At a glance...
Your home's environmental impact comes from two sources: day-to-day energy use (operational carbon) and the materials you build with (embodied carbon)
Retrofit Advisors give personalized plans for efficiency upgrades, and Energy Audits qualify you for rebates while identifying where you can make improvements
Going all-electric with heat pumps and induction stoves cuts carbon dramatically, while choosing low-carbon materials reduces your built-in emissions
A home improvement project is a golden opportunity to make your home more comfortable while lowering your energy bills and shrinking your carbon footprint.
Your Two Biggest Opportunities: Energy Use and Material Choices
When we talk about reducing pollution from your home, we’re really looking at two things:
The emissions from your day-to-day energy use for heating, cooling, cooking, and lighting. In industry speak, this is your home’s operational carbon, and it is reduced dramatically by switching from gas to electricity.
The carbon footprint of the materials you build with like insulation and drywall. You’ll hear engineers call this embodied carbon as there are plenty of emissions that are built-in to making those materials available to you.
Like with cars and clothes, picking appliances and materials that are built to last will save you from expensive emergency replacements down the road. Remember: buy nice or buy twice!
Day-to-Day Emissions Reductions: Designing for Efficiency and Comfort
We’d LOVE to give you a perfect blueprint for reducing your day-to-day emissions that maximizes comfort, savings, and low carbon. But your home and each person in it is unique! There is no one size fits all approach. It's part of your exciting home improvement adventure to find the best fit for your budget and your priorities.
Ok, you caught us—by adventure we meant lots of research and experimentation. Fortunately, we do know a little shortcut to save you time without sacrificing quality.
Talk to a Retrofit Advisor Retrofit Advisors are the ultimate day-to-day energy use nerds. They’re people who track the trends and developments in the energy efficiency space like a teenager tracks gossip. If you make an appointment with them, they will walk through your home and give you a clear, personalized plan for reducing your home's operational carbon and energy costs.
After reading that strong recommendation, you might wonder if we get kickbacks from Retrofit Advisors. Not. At. All. We recommend them because, in case study after case study, they’ve saved people time, money, and prevented those “wish we would have known sooner” surprises that pop up during home improvements. Our funding is transparent. This is just our standard advice: if you want your home comfort update to go off without surprises, talk to a Retrofit Advisor!
Energy Audits
Retrofit Advisors almost always recommend you get something called an Energy Audit. We know we know! Nobody wants to invite an auditor over. Sound stressful, invasive and expensive, but these are all things a good home audit will help you avoid! A more accurate title would be Energy Doctors because their job is to give your home a heating and cooling checkup.
This checkup will tell you where your home is leaking the air you’ve paid to heat or cool so you can fix those trouble spots during your home update. That kind of knowledge is worth its weight in gold on its own, and the Ontario Home Renovation Savings Program gives you money back on the audit AND the fixes you make afterwards. It’s a win-win. So, it makes good sense to book your home for a checkup before you start, it’s not scary at all and you get a helpful report afterwards. Just don’t promise your home a giant lollipop for being brave about being poked and prodded.
A few other tips for reducing your day-to-day energy use
1. Think about improvements that passively heat and cool your home
South-facing windows can warm your home in winter (just add shading like overhangs or leafy trees to shade your home in summer). A light-coloured roof reflects heat and helps with cooling. Ask your designer or architect about passive strategies that work in your area.
2. Go all-electric. Switching out your gas stove, gas water heater, and gas furnace improves your home’s air quality and dramatically cuts your household’s carbon footprint. Many Torontonians are cozy all winter long using cold-climate heat pumps instead of a gas furnace, and induction stoves are a huge improvement over gas—professional chefs are switching to them in droves. If you let your Retrofit Advisor know you’re interested in this, they’ll give you a plan for replacements that fits your timeline and cashflow.
3. Seal, patch, and seal again!
If any structural work is planned, this is the perfect time to do proper air sealing. It will be much harder (*cough* pricier cough cough) once the walls are closed up. Also, a lot of savings can also be found in a DIY-friendly afternoon of caulking.
Built-In Carbon: Choosing Low-Impact Materials
Built-in carbon is the "behind-the-scenes" environmental cost of your renovation materials. It’s easy to overlook, but once you’ve ordered and installed something, all the carbon emissions that went into extracting, manufacturing and transporting that material are now part of your project.
There are some simple ways to keep this part of your carbon footprint down:
1. Use what you’ve got Keep as much of your home’s existing structure as possible. Reuse materials where you can.
2. Choose quality materials with a lighter footprint. Concrete and some types of insulation carry a heavy carbon cost to produce. That doesn’t mean you can’t use them at all—just be strategic. For example, “bio-based insulations” like straw bales store more carbon than they produce and make excellent insulation (incredibly, straw bale insulation actually increases the fire safety of a building).
3. Ask if there is a lower-carbon option. There are forms of concrete with far lower embodied carbon. Some spray foams seem to spew out emissions primarily while others are a great low-impact choice. Often the materials picked for a job are just the standard or the cheapest available. Simply asking for the low-impact option can dramatically reduce the embodied carbon in your project at often a tiny premium.
4. Pick the right contractor. Make sure your contractor shares your priorities for efficiency, quality, and comfort. We have an article to help you find quality contractors in Toronto.
Building Smart
By thinking about both the day-to-day emissions and built-in carbon from the very start, you’ll get a home that’s not only more comfortable and efficient with materials and appliances that last. You’ll save money over time, feel the difference every season, and rest easy knowing the work was done right.