By Susan Burgess
As home-heating costs soar, Ottawa residents are looking for ways to keep out the cold.
Technicians at Envirocentre, a local non-profit organization that checks homes for heat and energy efficiency, will have inspected 300 homes this year by the end of December — twice as many as last year.
“I think people are interested in saving money,” says Dana Silk, the centre’s general manager. “On an average, we identify $400 per year in energy savings.”
Those savings might be just enough to offset the 20- to 30-per-cent increase in the cost of heating oil, says Bill Simpkins, vice-president of the Canadian Petroleum Products Institute.
Heating oil costs are affected by fluctuations in the price of crude oil, which has tripled in the past year, says Diane Salt, a spokesperson for Imperial Oil.
The rise in natural gas prices has been even steeper.
The reason is that demand for natural gas has been increasing in North America, says Mike Campbell, a spokesman for Enbridge Consumer Gas. He says it’s relatively clean-burning fuel and is being used to replace coal in electrical generators.
The price hike means that to heat a medium-sized, single-family home this year with natural gas could cost about $640 more than last year.
Sealing foam can solve the simpler problems, like a gap around a clothes-dryer exhaust vent. Others, such as a furnace that isn’t well suited to the house, are more expensive to fix.
The repairs aren’t covered in the $150 cost of the inspection.
Lorraine Plouffe had an evaluation done last March, just a few months after she moved into a 3,000-sq.-ft. home on McLeod Street that was built in 1887. The inspector’s report said she could cut her gas costs by $610 per year if she followed Envirocentre’s recommendations.
Plouffe says that according to the report, leaks in the house were siphoning off most of those savings.
“There were extensive leaks in the basement,” she says. She’s still working her way down the list of recommended repairs, but says she’s already noticed the house heats up more quickly than it did before she started.
She says she thinks her heating bills have gone down as well, but she hasn’t yet done a careful month-by-month comparison of this year’s to last year’s.
Plouffe also says some of Envirocentre’s suggestions surprised her. For example, the report advised her to remove screens from all the windows in the fall, in order to take advantage of sunlight to heat the home.
Making a home more energy-efficient also reduces the home’s output of greenhouse gases.