Greening Your Home: Find Out How at the 16^th Annual North Grenville Sustainability Fair

Sustainability, efficiency, comfort and resilience begin at home.  Let local experts show you how they can help you achieve these goals in the “Greening Your Home” section at the 16^th Annual North Grenville Sustainability Fair.  The Fair will be held at the North Grenville Municipal Centre and runs from 10am to 3pm on Sunday April 27^th.  Attendance is free.

This year’s Sustainability Fair has placed great emphasis on heat pumps.  Heat pumps continue to be in very high demand as people look for ways to save money and to move away from burning fossil fuels.  As awareness of heat pumps grows, people are not just replacing their air conditioners with them, but also their furnaces.  Continuous technological improvements increase heat pump performance and efficiency, while growing market uptake reduces their prices.  Models of air source heat pumps are now available that heat homes in temperatures below -30 Celsius.

In the Greening Your Home section of the Fair there will be no less than four local companies to help you learn more about heat pumps, whether they might be a good fit for your home, and to explore options.  They include Sauve Heating and Air Conditioning, Atel Air Heating and Air Conditioning, RB Heating ClimateCare, and Kemptville Heating & A/C.  Between these businesses there are offerings of all types of heat pumps: air source, ground source (“geothermal”), central, mini-split and multi-split systems, with a wide range of functional options.  Don’t worry if you’re not fluent in these terms; our local experts can explain them all in plain language, as well as their pros and cons.  They’ll help you understand which solution might be optimal for your home and budget.

To grow awareness and understanding of heat pumps, the Sustainability Fair will have two related presentations.  One will be delivered at 11 AM and will highlight a new incentive program in Ontario that covers a range of home efficiency improvements, including heat pump retrofits.  The other presentation will be given at 1 PM by Tim VanderMeer.  Tim is an HVAC designer and he’ll explain how heat pumps work, their relationship with the building envelope and how they can be adapted to a range of homes.

If your interest includes the generation of clean, emissions-free energy, Future Solar and Electric can help you determine whether solar might work for your home.  Discuss a range of options including the size of system you might need, whether batteries might help you to manage your costs with Time-of-Use and make your home more resilient in power outages, or discuss how Net Metering works, and what the costs are with various regional utilities.

Stevens Creek Shutter Company will be at the Fair with their range of products and services that promote sustainability and a healthy indoor environment.  Their offering includes window treatments, wallpapers and paints.  They have an iconic Canadian paint brand with near-zero VOC that is ideal for the greenest of project standards.  Among window treatments are cellular blinds and specialized fabrics with advanced features that meet elevated standards of energy efficiency to help keep your home more comfortable and save energy, some of which are made from reclaimed ocean waste.

Also on hand will be EcoGen Energy & Build, designers and builders of custom homes built to the highest efficiency standard using materials with the lowest environmental impact.  EcoGen has in-house capability specialized in Passive House design and all facets of highly efficient energy design, including HVAC, water heating and solar power generation based on over 18 years of experience designing and building these systems.  Find out why the highest efficiency also delivers not just the ultimate in savings, but also comfort and resilience.

Join us on Sunday April 27^th at the North Grenville Sustainability Fair to discover how to make your home more comfortable, efficient and sustainable, by meeting with local experts in the Fair’s Greening Your Home section.