Understanding Home Energy Assessments

A Home Energy Assessment, formally known as an EnerGuide Evaluation, helps you understand how your home uses energy and how upgrades can enhance comfort, efficiency, and overall performance. This knowledge allows you to make more informed retrofit decisions.

Why this matters in Manitoba

Home and water heating can account for about 75% of a typical home’s monthly energy bill, but how much energy your home uses depends on more than just the equipment inside it. Common factors that affect energy use include:

What Your Assessment Can Tell You

An EnerGuide evaluation produces more than just an energy rating. It gives you a measured picture of how your home is performing today and what targeted improvements could mean for your home and your household.

VIDEO: Energy Minute | What a deep energy retrofit can do for your home - Efficiency Manitoba

Building Performance Considerations

What is Building Performance: This refers to how well a home functions across several dimensions. It's not just about energy use but also about comfort, indoor air quality, durability, and resilience.

How EnerGuide Measures Building Performance: An EnerGuide Evaluation uses energy-modelling software to calculate an EnerGuide Rating on a gigajoules-per-year (GJ/year) scale, where lower generally indicates better performance.

Why Building Performance Matters Beyond Your Home: Buildings are a significant contributor to global energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.

Your Home as a Connected System and Why Upgrade Order Can Matter

Your home works as a connected system. Every part of a house can affect other parts, so components should not be evaluated in isolation.

Why Upgrade order can matter: Upgrades can sometimes affect comfort, moisture levels, condensation risk, and the performance of mechanical systems. For example: