Reflections on 2022

It’s been quite a year when it comes to fighting climate at home.

This year we worked directly with over 300 homeowners (309 exactly). These homeowners received an energy audit which with Goldfinch Energy means a conversation about their home, where it’s loosing heat, opportunities to reduce energy consumption and of course the merits and recommended options for climate-fighting heat pumps. We’re so grateful that homeowners trust us to help them with big decisions on their home.

Of those we worked with this year, 84 installed heat pumps (30% kept the gas as back-up while the remainder are using their heat pump to comfortably heat their home throughout the winter). We helped 24 homes disconnect their gas services entirely by removing gas hot water tanks (see this blog post about our two favourite gas-free hot water options). They also removed their gas fireplaces and gas stoves. These homeowners are all leading the way in cutting off their home’s reliance on fossil fuels and are saving by no longer paying the monthly gas delivery fee.

Trish and Sarah also took action on our own homes by getting rid of our gas furnaces and gas hot water tanks. Since both of our furnaces were relatively new we both retrofitted the furnace’s air handler (the fan that blows around the air) and connected it to a new heat pump. The gas for our furnaces is no longer connected. We’ll blog about this system soon, but it’s the most affordable way to switch to a heat pump if you have a gas furnace that’s newer and are ready to get off of gas for heating.

Trish’s heat pump getting installed.

Trish stands proudly in front of her home that is now heating with a heat pump.

Trish is also in the process of starting an HVAC company (which operates independently of Goldfinch Energy) that has the most talented heat pump installer in Toronto. Mike Holm is the only person (to our knowledge) that can help people who have radiators switch from a gas boiler to an air to water heat pump. We’re grateful to Mike Holm for working with our clients and making it possible for the many homeowners across Toronto to have an alternative to gas for home heating.

A few reflections from homeowners who made the switch to heat pumps are:

“In terms of the air to water heat pump. I would say it actually provides a nicer more even heat and works even better for the heated floors in our basement and addition. Nice surprise!”

“The air flow from our ductwork is so much more gentle than before making us more comfortable when we’re next to our vents.”

“My bills are lower this year than the last. I know that this will continue to be the case as gas prices continue to rise faster than electricity.”

Our work does not exist in a silo and we’ve enjoyed working with several community organizations who are also advocating for people to take climate-action at home. The PocketChange Project (nestled in Toronto’s east end) kicked off fall 2021 and has 22 homeowners in the process of retrofitting their homes. Goldfinch Energy is priviledged to be working alongside the fantastic volunteers who make PocketChange a reality and for our partnership with green architect Paul Dowsett (also a Pocket resident and one of the 84 mentioned above who installed a heat pump). Paul would want us to mention that at the time of writing this blog he is one gas fireplace away from cutting off his Enbridge account.

Harbord Village launched their bulk discounts offering reduced rates for heat pump hot water tanks, induction stoves and e-bikes. Along with the discounts they’ve been busy discussing the benefits of heat pumps, solar panels and insulation through many in person events and webinars.

At the city level, Toronto launched their zero-interest Home Energy Loan Program (HELP) which was so popular the loans were quickly allocated to many climate-motivated homeowners.

Looking forward, we are excited to meet the growing demand with our newest energy advisor Anne Hogarth and plan to continue to grow by bringing on at least three more energy advisors in 2023. We’re happy to share that there are even more rebates for heat pumps as Enbridge is now topping up the $5,000 rebate from the Greener Homes program (this is all part of a new program that is called HER+).

We look forward to growing our impact as we feel the climate urgency even more with increasingly unpredictable weather in 2023.

One of Sarah’s children Eli, poses in front of their house. Eli, seven, is great at noticing heat pumps and solar panels in the neighbourhood.

