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Canada Greener Homes

Last year, the Canada Greener Homes government program offered grants and interest-free loans to reduce the amount of energy our homes use. I gave it a try.

The way the program worked as based on energy assessments. One before retrofits, and one after. I found this to be a really interesting process, in two parts. First, the inspector did a walk through and carefully collected information about the house. Number of windows and doors, types of insulation and appliances, and so on.

But the most interesting part was measurement of airflow. My inspector sealed the front door with a giant high powered fan, as shown above. Then, he measured air leakage over a period of time. This gives an indication of how well sealed things are. In other words, how well can your house keep prevent ingress and egress of hot and cold air, depending the the season.

The energy assessment took about an hour. It gave the inspector hard data to plug into a standard computer program about the house and airflow.

My house, it seems, used 220 Gigajoules of energy a year. Being a 30 year old home, this result as about fifty percent higher than a new home would use, with all the latest insulations. Not surprisingly, most of my energy used was natural gas for heating.

As expected, my biggest sources of energy waste were windows, walls and general air leakage. So, could I do better?

Canada Greener Homes Improvements

In the end, I decided double my amount of attic insulation. This made sense because the grant program covered about half the cost and I would get pretty fast payback. Second, I replaced six big windows in the master bedroom and the door to the deck, which was very leaky. Grants for doors and windows only provided $125 per window opening. Boy, are windows ever expensive.

My post retrofit energy assessment shows that I reduced my annual energy use by 9%, down to 200 GJ per year. This should save me $200 per year. Not much, but it contributes to the cost of the interest free loan. Plus, our home will be more comfortable.

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