Just about ten minutes outside of Amherst, Nova Scotia, near the rural community of Salem, sits the home of Ravel and Taylor Perez. The house is hard to miss — it’s the one covered in solar panels, soaking in the sun and generating at least 10,000 kilowatt hours of power every year. That’s something the Perezes didn’t have in mind when they first moved to Nova Scotia about seven years ago.

Shortly after his family settled into their oil and wood-heated home, Ravel Perez got an email from Efficiency Nova Scotia, and the rest is history. The Perez home, which cost the family about $6,000 to heat in their first winter, would soon be producing more energy than the family uses.

But the journey didn’t begin with solar panels. The first thing Efficiency NS representatives did with the Perez home was conduct a blower test, which found a drafty house in need of good old-fashioned insulation.

Luckily, the family qualified for the Nova Scotia HomeWarming Program, with the entire house getting insulated at no cost to the family. Efficiency NS then arranged for heat pumps to be installed in the newly insulated home. Funded by the province of Nova Scotia, HomeWarming offers no-charge energy assessments and free home upgrades to eligible Nova Scotians.

Shortly thereafter, the Perezes were having their roof replaced, and the question of producing their own electricity through rooftop solar came up. Ravel says he put in another call to Efficiency NS, and eventually had a team of people at his home — equipped with drones — to evaluate its potential for producing electricity. With a steep roof pitch and no tree cover nearby, the Perez house was a natural fit, and promised to produce enough energy to make installations worthwhile. And with zero interest financing available, the Perezes went for it.

“It was a no brainer,” recalls Ravel about his decision. “The second you sign the piece of paper and the solar is installed, you're already saving money on a month-to-month basis.”

Ravel says people have asked exactly how much each upgrade on his energy system is saving him.

“It's hard for us to tell because we got everything done [nearly] at once…We got the new roof, the solar, the heat pumps, the insulation…So, it's like, of course it costs a lot less to heat the house now,” he says. “Actually, it essentially costs nothing now, because we produce more solar than we use.”

The Perezes metering agreement with Nova Scotia Power is “grandfathered in,” which

means the family gets paid for every kilowatt-hour they produce over and above what they use. They pay a monthly hook up fee, and, “essentially, that's our electric bill,” says Ravel. Once a year, NS Power tallies up whatever they have produced over and above what they’ve used and pays the Perezes for that power at the going rate. So far, Ravel says they’ve been paid about $1,000 a year for the extra electricity produced on their rooftop. *For agreements signed as of April 2022, surplus kilowatt-hours (kWh) (generated by customers who produce more electricity than they can use) will be “banked” and applied to the following bill to offset any electricity drawn from the grid until the end of the year.

The high performance of the combined energy and efficiency fixes exceeds what was originally predicted for the house, and not something they were planning for or expecting, Ravel says, adding that the family continues to make lifestyle changes when it comes to energy.

“A couple of years ago we needed a new water tank, so we looked for the one that was the most efficient,” he says. “I’ve got an app on my phone now, and it tells me how much each thing is using…It is a bit of a mindset. It was a big learning curve for us, but now looking back, it's like, oh my God, why isn't everybody doing this?”

According to Janet Tobin, of Efficiency Nova Scotia, a lot more people are following the Perezes lead. Before 2021, Tobin says the HomeWarming Program would get up to two thousand applications each year. These days, “it's consistently been over 8,000 to 10,000,” says Tobin, due to the rising cost of living and new programs and incentives coming online. That increase in popularity has caused waiting lists, says Tobin, something that Efficiency NS is actively working to reduce.

And Ravel Perez says the program, in combination with the solar panels, has been a game changer for his family.

“The amount of money and headache they've saved us,” says Ravel, “it’s massive.”

The Climate Story Network is an initiative of Climate Focus, a non-profit organization dedicated to covering stories about community-driven climate solutions.