Heating water without heating the planet

It’s been two months since Trish and I began heating the water in our homes without gas. We both previously had gas hot water tanks that were particularly inefficient and posed a risk from carbon-monoxide in our homes, as they exhaust through the chimney. Trish was smelling gas in her mechanical room and attributed the odor to her gas hot water heater. With both of us deeply committed to helping others get their homes off of fossil fuels we were both eager to practice what we preach with our water.

Trish opted for a heat pump hot water tank. Heat pump hot water tanks are the slick cleantech of water appliances. They extract heat from the surrounding air (using the same technology as a fridge, AC or a heat pump) and transfer it to the water. Their efficiency is around 400% (one unit of electricity to power the heat pump generates four units of heat) making them the most cost-effective water tank second only to solar hot water. Since heat pump hot water tanks need to be installed in a mechanical room that’s at least 10’ by 10’ or with vents on the door (so that there’s enough warm air for the heat pump) they were a good fit in Trish’s mechanical room.

Cost: $5,500+HST (Trish opted for a more costly model to test it out for other clients)

Rebate: $1,000 (Greener Homes program)

What Trish installed: Stiebel Eltron Heat Pump Hot Water tank

Size: 50 US gallons (181 litres). Since the recovery time can be around 50% slower than a gas hot water tank we recommend sizing up so that there’s more hot water to go around.

Sarah is currently undergoing a basement renovation and chose an electric tank and drain-water heat pump recover system. Given her smaller basement size, Sarah opted for an electric tank which is quieter than a heat pump hot water tank. Modern electric hot water tanks are much better insulated than older versions reducing the amount of electricity used to keep the water hot. To make her system more efficient, she also installed a drain water heat recovery system which is a simple copper pipe that extracts around 60% of the heat as it flows down the stack and out of the house. This heat is transferred to fresh water that goes into the tank reducing the amount of electricity used to heat the water. With an electric tank, we also recommend a timer that only allows the hot water to reheat overnight (when the cost of electricity is lowest). This was not necessary for Sarah since her home also has solar panels (offsetting the cost of electricity).

Cost: $3,600+HST (the drain-water heat recovery system cost $1,000)

Rebate: none

What Sarah installed: PowerPipe (drain water heat recovery system) + AO Smith Electric Hot Water tank

Size: 40 US gallons (151 litres). Her family got used to a tiny 20 gallon tank while her basement was being underpinned so going back to a 40 gallon tank felt luxurious. The drain-water heat recovery system makes the hot water last a little longer too.

Currently, these two systems represent the two best alternatives to gas for hot water heating. We’ve got our eye on the heat pump hot water heater that has an external unit, but for now, the heat pump hot water heater (that is one unit that goes in the basement) or an electric tank with an off-peak timer (and ideally a drain-water heat recovery system) are what we are helping homeowners install in their homes.

PS While solar thermal is really amazing, it ends up being quite expensive and we usually recommend that folks use their precious roof space for solar panels.

Reflections on 2021

As the year winds down and the beginning of winter (and unfortunately, the omicron variant) encourages a form of hibernation, we’re all drawn back into our homes.

This time of year always prompts in me a more mindful and reflective state of mind, one I often wish I could sustain throughout the year.

In spite of a turbulent year caused mostly by COVID, I am proud of how far we have come. Just over 2 years ago, Goldfinch Energy wasn’t even much of an idea and if you were to ask, there were only a handful of homeowners in Toronto who could say they’ve reduced their greenhouse gas emissions. Today’s landscape looks very different, with new growth and fast progress across many homes.

With my own home, my partner and I are about one third of the way with our plans (you can read about them here). Our efforts are not just about reducing greenhouse gas emissions but also driven by a need to have more space (the basement renovation was driven by a desire to have more than 1 bathroom in a house with 5 people) and a desire to be more comfortable at home (before we insulated the attic and flat roof and sealed our ductwork, the second floor wasn’t very comfortable in the summer or winter). I continue to believe that reducing greenhouse gas emissions at home doesn’t need to be the single goal that drives home renovations and that every homeowner’s path to getting their home off of fossil fuels is unique to their family’s goals and realities.

