Over 70 homeowners across the Peel Region, Mississauga, Brampton, and Caledon have called the Centre for Community Energy Transformation with questions about their home through the Home Energy Coaching Program.

The range of questions we’ve received from homeowners widely varies. Our home energy coach gets asked about everything to do with home renovations, upgrades, and energy efficiency. They answer questions to do with heat pumps and attic insulation to drafty windows, aging furnaces, rising bills, and solar weekly. Looking at the questions we’ve received recently, we’ve noticed that the nuance of the questions themselves has been changing, but not the range of topics covered.

Homeowners are no longer asking whether a particular upgrade is worthwhile. They are asking whether it is right for their particular home, in what order, and for what reason.

How the questions homeowners ask have changed

Much of the conversation around home energy upgrades has historically been foundational. Asking things like, what is a heat pump, do solar panels work in Canada, and if any of this worth doing at all because of our winters.

That is no longer where we see some homeowners begin. They arrive to our coaching calls knowing what the technologies are. But what they want to know is which one applies to their house, what it will actually change about their energy use, how it interacts with the other renovations or upgrades they are considering, and whether the rebate they have read about applies to their situation.

The questions have moved from “what is this” to “how does this work for me”. This shift is consistent with the decisions themselves becoming more complex.

As more households adopt electric vehicles, replace furnaces with heat pumps, and consider battery storage, their home energy use changes. According to the Independent Electricity System Operator’s 2026 Annual Planning Outlook,

“Ontario electricity demand is forecast to grow 65 per cent over the years 2027–2050, in line with recent forecasts, driven by economic development, population growth and electrification.”

A household weighing three or four of these decisions at once is not looking for a brochure of energy efficient products. They are looking for a plan for their home.

Why homeowners are seeking independent advice

Three factors appear to be directing homeowners toward organizations that have nothing to sell them.

Program availability keeps changing

The Canada Greener Homes Grant closed after supporting more than 409,000 households and distributing $1.8 billion. What Ontario households have available now is the provincial Home Renovation Savings Program. Determining what programs are available, and applicable to a specific address, is a considerable task on its own. That’s why we put together and maintain a list of available financial support for homeowners in Ontario in our Resources Hub.

Reliable information is harder to obtain than it should be

Clean Energy Canada’s September 2025 research found that “knowledge of heat pumps remains relatively low, with less than half of Canadians aware of key facts, such as their efficiency in cold weather (68% unaware).” But when that gap is closed, they said in the report that, “After receiving more information, that 19% jumped to 30% who said they would like to install one, an 11-point increase.” It also notes that “social media and search engines are among the top destinations for Canadians seeking information about home upgrades.” The interest is there but dependable and personalized answers are less so.

Trust in the available advice has eroded

Ontario’s own Home Renovation Savings website carries a warning about scams. Green Venture, a nonprofit organization in Hamilton, published an alert for homeowners which states plainly that “some organizations promote rebates that don’t exist, have expired, or misrepresent the terms of real programs,” and advises readers to “be cautious of anyone who pressures you into signing a contract on the spot or creates a sense of urgency that makes you feel like you’re running out of time.”

When the companies offering advice also stand to profit from the outcome, independent guidance carries a value it did not previously have.

An emerging model across Canada

Nonprofit organizations like Centre for Community Energy Transformation, Toronto Home Energy Network, Better Homes Ottawa, Windfall Ecology Centre, and The Atmospheric Fund provide comparable support to households considering energy efficiency, rooftop solar and other upgrades. As well as national organizations like the Building Decarbonization Alliance, who recently updated their Home Electrification Toolkit. The toolkit is a thorough and trusted resource for home energy retrofits. Although they serve different regions and may specialize in different technologies, they all follow the same underlying model of being a free, independent and knowledgeable guide positioned between the homeowner and the market.

Policy institutions have begun to formalize this. According to the International Energy Agency’s Energy Efficiency Policy Toolkit 2025, the instruments available to governments in the buildings sector include,“one-stop-shops that facilitate easy access to grants and other incentives, alongside guidance and quality assurance.”

