BANGOR – It was a Tom Gocze moment.

“We’re back. Got a problem. You’ve got to see this.”

The TV camera points at the top stair in Gocze’s house, the better to give viewers a look at the step the home-repair guy has fixed up and coated with a layer of oil-based stain.

Except the stuff won’t set up. It just won’t dry. Not only is the repair project off track, but the show is going to run short.

Not to worry. Video editor Tom Gocze rounds out his TV show, “Hot and Cold,” with part of an old episode on relative humidity, filmed with Dick Hill, his partner on the original “Hot and Cold,” the radio show which airs Saturday mornings on WVOM radio.

The next week, Gocze tries something different on the stair, it works, and he’s off on his next project.

After 13 years on the radio show, eight on the TV and experience as an energy contractor and builder of new construction, Gocze has a new project he can really sink his teeth into.

As viewers of his show this spring know, he’s totally renovating a small old Cape on the coast of Maine. There’s always something new to uncover, and a Gocze way of looking at it – and fixing it.

“Holy mackerel, that is one monster sink … We’ve got some square-cut nails that’s going to give us an idea of how old it is … There’s the fuse box, right theah … Then we’ve got a big piece of 10-3 [wire] that goes to something. It’s not the worst scary I’ve ever seen, but it’s not good.”

Gocze is in his glory getting to know the old building intimately, all the little secrets hidden under floors and behind lath and plaster.

“It’s about 100 years old, a typical old Cape,” he explained just before starting the work, sitting in the office in his Bangor business, Foam Insulation Outlet.

Gocze hopes to take the house, which he figures used 600-700 gallons of oil to heat for a winter, and wind up with one that will keep warm with a more economical 100 gallons a season.

Energy, of course, is one of his passions. Gocze delights in showing viewers how a thermal imaging device that helped firefighters save people in a burning building can be used on a reverse setting to help a homeowner locate cold spots, where heat is lost through windows and cracks.

“We’ve become oblivious to the fact that a house that should take 400 gallons [of oil] to heat takes 1,200,” he pointed out – this from a guy who points out he never realized how big the old house he bought in Bangor was until his family moved into it.

Over the years, Gocze’s renovations have reduced the number of gallons of heating oil his home uses by two-thirds.

The main thing, he said of the home where he lives with his wife and children, “was comfort. You don’t have to chop up this beautiful old house to make it work economically.”

Bigger houses are also the norm in many new neighborhoods, he acknowledged, “but I’m fascinated by small houses.”

Of course, even a small house can be a big project.

“At some point, you have to have a leap of faith, when you try something new,” he said. “I always look to what people have done in the past and try to do it with new materials.”

In fact, Gocze has quite an appreciation of the past. He served several years on the Historic Preservation Commission in Bangor, where he was vocal about the need to preserve the old Waterworks on State Street.

One of the television shows was a tour of the brick landmark on the Penobscot River, where the city used to clean drinking water by filtering it with sand.

Another program was a tour of Bangor Water District’s standpipe, with the camera getting into nooks and crannies that public visitors don’t see the four times a year they are allowed to climb to the top.

Gocze produces 25 to 30 new shows a year and edits them himself. He seems to have a special place in his heart for any program that features Dick Hill, the retired University of Maine professor who’s long been an energy expert in these parts.

“He’s got such a great laugh,” Gocze added.

He also enjoys doing shows with Charlie McArthur, the Sangerville inventor who’s always got something new going with cars, tractors and heat producers.

“It is Rube Goldberg-ish, what we do a lot of times,” Gocze said. “Why I want to live here is because of these kinds of people.”

Gocze, of course, is one of “these kinds of people,” someone who keeps little electric cars in his warehouse, including “one I bought on eBay, and it runs.”

He’s also someone who’s always looking for a new way to get something done. His viewers can identify with that, telling him that the show on duct tape was one of their favorites.

For now, the little house on the coast is the project that’s keeping him busy.

The shows that aired this spring on the first phase of renovation will be rerun beginning July 20 while he produces more programs for this fall, including one on the property’s septic system.

No doubt some viewers will tune in to the reruns this summer to hear him ponder, one more time, the field mice that would like to live indoors:

“Access of critters into the house is not considered an appropriate activity,” he says with a straight face, almost.

It’s another Tom Gocze moment.

The “Hot and Cold” television show airs at 11:30 a.m. Sundays on WVII-TV Channel 7. The radio show with Dick Hill and Gocze airs 7-10 a.m. Saturdays on WVOM 103.9 and WCME 96.7, Newcastle.