I’m happy to share that this year we addressed the top of our house. Our attic and flat roof are now well insulated and support enough solar panels to offset our electricity consumption  both now and in the future when we switch our heating, stove and hot water to electrically-powered appliances. Next year we’ll tackle the bottom of our house with the basement renovation.

Across the city of Toronto, neighbourhood and community groups have taken tremendous steps to bring together, motivate and educate each other in the importance and possibility of taking climate-action right at home. Trish and I are honored to have been invited to support several of them. Most notably the The Pocket Change Project and Harbord Village’s Net-Zero Project. All of the many groups and its members have demonstrated the power and potential of collective action that links both advocacy work and individual action.

Just last week, Toronto City Council adopted the TransformTO Net Zero Strategy which outlines a path for the city to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040. The strategy, linked here, contains a lot of ambitious goals and a focus on existing buildings (which represent over half of Toronto’s greenhouse gas emissions). The most exciting aspect of the strategy (to Goldfinch Energy) is the goal to phase-out the use of natural gas in buildings by 2040. That’s a big deal! 

At an individual level, many members of the above-mentioned groups have (or are in the process of) taken big steps to reducing their home’s greenhouse gas emissions. Goldfinch Energy is fortunate to have worked with many fantastic homeowners this year and helped support six homeowners to get their homes entirely off of gas for heating (photos of a few are below). We also supported dozens of homeowners who made big reductions in their greenhouse gas emissions by switching their heating to a heat pump and have worked with hundreds to help them with an energy audit and cleantech assessment so that when their furnace or AC breaks or they are planning a renovation, they too will reduce their home’s greenhouse gas emissions. 

It’s been an incredibly rewarding year and we are also grateful to the many like-minded business partners we’ve met. We look forward to building upon in 2022.

Ramona lives in a beautiful semi in the west end of Toronto. She made some big decisions this year. We met in June. By September she insulated her attic and made her home more airtight. By October she removed her gas furnace and replaced it with a heat pump. She also removed her gas hot water tank and replaced that with a heat pump. To offset the electricity consumption, in December she installed solar panels. It was a pleasure working with her to slash her home’s greenhouse gas emissions from 6.7 tonnes/year to ZERO.

She is featured (above) next to her heat pump and (below) pointing at the inverter which converts the electricity generated by the solar panels to AC current for Toronto Hydro’s grid.

My plan to cut my carbon emissions to zero

My partner and I have lived in our home for about 8 years. We’ve got 3 kids, one bathroom and 3 bedrooms. Things have been feeling quite squishy lately with all of us working and schooling from home.

Trish and I have found that when working with homeowners, the path to cutting home emissions is best when it incorporates the way that occupants use the space and their future goals.

Rather than aim for perfection along the way, we recommend that every step a homeowner takes shouldn't create barriers but instead gets the them one step closer to cutting fossil fuel emissions. For my home, the need for more space and an unfinished basement is our carbon cutting opportunity.

The other thing we’ve learned is that homeowners need to be talking and sharing their plans and experiences more. Homeowners who have cut their home emissions love sharing and homeowners who want to make changes but don’t know how get inspired when they hear these stories. I’m a part of an east end climate collective called TEECC. A few weeks ago I invited two homeowners (who we’ve blogged about here and here) to share their experiences during our weekly meeting. It was amazing to see the inspiration - it’s infectious! So I hope that by documenting and sharing my own experience I can inspire you to get going on the path to zero emissions.

The Basement

As mentioned above our basement is unfinished. The ceilings are about 5.5’ and with the ductwork it’s closer to 5’. So we know we need to dig down to create more height. I’ll add 1.5” - 2” of insulation before the concrete slab is repoured. These days hydronic in-floor heating is all the rage for basements but I think that a few inches of insulation will make it nice and cozy down there (it’s like putting slippers on the floor!).

The walls are double brick and covered with this ugly white parging that’s coming off. I’m still on the fence as to how we’ll insulate the walls. I’ve received a few quotes and most contractors love to use spray foam when insulating. I get it. Spray foam is way easier to install as you don’t need to worry about a vapour barrier (it acts as one) and you don’t even need to frame. But the embodied carbon of spray foam is pretty high (compared with other products). I’ll likely keep trying to find a contractor who will install 2” of rigid insulation made with Rockwool (the product is called ComfortBoard) and then frame with 2x4s and fill those with Rockwool as well. I won’t go into a detailed comparison as this blog I wrote does a pretty good job comparing the options.

my son enjoys picking off the parging which reveals this lovely greenish paint on the brick!

For the energy nerds out there, the basement walls will have an effective R value of R19 which is a bit better than framing with 2x6s and filling with Rockwool (which is R18) and much better than the standard approach of framing with 2x4s and filling with fibreglass (R10).

My energy consumption will go down by 12% which translates to approximately $200 saved/year. More importantly, our basement will have a bathroom, more livable space, it won’t smell musty and it’ll be super comfortable!

Heat Pumps

By improving our basement we’re reducing the size of furnace we need to heat our home. It may not come as much of a surprise that we’re going to chuck that furnace (or try to find an interested recipient for a 10 year old furnace) and install a heat pump. By insulating our basement we reduce the size needed by 40% which means we can spend $2,000 less on a smaller heat pump.

More importantly, switching out our fossil-fuel burning furnace for a delightfully clean heat pump cuts most of our home emissions (heating accounts for 75% of my home’s emissions).

We’re also going to remove our gas hot water tank which is also 10 years old and replace it with a heat pump hot water tank. Although the tank has not yet reached it’s end of life, it’s a good time to replace it as we’ll have plumbers in anyway for the basement bathroom and this’ll save us $ in the long-term (and of course gets us off fossil fuels sooner!).

Switching out our fossil-fuel burning hot water tank for a delightfully clean heat pump tank cuts the largest remaining chunk of our emissions (hot water accounts for 20%).

We’ll then just be left with a gas stove which I am eager to replace with an induction stove when we renovate the kitchen at some point (and we’ll then be able to cut our gas service altogether!)

Historical representation of heating solutions in my 100 year-old home. The chimney is currently only used to exhaust the gas from the hot water tank. The soot door can be seen in the bottom right.

The Roof

Our roof is also overdue to be replaced so that’s going to happen after the basement so that we can remove the redundant chimney. With a new flat roof that faces south we are prime candidates for renewable energy through solar panels. The solar panels will produce about 60% of the energy I calculate we’ll consume.

If by the summer the $40,000 interest-free loan program is in place, I hope to qualify for it to help cover the costs of a solar array (it’ll cost approximately $22,000 to install a 7.7 kW array). The solar panels will save us $1,500 - $2,000/year in electricity bills so we’ll use that to pay off the loan in 13 years.

Electrical Panel

Want to check if you have 100A or 200A service? Look at the switch at the top. It’s 100A here.

To install the heat pump for heating and heat pump hot water tank and to make sure we’ve got the capacity to charge an EV when our current vehicle goes, we’ll need to upgrade to a 200 amp panel. I’ve checked and we don’t quite have the capacity on our current 100A panel to accomodate everything we need. I’ve found that homeowners who are switching our fossil fuel appliances for cleantech don’t often consider their electrical panel. But it’s a great first step for any homeowner (and while you’re getting your panel replaced grab a can of spray foam and make sure to seal up any spots that seem drafty - I often find a lot of air leaks around and behind electrical panels).

What have we already done?