Efficiency Canada goes further. Writing in November 2025, Brendan Haley of Efficiency Canada argued that these organizations should not be treated as pilots and that

“Establishing market development teams as integral organizational infrastructure would better equip them to transform retrofits and drive lasting change.”

The Atmospheric Fund states the underlying issue in its own article, How rooftop solar can strengthen energy security in Canada is that “the challenge is access” and that “high upfront costs remain a major barrier for many households. Navigating installation, incentives, financing, and contractor selection can also be complex and time-consuming.”

At the household level, this tends to look fairly ordinary. For example, Bruce and Karen had been interested in solar for years, held back not knowing where to begin or which company to trust rather than the technology or the cost. They went through the Home Solar Accelerator (A program offered by The Atmospheric Fund to residents of the greater Toronto and Hamilton area) and described the experience in an interview as streamlined and unbiased, with the program administrators gathering their information, coordinating quotes, and presenting the options side by side so that they could be compared directly. For homeowners interested in solar, we recommend exploring the Home Solar Accelerator.

This gap between the homeowner and the market is why we offer the Home Energy Coaching Program, with the goal being to help residents in the Peel Region, Brampton, Mississauga and Caledon make the best decisions for their home. Homeowners can book one-on-one phone conversations with an independent energy expert and talk through their specific home, their energy bills, what rebates they’re eligible for and how to find contractors that are qualified and trustworthy.

This hyper-personalized approach has genuinely helped homeowners decide the best path forward for them.

What homeowners are asking CCET

Reviewing the questions we have received in enough detail to categorize, we found six patterns among them. Identifying details have been changed throughout to protect the privacy of the homeowners involved.

Equipment at the end of its life

This is the largest single reason why people book an energy coaching call. For example, homeowners have called us when a furnace is twenty years old, an air conditioner is on its last summer, or a water heater is leaking. Roughly one in five of the questions we see start this way.

What has changed is that the decision is no longer like-for-like. A homeowner replacing a furnace in 2010 replaced it with a new furnace. Today the same homeowner is weighing a cold climate heat pump, a hybrid system combined with a heat pump that keeps the existing gas furnace for the coldest days, or a conventional replacement, with different rebates and different operating costs attached to each.

The questions reflect that. One homeowner asked whether a heat pump would mean giving up their gas furnace entirely. Another, heating with oil in Caledon, wanted to understand what conversion would involve before their tank needed replacing. A third asked about pairing a hybrid heating system with a water heater on a timer, to take advantage of overnight electricity pricing.

These are not simple product questions, and they require a deeper understanding of how different technologies work in different situations.

A house that is not comfortable

Another common theme across the whole log of questions is about comfort. Homeowners have mentioned factors like cold bedrooms, a finished basement that never warms up, an upstairs that is unbearably hot in July, and condensation and mildew forming around windows in winter.

Comfort is where most households first notice that something is wrong, and it is a genuinely diagnostic problem. The problem is that the same symptom can have several causes, and the obvious fix is often the wrong one. A warm upstairs may be an insulation problem, an air sealing problem, a duct sizing or balancing problem, or an equipment sizing problem, and the remedies differ substantially in cost.

Answering these kinds of questions requires someone willing to consider that the previous work may have addressed the wrong thing and that can ascertain the root cause of the issue.

A bill that does not make sense

Several recent contacts have been with people who had just bought their first home and had no baseline for what their utility bills should look like. One had moved into a semi-detached house heated entirely by electricity and was facing monthly bills near $360 through the winter. They sent us the following questions:

• whether that figure was normal for an all-electric house,

• whether it was better to heat during low-rate hours or hold a steady temperature,

• whether adding a gas connection would save money,

• and whether an energy assessment would help.

Another homeowner sent their February consumption broken out by time-of-use period, alongside their gas usage in cubic meters, and asked what could be done.

Homeowners arriving with their own data, asking to have it interpreted, is meaningfully different from what conversations about energy efficient technology looked like ten years ago. Impartiality in these conversations matters, because the honest answer is sometimes that the bill is reasonable and the house is performing as it should.

