What separates a useful energy audit from a box-ticking one

Every EnerGuide evaluation produces the same deliverables — a rating, a label, an upgrade report — because NRCan specifies them. That makes it easy to assume they are all the same. They are not, and the differences are worth knowing about before you book.

1. Is the blower door actually being used?

Air leakage is frequently the largest single heat loss in an older Canadian house and it is invisible. A blower door test is required as part of the evaluation, but there is a difference between running it to get a number and running it while walking the house with a thermal camera to find out where the air is going. The second takes an extra twenty minutes and is where most of the useful findings come from.

2. Is the advisor affiliated with a licensed Service Organization?

They have to be. The licence — not the individual — issues the label, and a programme will not accept a file without one. Ask for the organization's licence number. Ours is 9E.

3. Does the firm sell the work it recommends?

This is the one nobody asks and it changes everything. If the same company that assesses your house also sells insulation, windows or heat pumps, the assessment has a commercial direction built into it. We sell none of those. It is not a virtue claim, it is the mechanism that makes an independent report worth commissioning.

4. Will they tell you when you do not need them?

Six of the twenty-eight programmes we track require no evaluation at all. If you ring about one of those we will say so. A firm that books every call that comes in is telling you something about how it treats the ones it does book.