It’s a funny thing to talk about air conditioning in January.
A year and a half ago, after a lifetime of happily doing without an air-conditioner, my wife and I installed a heat pump.
We used to enjoy a breeze wafting through our home, and birdsong, and the freshness that came with the warm weather. We found that ceiling fans and the shade of the trees around our home got us through sporadic hot spells just fine.
It all sounds so nostalgic now.
A steady parade of heat domes, heat waves, wildfires — well, you know the story. We finally decided air-conditioning was a necessity.
It also happened that our 24-year-old high-efficiency gas furnace was no longer highly efficient. Thanks to a federal government incentives to improve home energy efficiency, a high-end heat pump that would both heat and cool our smallish house was (barely) within our budget.
After a lot of market research and fraught moral discussions involving the future of our children and grandchildren, we settled on a high-end, fully electric system rated for -20 C conditions. The cost after rebate: about $16,000.
(Bloody hell.)
Our thinking was driven by a basic idea: since we can’t control the external costs of heating and cooling our home over time, we should pick a system that gives us the maximum ability to minimize our usage.
So our home-heating trajectory has gone like this: oil to high-efficiency gas to heat pump. It took us 30 years. That’s not as bad as it sounds, considering the technology that now heats our home didn’t exist commercially back when oil trucks were supplying our home heating needs.
But that technology is here now.
We are cozily half way through our second winter with the heat pump and very happy with its performance. But getting there wasn’t easy.
When first installed, the company was new to the equipment, and it took some time, and the intervention of an out-of-town expert to get it running at peak efficiency — all this at no cost to us. To me, and perhaps to the installers, this machine has entered the realm where technology is indistinguishable from magic. Occasionally we sacrifice a goat to it.
Then we started working away on the recommendations of the energy audit which was required to access the government incentives. Top on the list for our house was insulating the basement — something that seemed counterintuitive to me. By the time we got to that project last summer, the federal incentive program had ended, so we paid the full price, about $3,800.
We’ll continue to work away on the audit list. A new front door is budgeted for this year along with some more insulation in strategic areas. Some day, perhaps, solar panels.
So, after investing almost $20,000 in our home, how are we making out with the monthly bills?
Based on my rough calculations, we’ve gone from paying $3,144 per year in total energy costs to $1,728 — an annual savings of $1,416. I’m certain we’ll save more as we continue to insulate.
Comparing the Trane heat pump we installed to a Trane high-efficiency gas furnace and traditional air conditioning, it will take us just two-and-a-half years to make up the difference of our more expensive choice.
We paid almost 44 per cent less for energy between January and May in 2024 than we did in 2023. Then summer came and the story got even better. Although we added air-conditioning, our summer electricity bills actually went down. Running a heat pump is costing us less than running ceiling fans.
That’s not all. Our latest bill covering the last 28 days prior to Jan. 16 shows that we have used 46 per cent less energy than we did last year, which was our first winter with the heat pump. As we continue to improve the insulation, doors and windows over time, the numbers are going to get better still.
We aren’t the only benefactors. For a federal government investment of $7,000, our household spent $27,000 at local businesses. That’s a 285.7 per cent return on the government investment in just over a year.
By any standard, that’s astoundingly good.
So when Simcoe North MPP Jill Dunlop announced the provincial government is launching a new Home Renovation Savings Program, I was very happy. The program is supposed to cover up to 30 per cent of the costs of new windows, doors, insulation, heat pumps, rooftop solar panels and battery storage. It starts Jan. 28.
If you’ve been contemplating a more energy-efficient home, my cheerful advice is: Do it!
Mark Bisset spent the past 14 years of his working life as the executive director of the Couchiching Conservancy before retiring in 2024. In a previous iteration of himself, he worked in every news department at the Orillia Packet & Times, a daily newspaper from a bygone era. Mark was the managing editor when he stepped down in 2009. And before all of that, he was a pretty happy kid. He’s a lifelong sailor and gardener who has chosen Orillia as his beloved home for the past 38 years.
