Extremidades caseras diarias de la renovación

Happy New Year. What are your resolutions? Here’s one that’s different. If you are a home owner, please resolve to have an energy audit in January. Don’t wait. Do it now.

This is the first in a series of articles about the ecoENERGY evaluation we went through in November 2007 and, more directly, about the ecoENERGY report we received over the holidays.

If you are not familiar with the ecoENERGY program, please use the link Government of Canada ecoENERGY Retrofit Grant, which contains lots and lots of details. This grant is to homeowners in Canada. The  site indicates the following to qualify for this grant:

“To qualify, follow these five easy steps:

1. Hire a qualified energy advisor to perform an energy evaluation of your home.
2. Select the improvements from your home energy action checklist.
3. Implement the recommended energy upgrades within 18 months.
4. Call your energy advisor to perform your post-retrofit evaluation, to confirm your new energy rating and to submit your application on your behalf.
5. Wait for up to 90 days to receive your cheque based on the eligible upgrades performed! “

How much money are we really talking about?

It depends on the improvements your home needs per the ecoENERGY evaluation. In our case, the evaluation indicated we could be eligible for up to $2,700 and change. If your home needs a lot of energy conservation improvements, you can be looking in the neighbourhood of $10,000 in both Federal and Provincial grants. And, this does not include the energy (heat, water, power) savings that you will realize each year from the energy conservation.

What does it cost you, the home owner? Well, the cost of the energy evaluation by the firm we chose was around $321, of which $150 will be refunded back to us by the Province of Ontario. The ‘post-retrofit’ evaluation will cost you another $150-ish, or so.

Oh, and there is that little thing about it costing you the actual cost of the energy conservation related renovations.

Now, I am sure you would like to see our evaluation report, wouldn’t you? Well, we will show you many parts of it, where we are told we can improve the energy efficiencies in our home, if we actually made the recommended improvements, and so on…..in the coming posts. There’s a lot of stuff here, way too much for a single post.

For now, here is a picture of the envelope it came in.

The bottom line. Financially, every home owner should participate in the ecoENERGY Retrofit program. What do you have to lose? …..except as some say…..out planet!

To continue to the next article in this series on our experiences with the ecoENEGY Residential Retrofit assessment, simply select this link to Part 2.