There’s no denying that the past few years have been rough for Gene Coombs, an 86-year-old Korean War-era Army veteran. The retired organic farmer and jack-of-all-trades has been spending solitary winters living in just a couple of the rooms of his ramshackle farmhouse on Route 202 in Troy, closing off the rest of the space in a futile effort to save money on heating fuel. Despite that, he was still buying 230 gallons of oil a month, a cost that was hard to squeeze out of his small Social Security stipend.