When we first moved in we replaced all the 100 year old single pane windows with well-sealed double-pane windows. We replaced the rotting cedar siding with vinyl siding and added 1” of rigid insulation underneath. The siding is my one big regret. I wish we’d have added at least 2” of insulation and considered a more environmentally friendly siding such as cedar or metal. For more on why vinyl is not great for the planet check out this blog. Now I know better but this experience also helps remind me that we can’t all build the perfect new home from scratch and need to find creative ways to improve what we already have.

You may also recall that a few months ago we had the attic insulated and I’ve done extensive air sealing.

What else could we do?

Alas, there’s often more that can be done on our beautiful century-old homes. Our main floor walls are all double brick without any insulation on the inside. So during the winter they are quite cold to the touch. In the future, it would be great to add insulation to them (from the inside or outside). And rather than waiting for all the walls to be perfectly insulated, I’m seizing the opportunity to switch out the two big fossil fuel emitters (furnace and hot water tank) for heat pumps and get a solar array on that nice new roof.

I love old homes! Double-brick walls were common in Toronto in the early 1900s and are easy to detect from the outside. Look for bricks that are about half as skinny. These bricks, called tie-bricks, are used to connect the first and second layer of bricks.

Top 3 things you should know before purchasing an Electric Vehicle

I often commute by bike (well, when there was commuting) but my husband and I both have jobs that require cars so we’ve transitioned to EVs. We’re now in year 3 of having two EVs and what’s the outcome? Our fuel costs have been slashed by 40-80% respectively and our maintenance costs are way down too. And the best part… they are way more fun to drive! 

Despite the long list of benefits, we did make a few blunders along the way that I hope you can avoid if you need to buy a car in the future. 

The first charging blunder is that we didn’t plan for two EVs. I bought mine first and hired an electrician to run the wiring for charging. Of course in our 100-year-old home, our electrical panel is the furthest-most point from our driveway. What I didn’t anticipate was that my amazing husband would switch to an EV two years later. That meant another electrician and 7 holes punched in our basement ceiling to run the wiring needed for his car. If I’d planned ahead for charging two cars at the outset, I’d have saved a lot of money on electrical work. 

And there was a second charging blunder too. My charger has a long cord and my husband’s is shorter, but guess whose charger is closer to the cars? Mine with the long cord of course, so watch out for that too. 

And the third blunder I made, the type of EV I bought, relates to why we needed two chargers instead of one. I bought my EV in 2017, and while I’d really wanted to buy a Chevy Bolt (an all-electric vehicle) there wasn’t enough supply so I bought a Chevy Volt (a plug-in electric/gas hybrid). It seemed like a great first EV because it has 80km of electric range before gas kicks in to go another 500km. My thinking was that I mostly drive in the city so 80km was plenty, and when I occasionally went out of town I’d just use a bit of gas. Turns out that was wrong. 

Plug-in hybrid electric/gas cars are tempting but the emission reductions are disappointing.

My plug-in hybrid EV wasn’t a good choice in terms of reducing emissions. Yes I drive emission-free in the city all the time, but anytime I go out of town, I drive way more kilometers than I did in the city, so the car isn’t nearly as clean overall as I had hoped. If everyone follows this hybrid route, we’re essentially putting off electrification of our transportation for another 20 years.

Car companies like the hybrid EVs because they’re easier to sell and they still need lots of expensive maintenance like a gas car. Those are exactly the reasons not to buy one! I wish I’d taken the plunge and done all-electric the first time. It also would have saved us money on the electrical work. My car charges at a regular 120V outlet but when my husband bought his car it made sense to run a 240V line. If I’d run a 240V line when I bought my car, we could have just upgraded to a two-headed charger when the second EV arrived. And it turns out, charging on a long distance trip is super easy, we just needed an open mind to learn something new (like the early gas drivers did!) 

With a Thule box on top our little family car can transport SUV-sized cargo.

An exciting outcome of buying EVs is that our neighbours have now done it too. We have 4 immediate neighbours which makes us a climate-conscious pocket of 6 EVs in close proximity. Our collective emission reductions are impressive, about 25 tonnes annually. So fun to drive and contagious too.

