Rebates for Heat Pumps

It’s a good time to upgrade your inefficient home heating system. There are rebates currently available through the Home Renovation Rebates Program from BC Hydro, and the CleanBC Better Homes Program funded by the Province of BC and the Government of Canada.

The rebate offered by BC Hydro is $1000 for qualifying air-source mini-split or multi-split heat pump systems installed to replace electric furnaces or baseboard heaters. 

The heat pump incentives from the CleanBC Better Homes program are for homes converting from oil or gas heat, and include $3000 for qualifying mini or multi-split systems, $3000 for qualifying variable speed central systems, and $1200 for qualifying conventional central heat pump systems.

Both rebate programs are combined into one online application form.

There are additional municipal top-up rebates available from select municipalities, which are automatically added when rebate applications are processed. These top-ups are only offered when an eligible heat pump system is replacing fossil fuel heat, not when replacing electric heat. Currently there is a $350 top-up rebate for all residents of the Capital Regional District (CRD), an additional $350 top-up for residents of Saanich, Central Saanich, and North Saanich, and an extra $2000 top-up for residents in the City of Victoria!

An EnerGuide Home Evaluation is not required to receive a heat pump rebate, but there is a $200 incentive offered for homeowners who choose to get one. Some municipalities also offer a top-up of $150 on this rebate.

There are additional home energy rebates available. Try the rebate search tool on the CleanBC Better Homes website to find all the rebates that may be applicable to your home. There are also a number of eligibility requirements, so be sure to review the Program Requirements and the Terms and Conditions for all those details.

For further information and guidance on these rebate programs, contact the Energy Coach service, either through their web contact form or by phone: 1-844-881-9790.

**This post has been updated with rebate program information available as of September 23, 2020.**

Deep Retrofits

Existing buildings are full of energy efficiency opportunities waiting to be realized. While some savings are obvious and easy to get, often design teams can realize much deeper savings at little or no added capital cost—and sometimes at less.
Deep energy retrofits improve the economics of efficiency, and achieve bigger energy savings and other benefits at equal or lower cost, driving much larger savings (more than 50 percent) than conventional, shallow retrofits.

Key Aspects to the Deep Retrofit Process

• Timing the deep retrofit with planned capital improvements, breaks in occupancy, and other situations
• Applying integrative design principles
• Using advanced energy modeling, auditing and life cycle cost analysis methods and tools
• Metering and commissioning to verify savings and to continually improve. 

Buildings are systems, and integrative, whole-building strategies recognize how one kind of efficiency gain can affect other building systems and attributes. For example, improvements to the building envelope can reduce mechanical system loads and equipment, which in turn may increase usable floor area. Simply by recognizing how systems are interrelated, design teams can cause small improvements to cascade into substantially larger benefits.

Super-efficient home in Burnaby combines vacuum insulation, solar gain and air-source heat pump to achieve "net-zero" energy

Harmony House generates as much energy as it consumes

Insulation is at the core of efficiency that helps make Burnaby house 'net zero'. But insulation is only one part of what makes Harmony House such an interesting — and efficient — residence.

The two-storey, 4,700 square foot residence with a full basement and attached garage is part of the Equilibrium Sustainable Housing Demonstration Initiative, a CMHC program to encourage designers and builders to explore truly sustainable housing developments.
A net-zero energy home produces as much energy as it consumes, annually, through energy conservation strategies and the use of renewable energy technologies.
Additionally, the design team set the goal for the home to produce zero greenhouse gas emissions. This eliminated the possibility of using a combustion appliance for space or water heating so there's no gas line into the house at all.

Conducting a recent tour of Harmony was Gary Hamer, manager of technology and innovation with BC Hydro. He estimates that it will take 2,500 kWh per year to heat the residence, about a fifth of what it would be for a conventional home.

The first part of that solution is insulation. In all of the exterior walls of Harmony House are thin panels which use a vacuum space to insulate. They work because heat can't transfer across a vacuum. The vacuum panels also allow buildings to have superior insulation while maintaining conventional wall thickness. While a wall in standard house is built with an effective insulation rating of about R16, Harmony's effective wall rating is R38.

Triple-glazed windows also help keep the house warm. Even on this January day, from the inside of the house the windows don't feel cold. Nearly a quarter of the heat needed by the home will come from solar gain — that's heat from the sun — via windows on the south of the structure.

Additional heat comes from a very efficient air-source heat pump that cycles a refrigerant from outside and into the house. It's is so efficient that it can effectively pull heat out of the outside air at temperatures as low as -18 degrees Celsius. The same kind of heat pump is used to heat water. Gary says that being able to use one outside source, one piece of equipment, to heat both the space and the water is ideal in some circumstances.

But houses need ventilation, and Harmony House is nearly airtight.
So fresh air is brought into the building using a heat recovery ventilation (HRV) system. It exhausts stale air from rooms that could have moisture — bathrooms, kitchen and laundry rooms — and brings fresh air into the bedrooms and other living spaces. Rather than waste the energy used to heat the indoor air, the air leaving the house preheats the fresh outdoor air coming into the home. Around 80 percent of the heat is recovered.

Always being on the look out for better and more efficient ways of using electricity, Gary is excited about better ways of heating homes and water. He is currently studying the effectiveness of ductless heat pumps in a pilot on Vancouver Island.
"The pilot's goal is to measure the amount of energy that high-efficient ductless systems can "displace" from the less efficient electric baseboard heaters that currently heat these homes," he explains. "I believe that properly applied, efficient heat pumps hold much promise in saving energy and increasing occupant comfort. But like all good science, what equipment and when to use it must be determined first. That's where our pilot comes into it. And the data gather from the Harmony House will add to our knowledge."