Every fall the same question arrives with the first cold snap: the house is drafty, the gas bill is climbing, and someone has heard there is money from the province to fix it. There is. Ontario’s Home Renovation Savings Program — run by Enbridge Gas and Save on Energy — pays real rebates for insulation, air sealing, windows and heat pumps.
But the programme was written for houses in general, and most of the houses we work in are not houses in general. They are hundred-year-old semis and row houses with solid brick walls, balloon framing, attics nobody has looked into since the war, and wiring that was never meant to be buried in insulation. In these houses the rebate rules and the building physics pull in different directions, and the calendar is now part of the problem: the current version of the programme has a hard date on it this fall.
This is the builder’s guide to insulating an old brick house under the rebate — what actually qualifies in an older East-Toronto house, what quietly caps the money, what can hurt the house, and why the order you do things in matters more than the amount.
The clock: November 30 is about the second audit, not the work
The bundled insulation rebates run through an energy-assessment stream, and it works in a fixed order:
- A pre-retrofit energy assessment comes first — before anything is touched. A registered energy advisor inspects the house and does a blower-door test. Any upgrade completed before that visit is not eligible.
- You complete at least two qualifying upgrades from the advisor’s report.
- A post-retrofit assessment confirms the work. Under the programme’s current eligibility requirements, that second assessment must be scheduled and entered into the programme’s system by November 30, 2026, and completed within 180 days of the first one or by December 31, 2026, whichever comes first.
That is the rule as written in the programme’s own Assessment Program Stream — Additional Program Eligibility Requirements (version dated November 2025). No successor programme had been announced when we wrote this, and the terms allow the programme to change. Confirm the dates with your energy advisor when you book.
There is also a separate, simpler attic-only stream that needs no assessment. It runs on its own clock — installation by a programme-approved contractor finished by November 30, 2026 — and it has its own trap, which our knob-and-tube guide covers: if you open the attic yourself first, you can lose it.
What this means in practice: if a renovation is starting this winter and insulation is part of it, the energy assessment is a week-one task. Demolition, strip-outs and “just opening up that wall to have a look” all come after it. Somebody has to sequence that, and on a design-build job it is us.
How much you can actually get: the number is smaller than the headline
The programme advertises insulation rebates of up to $7,700, and individual line items are genuinely generous — up to $3,600 for exterior walls, up to $1,500 for the attic, up to $1,500 for basement walls. Our guide to Ontario renovation rebates keeps the current amounts.
What the headline doesn’t say is that the assessment stream carries an overall cap that depends on how your house is heated:
- Heated primarily by an Enbridge natural-gas furnace or boiler: up to $5,000 in total rebates.
- Heated by electricity (including a heat pump), oil, propane or wood: up to $10,000.
Most of the older houses we work in heat with gas. For those houses, $5,000 is the ceiling on everything claimed through the assessment stream combined, whatever the individual line items add up to. The first time you complete the programme, up to $600 of the assessment cost is reimbursed as well. And any measure you already received a rebate for under an earlier Enbridge or Save on Energy programme — windows through the old HER+ programme, say — can’t be claimed twice.
None of this makes the rebate less worth having. It just changes the conversation from “how do I get $7,700” to “which two or three upgrades does this particular house need most.”
Semis and row houses: the house type caps the rebate first
This is the rule that matters most in East Toronto, and it is written plainly in the programme’s requirements:
- Semi-detached and end-of-row houses are eligible for 75% of the maximum rebate on wall, basement and crawl-space insulation.
- Middle-of-row houses are eligible for 50%.
- Shared walls between units earn nothing — there is no rebate for insulating a party wall.
The logic is sound: a semi has one fewer exterior wall to lose heat through. But it means that on a Riverdale semi or a Leslieville row house, the wall and basement numbers are three-quarters or half of what the programme page shows before any other rule applies. Detached houses — more common as you move north toward Leaside, where our office is — are the ones that can reach the full amounts, though the gas-heat cap is the same for everyone.
Rebates are also pro-rated by how much of each area you insulate. Insulate 60% of the exterior walls and you receive 60% of the (already house-type-adjusted) wall rebate.
If the house has a suite — or is about to become more than one home
Two rules matter for anyone adding a unit:
- A house built as a single-family home with a secondary suite added later is eligible. The whole house is assessed as one, and it needs a central heating system.
- A house built as a duplex, triplex or low-rise multi-unit building is not. Neither are stacked townhouses.
So if a basement apartment or a suite for a parent is part of the plan, keep the heating central if you want the rebate, and talk to your energy advisor before the design separates the systems. Where the house’s classification is changing more substantially, ask the programme directly before assuming eligibility.
The walls: where the rebate and the building disagree
Here is the part the rebate tables can’t tell you.
Most pre-1930 houses in the east end are built with solid brick walls — two or three wythes of brick, plaster on the inside face, no stud cavity. There is nothing to blow insulation into. Getting R-value onto those walls means building a new insulated wall on the inside, or wrapping the outside, and both are major work.
