically very glad they did.

“This place in the wintertime was cold,” Stuart says of his early-1980s manufactured home. “You could feel the cold air bleeding in through the walls and windowpanes.” Through NHSaves, a statewide weatherization program funded by small surcharges on New Hampshire residents’ utility bills, Stuart received a home energy audit and a $6,000 grant that covered about two-thirds of the recommended energy efficiency work.

“They added six more inches of insulation blown in underneath, which was the principal thing that made the big difference, between that and the air sealing and the doorways,” Stuart says. “They did a [blower door] test in the doorway to measure the air exfiltration of the building, and I think when all was said and done, they cut the actual air exfiltration by half to two-thirds.”

After getting the work completed, Stuart used 13 percent less propane last winter—one of the coldest in years in New Hampshire—while keeping cozy and comfortable. And unlike in years past, he says he rarely had to turn on the electric baseboard heat in his three-season sunroom, either. “It really made a difference in the comfort of the home,” he says.

“I think in the past, there had been a misconception that you couldn’t weatherize manufactured homes,” Foerster says. “But you can, and you should. It really improves the life of the person living there, and the life of the house itself.”

Affordable Now—and Later, Too

Before moving to Medvil in 2018, Stuart had lived for decades in a single-family ranch across town. But by the time he retired, he’d grown weary of maintaining the one-acre yard, so he and his wife chose to downsize. The manufactured home community offered an easy and affordable option near his grandchildren. “Both of my children at that time were in town, so I wanted to stay near them, and this was the only affordable option,” Stuart says. With the median sale price of a single-family home in Goffstown reaching $539,000 in August, he adds, “Were I moving here today instead of 35 years ago, I wouldn’t be moving here—I would be totally priced out.”

Stuart, who served on the town’s zoning board of appeals for years, sees manufactured housing as one way to help ease our housing shortage. “Allowing manufactured homes on any qualifying residential lot is something that I think would solve a great deal of problems,” he says.

Back in Oregon, with the median price of a house in Corvallis approaching $600,000, Davis says her manufactured home park offered an affordable option in a place she and her children love. “The schools here are phenomenal,” she says, and there’s a free transit stop nearby. But it’s also the sense of community within the park itself. “Everybody’s looking after each other. My can opener broke, actually, two days ago, and my neighbor opened my can of soup.”

That cooperative spirit of generosity doesn’t surprise Davis, who grew up in manufactured housing. But now, with a dramatically lower electricity bill each month, Davis and her family can afford to dream a little bigger, putting those energy savings toward a family vacation fund. “We’re hoping to go on a family trip to Australia to visit our friends,” she says. “We’ve been just hoarding money, staying at home and saving for that, and we’re almost there.”

Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: A new double-wide manufactured home is delivered and installed in two sections. Credit: Greg Kelton/Getty Images.