Good luck with yours!

My home office IS now comfortable!

Yesterday when the outdoor temp was between -5 and -10 for most of the day, I was able to work at home in my office in just a t-shirt. No toque, no blanket and not even a sweater! And in case you are wondering, we keep our home at a comfortable 19 degrees.

What did we do? You may recall the blog post of a few months ago where I outlined the things I had planned.

I’ve done two of the three things and am so satisfied with the results.

(insert image).

Duct sealing

The ducts were leaking (inser percentage) meaning not much of that warm air was making up to the spot that’s furthest from the furnace (my home office).

Cost - $1,600

Benefits - immediate gratification. Toque and blanket shedding levels!

Implications - for about 3 hours we had two people working in our house so it was best if we vacated. Once they left, it was as if they weren’t there (except that now warm air was gushing from the vents!). Trish wrote a great blog post detailing how duct sealing works.

Attic insulation

We didn’t know what was in our attic (as we didn’t have any access). So to start, I had a handyperson cut a hatch into our attic (cost $500). Only the first 16’ of our roof is an attic, the remaining 23’ is a flat roof (we’ll deal with the flat roof later).

We then had a contractor come and blow in insulation called cellulose (cellulose is amazing at insulating in attics and it’s made from recycled newsprint!).

Cost: $800 (we’ll recoup a few hundred dollars from Enbridge’s Home Energy Rebate Program)

Benefits: immense satisfaction. Sweater shedding levels!

Implications - we had the contractors here for about 3 hours. They parked their truck in our shared drive (which we needed to make sure they had access to) and ran a large tube through the second floor windor and into the attic. They evenly distributed the cellulose up to 20” which is just over the level required to qualify for the Enbridge rebate (and the level that as an energy advisor I recommend attics to be insulated to!).

I can’t believe we didn’t do these things sooner. As an aside, I also didn’t realize how much my feelings about certain rooms in my home were based on comfort. My love of my bedroom/home office has gone up immensely now that it’s not shudderingly cold.

Productivity is at an all time high in this comfortable office!

Our vision for a golden future

The idea for Goldfinch Energy came from Trish’s own experience when her furnace broke on a Friday night in February.

Trish had just started working with a clean energy policy organization (the Pembina Institute) and so she asked the HVAC company what alternatives there were to gas. The salesperson laughed and said, “there are no alternatives to gas”. With the risk of pipes freezing, there wasn’t time to shop around.

That was 5 years ago. Now, finally, MANY more homeowners are interested in reducing their fossil fuel consumption in order to mitigate climate change.

However, even though the urgency of addressing the climate crisis and demand from homeowners have both risen, it’s still not as easy as it should be to do the right thing. Just yesterday, I had a conversation with a Toronto resident who was interested in switching out her gas furnace for a heat pump. She was told by an HVAC contractor that it’s not possible to fully heat your home with a heat pump. She knew better though and called us to discuss her home and develop a plan.

That’s why Goldfinch Energy exists. Goldfinch Energy exists to make it possible for all homeowners to get started and keep on the path of cutting home emissions. We all want to ensure a future for children (and a decent retirement would be nice too!) Taking action at home should be easy, possible and affordable. For many clients we make a 5 or 10-year plan so each time a gas appliance fails in can be replaced with a clean technology. We’re also advocating for heat pump rebates to reduce the cost of switching.

We believe that Canadians, if given the opportunity, would choose to make their homes safer for everyone’s future.

We have a vision where that’s possible for all Canadians. We have a vision where our homes don’t spew out gas emissions but instead are affordably heated using renewable electricity. Where it’s easy to switch to a heat pump. Where it’s not complicated to add insulation to our walls and upgrade leaky windows. Where lending and rebate programs are easy to navigate and motivating to make climate-responsible choices. Where HVAC contractors are better informed on climate issues and supportive of homeowners’ desires to get off gas.

