The IRS Energy Efficient Home Improvement Credit has been on the books since the Inflation Reduction Act expanded it in 2022, and it remains available through 2032 — but tax professionals consistently report that working-class homeowners are leaving the money unclaimed. For the 2025 tax year, the credit covers 30 percent of qualifying improvement costs, up to $3,200 annually. That cap resets every year. For someone like Linda Lombardi, that reset mattered more than she initially understood.
I first came across Linda’s name in the comments section of an article I wrote last November about home repair assistance programs in Tennessee. She had written three paragraphs — methodical, numbered, no typos — describing a situation that had been unraveling for months. She wasn’t asking for sympathy. She was asking whether anyone had actually used the credit successfully. I reached out the same afternoon.
A Month When Everything Broke at Once
When I sat down with Linda Lombardi over a video call in late March 2026, she was still working six days a week. At 47, she has spent two decades as a licensed HVAC technician in the Nashville metro area, the kind of work that pays steadily but not extravagantly. She estimated her gross income for 2025 at roughly $54,000 — enough to stay housed, not enough to absorb large unexpected costs without consequences.
The trouble started in September 2025. Her 2014 Ford F-150, the truck she uses to haul equipment between job sites, threw a transmission fault code on a Tuesday morning. The repair estimate came in at $2,850. Two weeks later, a home energy audit she’d scheduled through her utility company flagged her central HVAC unit — a 17-year-old system she’d been nursing along — as operating at roughly 60 percent efficiency. Replacement quotes ranged from $5,900 to $7,200.
Linda told me she put the truck repair on a credit card and deferred the HVAC decision. Then the roof started leaking above her back bedroom — an inspection in October put remediation at $3,400. By November, she was carrying roughly $6,200 in new debt, facing a $6,500 HVAC replacement she hadn’t made yet, and working without a reliable vehicle by renting a cargo van three days a week at $89 per day.
What She Knew — and What She Didn’t
Linda is analytically sharp about most financial matters. She keeps a spreadsheet tracking her monthly expenses, maintains a small emergency fund she tries not to touch, and files her own taxes each year using tax software. What she did not know, she told me, was that the Energy Efficient Home Improvement Credit had been substantially restructured under the Inflation Reduction Act and that HVAC equipment — specifically heat pumps — now qualifies for a separate, higher subcategory of the credit.
Under the current rules, the $3,200 annual cap is divided into two buckets. Improvements like insulation, windows, doors, and non-heat-pump HVAC qualify for up to $1,200. Heat pumps and heat pump water heaters fall into a second bucket worth up to $2,000. Both can be claimed in the same tax year, which is how the $3,200 total is reached. Critically, the credit is nonrefundable — it reduces tax liability dollar for dollar but does not generate a refund beyond what you owe.
Linda had initially assumed the credit was for solar panels or major renovations — the kind of investment she associated with higher-income homeowners. “I thought it was for people building new houses or putting in solar,” she said. “I didn’t know a heat pump replacement counted. That’s literally what I sell to other people.”
The Process of Actually Claiming It
After finding Linda’s comment and connecting by phone in late November 2025, I pointed her toward the IRS Form 5695, which is the form used to claim residential energy credits. She went quiet for a moment on the call, then said she’d look at it over the weekend. When she followed up a week later, her tone had shifted.
She had decided to move forward with the heat pump replacement she’d been postponing. She chose a contractor she’d worked alongside professionally, negotiated the installation down to $6,480, and confirmed the unit met the IRS efficiency requirements — a minimum SEER2 rating of 15.2 for split systems in the southern region, per Department of Energy guidelines. She also added attic insulation at $890, which qualified under the second credit subcategory.
Linda filed her 2025 return in late February 2026. Her federal tax liability for the year was approximately $3,100, which meant the full $2,211 credit applied. Her refund — which in prior years had averaged around $400 — came in at $1,847. She received the deposit on March 14, 2026.
The Relief Was Real — But Incomplete
When I checked back in with Linda in late March, she was direct about what the money did and didn’t solve. The $1,847 refund went immediately toward the credit card balance she’d accumulated since September. It reduced that balance from $6,200 to approximately $4,350. The roof repair remains undone. And the truck — the original crisis that started all of this — is still sitting at a family member’s property outside Murfreesboro waiting for a repair she hasn’t been able to fund.
She’s been managing without it since January by scheduling her jobs geographically and continuing to rent vans on high-demand days. She estimates the van rentals have cost her roughly $1,100 since October 2025 — money she describes as “paying twice” for a problem she hasn’t fixed.
She’s also now aware that the annual cap on the credit resets for tax year 2026. If she can afford the roof repair this year and uses qualifying materials, she may be able to claim a portion of that cost on next year’s return as well — potentially another few hundred dollars back. She’s tracking it in her spreadsheet.
What Linda’s Story Reflects About a Wider Gap
There is no shortage of policy language around the Energy Efficient Home Improvement Credit. What’s scarce is the translation of that language into something a working HVAC technician in Nashville can find and use before she’s already deep in debt. Linda’s situation was not exceptional — it was ordinary in exactly the ways that make it easy to miss.
She is not unsophisticated. She files her own taxes. She tracks her finances. She works in the industry the credit is literally designed to support. And she still spent months carrying mounting debt without knowing a partially offsetting credit existed. The information gap is not a character flaw; it’s a structural problem with how these programs are communicated.
She told me that since filing her return, she’s brought up the credit with three clients who were on the fence about HVAC upgrades. Two of them followed up with their tax preparers. She doesn’t know what they ended up doing with the information — but she passed it along, which is more than the system did for her.
Linda Lombardi is still dealing with an unrepaired truck, a roof that leaks when it rains hard, and a credit card balance that will take most of the year to clear. The $2,211 credit didn’t fix her life. But it narrowed the distance between where she was in November and where she needed to be — and that, as she told me near the end of our last call, was not nothing.
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