Order, and what a household can afford

Once a homeowner has decided to act, the next question is almost always sequence, and sequence is where budget and eligibility collide.

One homeowner described the task as deciding which retrofits to prioritize given available capital and deadlines and asked for a cost-benefit comparison. Another had already completed a home energy assessment and arrived with the report, wanting help identifying which of its recommendations would be most effective and most affordable, since they could not do all of them.

Both are asking for something that no single contractor can supply, because the answer depends on trade-offs between measures that different companies sell. Air sealing generally precedes ventilation. Envelope work generally precedes sizing new heating equipment, since a tighter house needs less of it. Rebate eligibility can depend on the order in which work is completed, and on whether an EnerGuide Home Energy Audit was done first.

Whether a program is real, and whether it applies

Roughly one in five of the categorized questions concerns rebates and incentives, which is unsurprising given how much the financial support programs have moved.

Most of these are straightforward eligibility questions such as whether a particular upgrade qualifies, what an assessment costs, whether federal and provincial support can be combined. Some are more specific, such as the homeowner who wanted to know the practical do’s and don’ts of applying to the Home Renovation Savings Program before beginning any work.

One homeowner had already paid for a post-retrofit energy assessment that had not been completed and could not establish whether her application had ever been entered into the rebate program’s system. There was no product to recommend and nothing to sell. What she needed was someone to tell her which office to call and what to ask for.

Helping homeowners navigate the complex and changing financial support landscape in Ontario and Canada is among the most useful information we provide to homeowners because it helps to simplify the process for them.

Solar

Nobody has asked us what a solar panel is. They have asked about the type and compatibility with the age of their roof. Others have asked whether to install panels on a house that is a new build, or how much capacity it takes to cover a year of driving an electric vehicle.

One homeowner arrived with a fully researched list they wanted their solar system to power and the upgrades they wanted to complete. This list included a cold climate heat pump, a heat pump water heater, new windows and doors, air sealing and insulation, a heat recovery ventilator, and solar with battery storage. Every item was appropriate to their home. They had still not encountered the details about net-metering that mattered most to their decision.

According to the Home Renovation Savings Program’s own terms, “participants who receive an incentive through the Home Renovation Savings program for solar PV and battery storage projects are not eligible to participate in a net-metering agreement with their LDC.”

In practice this means a rebated system must offset power as it is generated and banks nothing for what is exported, and whether that is the better arrangement depends entirely on when a household uses electricity. Ontario’s net metering rules are set by the Ontario Energy Board. The rebate itself is worth up to $5,000 toward solar and a further $5,000 toward battery storage.

This example demonstrates there are still information gaps in the market because someone can read everything publicly available and still miss a rule that may change their decision.

What we noticed

Across all six categories, very few of these questions have a single-product or single-solution answer.

The homeowner replacing a furnace is choosing between whole systems, not brands. The one with a cold bedroom needs a diagnosis before purchases. The one with the high bill may not need to buy anything at all. The one with the audit report needs someone to help them decide what not to do. And the one with the researched list needed to know about a rule that was not where they were looking.

Each of them was, in effect, asking about their whole house energy use rather than about a specific technology alone.

That is the shift in the conversation we are observing, and it speaks to why having an independent nonprofit providing advice is important. A homeowner making a single decision can manage with a good website, but when that homeowner is making several interconnected decisions, against programs that change and advice that largely originates with parties who have something to sell, benefits from an impartial guide.

Where to start as a homeowner

None of the homeowners described above had to work through these questions alone.

Our Home Energy Coaching is a free call with a certified energy coach, available to residents in Mississauga, Brampton, and Caledon. We do not sell equipment, we do not accept referral fees, and we have no stake in the decision you reach. In some cases, the answer is that an upgrade makes sense for your home, and here is who to contact. In others it is that the timing is not right yet, or that nothing needs to change at all.

Book a call with an Energy Coach to get your questions answered.