We know that people who make retrofits to their homes find them more comfortable. Rooms that used to be avoided in certain seasons are now enjoyed year round. Drafty rooms don’t send homeowners running for a toque and a warm blanket.

We also know that everyone’s journey towards a cleaner, greener home is different. We are trained Energy Advisors and have tapped into a wealth of knowledge on building science so that we can provide you with the expertise to help guide you along your journey.

We know that it’s always nice to get a rebate cheque in the mail and work hard to ensure that our clients maximize their rebate opportunities.

We’re also actively reducing the emissions produced in our own homes. Step by step switching out a gas stove for an induction stove (Trish did this just last week!), replacing a gas dryer with an electric one, preparing our homes for heat pumps (for heating, cooling and hot water) and, for clean electricity, adding solar. We look forward to continuing our own journey and being inspired by the many homeowners who have reached out to us to cut their fossil fuel emissions and make their home more enjoyable in the process. We’re all in this together.

Proudly sporting our new Goldfinch Energy hoodies after having just provided a cleantech roadmap and energy audit to a Toronto homeowner

Amazing fix for too hot or too cold rooms

I’ve only been conducting energy audits for a few months now but I already see homeowners struggling with the same problem over and over. Rooms that are too hot in summer and too cold in winter. People usually blame the windows or insulation but I often find that leaky ductwork is to blame. It’s not hard to check if this could be happening in your home. Turn on the heat (or cooling in the summer) and feel with your hand how strong the airflow is in the problem room(s). People always tell me they can feel some air but I point out that if it’s blowing less than in other rooms, that room is going to be less comfortable. The good news is that problem ductwork is fixable using Aeroseal technology. 

Last summer I had two rooms on my second floor that were way too hot. It drove my teenage son to move to the basement and my husband to a makeshift office on the main floor. That left me sweltering upstairs looking into solutions. Luckily I discovered Aeroseal technology which has since transformed these rooms completely. By fixing our home’s ductwork, conditioned air now comes blasting out of the vents.

The Aeroseal crew found three ‘ducts to nowhere’ behind the drywall in my basement ceiling. Because so much conditioned air was being lost here, three rooms on my second floor weren’t receiving enough.

So how did Aeroseal Tech do it? The first step was to cover our vents and then hook up some software to report on rogue air loss from the ducts. In my case, a whopping 45% of my home’s conditioned air was leaking out somewhere behind the walls or between the floors. Using a thermal camera, the crew was able to pinpoint three problematic spots in my basement ceiling. They cut these open and showed me that I had three open ducts going absolutely nowhere. Unbelievable! It was the result of a renovation done in the early 80s and no one had bothered to seal them up when an addition had made them redundant.

An aerosol containing an acrylic compound is being blown into my ductwork filling all cracks and gaps up to the size of a loonie.

Once the crew closed up the gaping holes, the Aeroseal technology came into play. The crew blows an aerosol containing an acrylic compound into the ductwork and it sticks to any gaps, cracks and openings in the ductwork, up to the size of a loonie. A lot of old ductwork is just fastened together with metal bands and using a thermal camera you can see that air leaks out from every join. In my home, the Aeroseal technology worked so well that my duct leakage went from 45% to less than 1%. 

As a final step, the crew measures the airflow from each vent before and after and adds vent dampers as necessary to get the air flow as even as possible in every room. The result in my home, absolutely amazing! I can’t believe we didn’t know about this solution sooner but very few people think about their ductwork. Home inspectors don’t mention it in their reports and energy advisors rarely notice it either (except the energy advisors at Goldfinch of course!) I think we’re just raised to make do in older homes but it’s better to proactively find solutions that improve comfort.

The rooms that were uncomfortable before are now prime real estate in our house. Funny though, my teenage son has decided to stay in the basement. After I used the service, my business partner Sarah Grant also had her ducts fixed and now she doesn’t have to wear a toque in her office anymore. It’s not an inexpensive service at $1,500 to $2,200 but we both found it was very good value and we wish we’d done it years ago. A client of ours also had it done recently and the crew found Toronto Star newspaper pages from 1976 shoved in her ducts. Older homes can be uncomfortable but it doesn’t need to be that way! If you need any advice don’t hesitate to reach out.

My home office is not comfortable

Since the pandemic hit my partner and I have been, like many Canadians with desk jobs, working from home (okay I don’t always work from home and love the days when I am outside measuring other’s homes and talking with you about your comfort issues). Today, I want to share a bit about my home office and the steps I am taking to make it more comfortable.

A caveat: calling the space an office is quite a generous term. We are in a 3 bedroom semi and with 3 kids, the office is also the master bedroom. But during the day, it serves as an office so hereonin I will refer to it as my home office.

As the temperatures have dipped below zero recently, you’ll often find me working with a blanket wrapped around me and a hot cup of tea on the desk. Sometimes I even don a hat.

Many of us (myself included) would have tried cranking the thermostat or even speculated that our furnace was not sized big enough. Now that I’m an energy advisor, I know that more often than not the path to comfort involves insulation and air sealing rather than upsizing a fossil burning piece of mechanical equipment that has a lifespan of 10 years (although there are times when a heating system is not sized properly and as an energy advisor I am also trained to check this too!)

So what’s the plan? First up, our ducts. This is an area that energy advisors, home inespectors and even HVAC installers don’t typically look at. But I know that my ducts are leaky as the air coming into one of the other bedrooms on the second floor is much more forceful than what is entering my home office. This was confirmed when I brought in Victor. Victor is with Aeroseal Tech. With a free home quote, he confirmed my suspicions, the air flow to my home office is half of what I’m getting from other vents. He was able to determine that at least 30% of my heat wasn’t making it to where it should. Meaning, my ducts are leaky and the heat, rather than getting pushed upstairs, is getting lost in the basement (where we don’t really need it) and in the walls where it slowly dissipates out. You may not think that this is a problem as the heat makes it upstairs eventually (temperature differences like many things in life naturally seek to balance out, I’ll save the physics lessson for later). But the problem is actually two-fold. Not enough hot air is getting to my home office and what little that does get there is leaking out of my home too quickly making that room constantly 2-3 degrees colder that what I’d like.

That brings me to the next section. You might be wondering why this room alone has issues. Part of it is because of leaky ductwork but the other part is because a good portion of the walls are exposed and poorly insulated. The ceiling is above a small attic that most definitely does not (yet!) have any insulation in it. The front wall also does not (yet!) have any insulation. A third of the floor is actually exposed (it hangs over our porch) and it too is not insulated (yet!). So there are both A LOT of exposed walls in this room and most of them are poorly insulated. The only side that is exposed and insulated is the right which has 2” of continuous insulation underneath the siding (we added this when we redid the siding). By putting my hand on the decently insulated and the poorly insulated walls I can feel an extreme temperature difference.

So the plan involves fixing my leaky ductwork and insulating the exposed walls. Two of the three exposed walls have framing and I plan to have cellulose blown inbetween the studs. Then, when we can take on a bigger project, we’ll add more insulation at the same as time when we redo the roof and the siding on the front of the house.

As far as insulating walls goes, blowing in cellulose between the studs is a relatively uninvasive low-cost approach. A insulating company will drill 2” holes between the studs, fill them with insulation, and patch over the walls leaving me with warm comfy walls and only a few spots that need to be painted over. We’re timing this work so that it’s done before we need to repaint.

I’ve started getting quotes on the insulation work and have the duct sealing scheduled for next Wednesday. I am SOOO looking forward to a more comfortable office in 2021! I promise to keep you posted on my home comfort adventures. If you have a problem with an uncomfortable home office, I’d love to chat and see if we can help!