A home energy retrofit pathway sets out a plan for making your home more comfortable, resilient, and energy efficient. Your Registered Energy Advisor will assess the current energy efficiency of your home, recommend specific upgrades, and help you develop your retrofit plan that’s a right fit for your unique home, goals, and living and financial situations.
Creating Your Home’s Deep Energy RetrofitPlan
A good retrofit plan bundles upgrades into three steps to improve your home’s energy efficiency. Depending on the age of your home or past upgrades, your starting place on the pathway may vary.
Generally, planning and completing these steps in the recommended order maximizes the efficiency, impact, and cost of your retrofit journey.
For instance, if a retrofit plan leaves out the insulation and other building envelope upgrades identified in Step One, and your home is losing a lot of heat, a new heat pump or furnace will need to be larger and use more energy to compensate for that extra heat loss. That’s a more expensive option to buy and operate over the long run!
However, if you live in a newer home with an excellent building envelope your energy advisor may recommend topping up insulation in the attic and moving directly to Step Two.
Three Steps in a deep energy retrofit project
Step 1 Inspecting And Upgrading Your Home’s Building Envelope
Heating our houses is the largest user of home energy. Your home’s building shell will need to be inspected for locations of air leakage, air leakage rate, and insulation levels. Upgrades may include insulation in the basement, walls, exposed floors, and attic, along with window and door upgrades, and sealing and draft-proofing cracks and gaps around your home.
Air leakage control: Air leakage can account for as much as 40% of the heat loss in our houses. Sealing cracks and gaps reduces this leakage. Air-sealing is done around windows, doors, vents, electrical and plumbing fixtures that bridge the interior and exterior of your home.
Insulation: High insulation levels in the thermal barrier of your home is the most reliable way to keep the heat in. Insulating the attic, basement, and exterior walls helps stop heat from either leaving your home in winter or entering your home in summer.
Windows: Replacing old inefficient windows with high-efficiency windows, like double-glazed units with dense gas insulation and Low-E coatings, greatly improves efficiency and comfort. When in doubt, look for the ENERGY STAR label for high-efficiency units.
Doors: Replacing old drafty doors with high-efficiency models is another way to boost energy efficiency and comfort. Make sure that your door fits right and your doorframe is draftproofed to integrate with your building envelope’s continuous air-barrier.
Ducts: Though not technically part of a home’s building envelope, in homes with centrally ducted HVAC-systems, air-sealing and insulating ducts can improve the efficiency of heating, cooling, and ventilation systems.
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In this step, your home’s space-heating and -cooling, water heater, lighting, and other appliances are checked and upgraded as needed to improve efficiency. This includes installing a heat-recovery ventilator, and ensuring your HVAC systems are properly sized for your insulated and leakproofed home.
Upgrading your furnace and air-conditioner to a heat pump system will cost less once your building envelope is upgraded since a smaller system will now be able to cover your home’s smaller heating and cooling needs.
Upgrading ventilation with a heat-recovery ventilator (HRV) will ensure good air quality by controlling and filtering the fresh air coming into the home and will pre-heat or pre-cool it with the stale air being cycled out of the home.
Water heating is the second largest area of household energy use and cost. Replacing your water heater with a heat pump water heater can increase efficiency and reduce costs.
Adding a drain-water heat-recovery (DWHR) pipe will increase the energy efficiency of your water heating by recycling residual heat from draining water from, for example: a shower, to preheat water entering your water heater.
Upgrading to a smart thermostat allows you to set a schedule for your mechanical systems or use artificial intelligence (AI) to find the most energy efficient settings for your household. Lower cost programmable thermostats can be a good option too.
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In the final step, after minimizing the amount of energy consumed by the house through envelope and mechanical improvements, domestic renewable energy generation can be added to cover the smaller remaining electricity load. This step includes installing roof or ground-mounted solar PV systems, solar hot water systems, and a home battery to store excess solar energy or cheaper off-peak grid electricity (or as a carbon monoxide-free emergency energy source during power outages).
Adding solar photovoltaic systems to your roof or yard, given that you have the room or sun-exposure for it, can help take your energy efficient home to net zero. Solar panels are largely modular and you can add more as you need or are able to. However, some utilities in certain jurisdictions have started to limit the amount of energy you can generate on your property to how much your household consumes in a typical year.
Adding a solar water heater can supply up to 60 per cent of a home’s domestic hot water needs. Like a drain-water heat-recovery (DWHR) pipe, a solar water heater pre-heats water from the municipal system before it reaches your water tank.
Adding a home battery system or electric vehicle charging station allows you to store excess solar energy or cheap off-peak grid energy for later use in the home battery or in your electric vehicle’s battery. These batteries can also supply power during electrical outages.
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