Student Spotlight: How Amelia Fox Is Helping Mississippi Homeowners Take Control of Their Energy

When Amelia Fox signed up for her first BPI course through HeatSpring, she had already done something most building performance professionals never do: she used herself as the test case. Before she ever knocked on a client’s door, she spent years turning her own 50-year-old Mississippi home into a living laboratory, installing a solar + storage system, going nearly off-grid, and doing most of the weatherization work herself along with her late husband, Charlie.

Now she’s taking what she learned and putting it to work in her community.

A Background Built for This Work 

Amelia’s path to building performance is not a straight line, but the through line is unmistakable: she has always been someone who figures out what’s going on beneath the surface.

She spent years as a professor at Mississippi State University teaching students to build and fly autonomous drones and use spectral radiometry to assess crop nitrogen levels from above. Her doctoral research refined vegetative indexes used to read crop health through camera imagery. She understood, at a very technical level, how light and thermal signatures reveal invisible conditions.

When she transitioned out of academia, she leaned into something she and Charlie had been doing together for decades: fixing houses. They moved 21 times over 42 years of marriage, and in between every move, they worked on a house. Charlie was the electrician, the carpenter, the one who could do it all. Amelia was the closer, handling the finish work and the details. It was a great partnership.

After Charlie passed away, Amelia took stock of what she had left and what she still wanted to do. The answer came into focus when she looked at her own home. “The only thing I really truly enjoy doing,” she says, “is fixing homes.”

Building the Test Case at Home First

Amelia’s house in Starkville, Mississippi now runs almost entirely on solar and storage. Her system produces 48 to 60 kilowatt-hours a day in summer, and her daily operating cost has dropped to about 10 cents. She got her EPA 608 certification, her NABCEP PV Associate credential, and started building her building performance toolkit before she ever took on a paying client.

She also went after her BPI credentials through HeatSpring, earning her BSP and BA-T credentials. She traveled to Southfield, Michigan for the BA-T blower door exam and did well enough to surprise herself. She’s currently studying the building science principles and codes she’ll need for the BA-P exam, with Energy Auditor (EA) on the horizon after that.

The credential work has always been in service of something more practical. Before she put $85,000 worth of solar and storage on her own house, she wanted to understand exactly what she was doing. “I wasn’t going to do that and not know what I’m doing,” she explains. So she learned, and then she kept going.

She insulated her attic to R-50. She figured out that her fireplace had been improperly installed, with only one flue liner instead of two, pulling cold air directly into the house. She found a specialist in Alabama to fix it. She hung European-style door covers with thermal linings across every exterior door, and on the coldest nights of the year, she measured a 17-degree temperature difference on either side of the curtain.

The TIR camera work she does now connects directly to her academic background. Spectral radiometry and thermal imaging operate on the same principle: you capture what the eye can’t see, and the data tells you what’s really happening.

Launching Fox Geomatic Solutions

Amelia founded Fox Geomatic Solutions, LLC to formalize her home performance consulting work. She plans to take one paying client a week and spend the rest of her time doing charitable work for homeowners who can’t afford professional services. 

Mississippi is the poorest state in the country, and her corner of it is no exception. Electric bills regularly hit $300 in summer, and with the Tennessee Valley Authority now planning to rebuild the grid and pass the costs to ratepayers through kilowatt-hour charges, those bills could climb higher still. A lot of families in Starkville can’t absorb that high of a quarterly bill.

Amelia’s approach is to meet people where they are. For some clients, that means a full blower door test with combustion appliance zone (CAZ) testing, pressure pan testing, and a detailed written technical report. 

For others, it might just mean a conversation at the end of the driveway. When a neighbor recently asked whether he could run power tools off $50 solar panels, Amelia walked him through why that wouldn’t work, not in a dismissive way, but in a teaching one. She loves those questions.

“If they’re going to pay me, they might as well have fun,” she says. She hands clients her old Android phone with a TIR camera attached and lets them walk the house while she does pressure pan testing. When they find a bad window, they find it themselves.

She believes deeply in doing energy efficiency work before solar. She has surveyed homes where the owners put in a solar system without addressing the building envelope first, and the system can’t keep up. Her advice is consistent: tighten the house, reduce the load, and then right-size the generation.

Why This Work, Why Now

After losing Charlie, Amelia took about a year before she figured out what came next. The answer was already around her: the house they had worked on together, the equipment she had invested in, the neighbors she could see struggling with electric bills they couldn’t afford.

Mississippi’s grid is ranked among the worst in the country. She recognized that most homeowners don’t act until financial pain forces them to. She is trying to get ahead of that.

Learn more about the BPI Building Analyst Certification – One Week Intensive – LIVE that Amelia did in Michigan.