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Brayton Cherry pointed to a single sheet of paper in his dining. February's electric bill at 8 Washington St. — heat, hot water, cooking and lights for the 2,000-square-foot Old Town home he and his partner, Krissy Goodman, gut-renovated last year — came to $330.
"That's the whole little kit and caboodle of energy," Cherry said.
The 1756 house was one of nine on Sustainable Marblehead's third annual Green Homes Tour, held Saturday. The self-guided event drew visitors from across the North Shore and as far as Cambridge, Massachusetts. Tickets were $10 per person. Five homes were new to the tour and four returned from previous years.
Each house told a different version of the same story: trading oil, gas or propane for some combination of heat pumps, solar panels, induction stoves and deep insulation. The homeowners stayed home to walk visitors through what worked, what it cost and what they would do differently.
At 8 Washington St., the renovation was thorough enough to qualify as new construction under home energy rating standards. Cherry and Goodman installed foam insulation in the walls and basement, an electric heat pump system for heating and cooling, a heat pump water heater, an induction range, radiant heat in the bathroom floors and Energy Star appliances throughout. Where the Old and Historic Districts Commission required single-pane windows facing the street, they installed interior storms behind them.
"We came in thinking we want to have the most efficient home we can," Goodman said. "We came from a gas heating place, and we both were like, we don't want to gas."
The couple said the house held its temperature through the past winter's heavy snow and below-zero stretches.
Across town in Naugus Head, David and Damaris Berner have been chasing the same goal since 2016 at 5 Whittier Road, a 2,000-square-foot Acorn home built in 1984 around an early-generation rooftop solar system. That original setup piped heated water through copper tubing into a basement tank — equipment the Berners stripped out shortly after moving in. They replaced the propane furnace with a Mitsubishi cold-climate heat pump and six mini-splits, added an induction stove and a heat pump water heater, and put 28 solar panels on the roof in 2018.
With solar credits and renewable-energy certificates, Damaris Berner said, the household's annual electric bill runs essentially to zero. A wood stove still handles the coldest weeks.
"It's a nice heat," she said. "We like wood heat."
Other stops layered different versions of the same arithmetic. At 183 Green St., Katie Farrell has phased upgrades to her 1960 ranch since 2017, finishing in November 2025 with a ducted heat pump that replaced an oil burner. At 24 Central St. in the Shipyard, Sam and Vivian Bennett's 1910 home now runs on 22 rooftop panels, two heat pump condensers and a 60-gallon heat pump water heater, all installed in 2022 after the gas furnace failed. At 76 Beacon St. on Peaches Point, Gary Canner and Luanne Off's 1917 granite carriage house — originally a five-bay garage for the estate across the street — was redesigned by Canner, an architect, and outfitted with a heat pump, an instant water heater, radiant floor warming and an induction cooktop.
Inside one of the homes, Marblehead Light Department customers could collect rebate information from Joe Coles, efficiency senior coordinator at the Massachusetts Municipal Wholesale Electric Company, which administers the utility's NextZero program. NextZero schedules in-home energy reviews and tracks rebates on heat pumps, induction stoves and connected devices that shift household use away from peak hours. National Grid gas customers were directed to Mass Save.
Coles drove roughly three hours from East Hampton in Western Massachusetts to staff the table. He said it was the first full home tour of this kind he had attended.
"You have these old homes on the water, so they're very desirable, and they're all close together," he said.
New this year was a team of volunteer Energy Coaches stationed at each stop to answer questions and book one-on-one follow-up sessions with residents weighing their own projects.
Petra Langer, a former Sustainable Marblehead executive director and board chair, worked the registration table at 5 Whittier Road. Visitors had traveled from as far as Cambridge to walk through the homes, she said.
"This tour has grown every year," Langer said. "We have new homeowners and people coming."
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