Energy Audits: Priceless Information Making Your Home Energy Efficient

The Ministry of Energy has started a program in Ontario of home energy audit, with the purpose and initiative of energy conservation in Ontario. The Home Energy Audit Program is a 24 million dollars program that will last for four years and it will subsidize home energy audits all over Ontario. The funds will be spread amongst the citizens and the program will try to reduce the useless consumptions of energy and also reduce the expenses that the citizens suffer because of the losses of energy.

An audit will evaluate the energy efficiency of a home and outline improvements to the heating, cooling, hot water heating and other uses of energy in the house that could result in energy savings.

Not everybody will benefit from the program. Anyone who lives in Ontario and owns a single family home is eligible for this program. A single family home is defined as a detached or semi-detached home or low-rise multi-unit residential building. Low-rise residential buildings must be three stories or less with a building footprint of less than 600 square meters. These rules point out the need of the middle class to reduce the useless expenses that come out of energy wastage in their homes .These problems come from the lack of information and the lack of a budget which would allow the families to do the home energy audits on their own account without the need of a program.

The Ontario Home Energy Audit Program provides the owner a rebate of 50% of the cost of a pre-retrofit audit up to a limit of 150 dollars. A pre retrofit audit is one made before any other renovation is made to the house and before any improvement to the energy conservation in the home.

Within the details of the program we should mention that the Home Energy Audit Program is linked to the federal ecoENERGY retrofit grant program. To be eligible for this program any homeowner is required and obliged to use a professional auditor licensed by Natural Resources Canada. Only these audits are accepted in the program and also the home energy audit should have occurred any time after the Ontario budget announcement about the program was made. If a homeowner has made an audit before that time, he is not eligible for the program and he will have to perform it again if he wants to enter the program.

There are a few steps which need to be followed for this program to work properly. Firstly, a home owner hires a licensed auditor for a first or pre retrofit audit. The normal cost of such an audit can rise up to 300 dollars. Secondly, the licensed auditor performs the audit on the home and then provides the owner with a report concerning the improvements required for the energy efficiency. The next step is only up to the auditor who has to notify the federal ecoEnergy program and the federal government after performing the audit. The last part of the process is that the government sends a cheque to the home owner giving back 150 dollars from the expenses. This way the home owner reduces drastically his expenses and performs a home energy audit at low cost and also benefits from it afterwards by saving a lot of money.

If the homeowner chooses to pursue the recommendations in the audit, they could be eligible for the federal government’s ecoENERGY retrofit grant program.