Daily Home Renovation Tips

Today, April 22nd 2008, being Earth Day we thought we would write about an email we received concerning our series of articles on the ecoENERGY Retrofit - Homes program.

We were actually quite humbled to receive an email less than a week ago from The Honourable Gary Lunn, P.C., M.P., Minister, Natural Resources Canada. Yes, that Gary Lunn!

We had contacted via email the leaders and selected members of all major federal political parties in Canada as well as the major and many local media outlets on three occasions this past winter to make them aware of our ecoENERGY Retrofit program articles. We are only a small personal web site and so, as one would expect, we received only one email prior to The Honourable Mr. Lunn’s, that being from Mr. Jack Layton, M.P., Leader, New Democratic Party. We sincerely thank (and have done so privately) both Mr. Lunn, Mr. Layton and their offices for actually taking the time to read our email and some of our ecoENERGY Retrofit related articles from our site, as well as for taking the time to contact us here at Daily Home Renovation Tips.

Not even the media (print, television, radio) picked up our articles.

The Honourable Mr. Lunn appreciated our enthusiasm for the ecoENERGY Retrofit - Homes program through the many articles we have written on the subject (simply go to the ecoENERGY category so see them all ). He also indicated that one of the statistics we used was not correct, so I would like to pass on his corrected information.

In prior articles we indicated that the ecoENERGY Retrofit program has been funded with $220 million. That is correct. What was not correct, or perhaps needed to be clarified, was that $160 million of this total is funding for the ecoENERGY Retrofit - Homes program with the remaining $60 supporting two other components of the ecoENERGY Retrofit program directed and small commercial, institutional and industrial sectors.

In our article ecoENERGY Retrofit Program - 1st Anniversary Progress, we indicated that the value of the incentives under the ecoENERGY Retrofit - Homes program was $17.5 million, which was correct. The more accurate total funding for the Homes portion of the program provided by Mr. Lunn is $160 million. This would then result in over 10.9% of the available program funding having been realized by participating home owners. Yes this percentage will increase as home owners have, as has been reported by us in prior articles previously, 18 months between the initial ‘D’ energy assessment and follow-up ‘E’ energy assessment on their home.

The Honourable Mr. Lunn confirmed that the goal of the ecoENERGY Retrofit - Homes program is to encourage energy upgrades in 140,000 dwellings over the program’s current 4 year duration scheduled to end March 2011.

He also advised that the program’s intent is to operating ‘very efficiently, with more than 90 cents of every single dollar going directly into the pockets of consumers for home retrofits.’ This would explain then the absence of significant publicity by the government for this program. Rightly or wrongly, with this direction, it really does need to be up to the national and local media outlets to write more articles on the program and its progress there is minimal publicity for the program within it’s funding. As well, we hope that our extremely small corner of the Internet world here at Daily Home Renovation Tips helps to also make other Canadian home owners aware of the program as well.

Just yesterday our next door neighbour asked us about our windows we had replaced late last year. When I brought up the ecoENERGY Retrofit - Homes program, she knew nothing about it at all. Now she does.  :-)

On this Earth Day, what can you do to help reduce the consumption of non-renewable energy resources beyond your own home that will cost you absolutely nothing? Simply tell your neighbour about the ecoENERGY Retrofit - Homes program and send them to either or both:

• Natural Resources Canada web site explaining the 5 easy steps of the program, or
• ecoENERGY page of Daily Home Renovation Tips containing a brief summary of the program and links to all 15 articles we wrote about the Energy Efficiency Evaluation Report (i.e. energy audit) we received on our own home with the charts and graphs and so on.

You don’t have to understand how a car runs to drive it. You don’t have to understand (not that we do either) terms like EnerGuide Rating (relative energy efficiency of the home) or Gigajoules (an energy consumption measurement) or tons of CO2(I still don’t understand how a ‘gas’ can weigh multiple tons!). All you need to do is, (A) if you are a Canadian home owner is to participate yourself in the ecoENERGY Retrofit - Homes program and (B) home owner or not, tell your neighbour of the program so they can at least be aware and get the initial energy audit prior to undertaking any energy conservation related home improvement so they don’t loose out on available grant money as we did.