$12,000 in Ontario, a twenty-five year asset, and a design nobody verifies.
Ground source — geothermal — carries the single largest residential rebate in the country: up to $12,000 under Ontario's Home Renovation Savings Program. It is also the measure with the widest gap between a good installation and a bad one, because almost nothing about the ground loop is visible after the trench is closed.
The ground a few metres down sits at roughly the annual average air temperature and barely moves. A ground source system therefore never faces a minus-thirty source temperature, which is exactly when an air source heat pump is working hardest. In a Winnipeg or Fort McMurray winter that difference is the whole argument.
Loop sizing. A ground loop sized optimistically works beautifully in year one and degrades as the ground around it is thermally exhausted, because the heat is being extracted faster than the surrounding soil replaces it. That failure appears in year three or four and is enormously expensive to correct.
The Canadian design and installation standard is CSA/ANSI/IGSHPA C448 Series:25, which replaced the 2017 edition. It exists precisely because this is the measure with the least public clarity about who is competent to design to it.
Ask for the load calculation the loop was sized from — a CSA F280, room by room. Ask what standard the loop design follows. And do the envelope first: every kilowatt of load you remove is metres of loop you do not have to pay to put in the ground.
Programme details in this post were checked on 22 Sep 2026 against each issuing body's own published page. Programmes change without notice — the maintained version of all of this lives on the programme list, which carries the date of the last check and a link to every source.
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Licence 9E
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