How green is your home? How much of your household energy budget is escaping through your walls and windows?
If you are like us, you hope your home is green, but you don’t really know. One way to find out is by a home energy audit. These audits are about to become a requirement in order to buy/sell a home in Ontario. They are similar to a home inspection, which is already performed during more house sales but instead of dry rot and termites, the inspector is looking for leaks and inefficiencies.  
During a home inspection, the seal on your windows, the effectiveness of your insulation, and the efficiency of your furnace and hot water heater would be assessed. A blower is used to suck air out of the house so it is under negative pressure. Then the amount of suction required to keep the pressure in the house constant can be used to figure out how much air is leaking into your house. They can even tell you where the air is leaking in.
OK, so you get your home inspected and some problems are identified. Then what do you do? As luck would have it, the government is willing to shoot some money your way to fix some of these things. Federal grant money is available in order to make your home more green. In addition to the federal money, provincial money is also available in many provinces including British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia to upgrade the “green-ness” of your home.
Money is available to get a more efficient furnace, to improve the insulation in your attic, to insulate your walls and basement, replace leaky windows and doors, and for a ground source heat pump and solar hot water system.
So how do we get at this money, you ask? What you need to do is have a pre-audit done by an auditor certified by Natural Resources Canada. The auditor will give you recommendations for upgrading your home. You then perform the upgrades and have the auditor come back for a post audit. The auditor will then file for whatever grants you may be eligible for on your behalf.  
The downside to this is you have to pay the upfront costs for the renovations yourself and then trust the improvements will be enough to qualify you for the grant money. But if your furnace is getting old, or you were planning to do some upgrades anyway, why not get some help footing the bill?

Federal and provincial grants
For more information about federal and provincial grants and to find a certified home inspector go to the the Natural Resources Canada website (www.nrcan.gc.ca) and look for the ecoEnergy Retrofit program.

– Sophia Dore is an environmental scientist with Conestoga-Rovers & Associates. Andrew Laursen is an assistant professor at Ryerson University; earthtones.metro@gmail.com.