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The new ecoEnergy home audit is based on the very successful EnerGuide for Houses program. The re-branded ecoEnergy program is slated to start on April 1, 2007, when Natural Resources Canada will once again hand out cash rewards to Canadians who upgrade their home’s energy efficiency.The fine details of the program are still foggy, even to insiders, as the political wrangling continues around how best to address climate change and motivate the average citizen to cut energy consumption.

What we do know is that if your house has already had an EnerGuide audit, and you haven’t done anything you may have to get your house re-tested under the new program. Otherwise, if you’ve had your house tested before May 12 of 2006, you have till March 31, 2007 to get any upgrades you’ve completed retested by your energy advisor for cash rewards. Yes, that’s only a matter of weeks!

The analysis software used for generating the custom report for your home will become a bit more sophisticated, but will still share the same calculating core as the old EnerGuide program. It promises to be a more streamlined process, which will include solar hot water, gravity film heat exchangers and A/C efficiency.

The new software will still have the familiar 0 – 100 score—a universal method of comparing house efficiency, and may allow the respective provinces to boost the cash incentive if they choose. But the new program will no longer dole out cash using the score. NRCan is suggesting that the cash will be based on individual retrofit measures completed to the house. Details are sketchy as how this will pan out for homeowners.

Since the subsidy to the highly-trained technician checking your house has been cut, and the price cap eliminated, the slightly higher cash rewards paid out to the homeowner will likely be offset by the increased cost to have your house tested. So expect the audit to be pricier than with the old program.

Technicians will also be required to pay for their own training, and supply more equipment, such as colour printer, digital camera, and power meters. That will no doubt add to the cost.

You can get your ecoEnergy home audit done right now by calling your local Green Communities Canada (www.gca.ca) office, but the official version of the new software isn’t ready for use until April 1, after which your completed report would arrive.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 15th, 2007 at 6:28 pm and is filed under News, Green News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.