Hopefully you're familiar with that Sesame Street song, or my title will make no sense at all. Today I had a guy from REEP (Residential Energy Efficiency Project) come over to do an evaluation of my home's energy efficiency, to see what I qualify for in the way of government grants currently available under the ecoENERGY Retrofit Program.
It's pretty cool actually: the Federal government is offering rebates up to $5,000 for various upgrades you can make to your home's energy efficiency, through improvements in insulation, heating/cooling systems, doors and windows and the like. And Ontario is currently matching those rebates, for a total of up to $10,000 in rebates available! You win by getting updates to your home that will not only increase resale value but also reduce your energy consumption (and thus of course your energy bills); and the contributions made to the environment will add up very quickly through reduced use of natural resources to sustain our daily living.
My house is only thirteen years old and the basement is already fully finished and insulated, so there isn't as much to do as will be, for example, in the next home my inspector was going to check out. It was built in 1884. Building code has definitely changed since then. But I learned that even in the last thirteen years, things have changed. When my house was built, for example, the insulation in my attic (maybe in the rest of the house too, not sure!) needed to be a minimum of R30; now it's up to R40. So even I have some updates I can make that will make my home more energy efficient, therefore less costly to heat and cool and at the same time making it more environmentally friendly. I feel good just thinking about it.
I had some things I was thinking of renovating and updating anyway, and heard about the ecoENERGY program by seeing an ad display about it on one of my gozillion trips of late to the Home Depot. So it pays - literally - to get out in the world and keep your eyes and ears open while you're out there!
Make the most of what you've got. It may not make sense nor be even remotely practical to tear a house down and start from scratch with all the newest, latest and greatest energy efficient materials available to mankind, but you CAN take the structure you've got and make it the best it can be with a handful of upgrades and piece-by-piece improvements.
Kind of like when you have changes you want to make with other parts of your life too. :-)
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