The interior route carries a real risk. A solid brick wall has stayed sound for a century partly because the heat leaking out through it keeps it warm and helps it dry. Insulate it from the inside and the brick runs colder and wetter through the winter. In older, softer brick that can mean freeze-thaw damage — spalling faces, crumbling mortar — and it also reaches the floor joists, which in these houses sit in pockets in the brick. The National Research Council’s best-practice guide on insulating mass masonry from the interior (2022) sets out how the risk is assessed and managed. It can be done well. It has to be designed, not just installed.
The rebate pays by the R-value added. It doesn’t ask whether the wall behind the insulation will be healthy in ten years. That’s our job.
How we handle it:
- When a wall is already open for other reasons — a kitchen, a new window, services that have to run on that wall — we build the new insulated wall with moisture management designed in. (That is what we mean in our kitchen guide when we talk about building a new wall in front of the brick.)
- We don’t recommend stripping good plaster off every exterior wall in the house to chase a wall rebate on a house that isn’t otherwise being opened up. The disruption is large, the rebate on a semi is 75% of the headline, and the risk to the masonry is real.
- The attic, the basement header and air sealing come first. They are where an old house loses the most heat for the least risk.
The attic: check for vermiculite before anyone goes up there
The attic is usually the best first move — but in houses of this age, look before you blow.
Many older attics contain vermiculite: a loose, pebbly, grey-brown or silvery-gold fill poured between the joists. Health Canada’s advice on asbestos and your health is direct: vermiculite may contain asbestos, so don’t disturb it, don’t try to remove it yourself, and have a professional test it before any renovation that could.
For the rebate, that means: if the attic might hold vermiculite, test first. If it’s there, removal by a qualified abatement contractor comes before any insulation contractor or electrician works up there.
Two other attic realities in older houses:
- A lot of the “attic” isn’t reachable. In a storey-and-a-half house, much of the roof assembly is sloped ceiling behind plaster. Under the assessment stream, the attic rebate is pro-rated by how much of the whole roof assembly you insulate — and the inaccessible areas count in that total. The attic-only stream is stricter still: it requires 100% of the roof assembly to be insulated.
- Old wiring and new insulation. Whether you can insulate over knob-and-tube is an electrical question, not an insulation question — the answer comes from a licensed electrical contractor. Our knob-and-tube guide explains why.
Air sealing and the basement: small rebates, big differences
Older houses in the east end are often balloon-framed: the wall cavities run from the basement to the roof without a break. Air — and heat — moves straight up through them. Sealing those paths at the top plates and around the basement header is some of the most effective comfort work you can do in an old house, and it’s the same fire-stopping work we describe in our guide to bringing a parent home.
Be realistic about the money, though. The air-sealing rebate is $200 to $250, and only if the house hits the airtightness target in the advisor’s report. Do it because the house needs it. And because a tighter house changes how it breathes, ask your advisor about ventilation before and after.
In the basement, the programme pays for insulating walls, the slab and the foundation header — but walls and headers only on 75% or 50% terms on a semi or row house, and a header alone doesn’t qualify without the walls. On a brick or rubble foundation that already has water or salt showing on the inside face, insulation is not the first job. Water management is. If the basement is being lowered or underpinned, insulation belongs in that plan, not before it.
Windows: original sashes and the rebate
The programme pays $100 per window or door opening replaced with an ENERGY STAR certified unit, with a minimum of three windows or one door. Two details matter in older houses:
- Only complete units with frames qualify. Replacing sashes or glass alone is not eligible.
- Restoring original wood windows earns nothing from the programme. Restoration is often the right call on a house with good original sashes. It just isn’t a rebate item.
The order of operations
Put together, the sequence we’d follow on an older East-Toronto house this fall looks like this:
- Decide whether the rebate is worth chasing on your timeline. If the work can’t be finished and the second assessment done by December 31, don’t bend the renovation around it.
- Book the energy assessment before any work — including exploratory openings.
- Test the attic for vermiculite if there’s any chance it’s there.
- Have an electrician answer the wiring question before insulating anywhere old wiring runs.
- Pick the two or three measures this house actually needs — usually attic, air sealing and the basement header, with walls only where they’re already open and can be designed properly.
- Complete the work, book the second assessment early, and keep every invoice.
That is the same principle as the order you do things in across a whole house: every early decision either opens a door or closes one. It’s also part of what makes an old house one you stop worrying about, and it matters most for anyone planning to age in place in a house that should be comfortable for a long time.
Woodsmith Insight: The rebate is worth taking — but never let it choose the work. Insulating an old brick house is a design decision before it is a rebate form. In a hundred-year-old house, the right insulation is the one that keeps the building healthy for the next hundred years, and the rebate is how the province helps pay for it. Get the assessment in first, test the attic, respect the brick, and spend the money where the house is actually losing heat.
Christopher B. Smith, Red Seal carpenter and BCIN-licensed designer
If you’re planning work on an older house this winter and want to know whether the rebate fits your timeline — or which upgrades your house actually needs — talk to us. We’ll help you get the order right before anything is opened up.
Frequently asked questions
Yes, as of September 2026. Under the assessment stream’s current requirements, the post-retrofit assessment must be scheduled by November 30, 2026 and completed by December 31, 2026 (or within 180 days of the first assessment, whichever is sooner). The programme can change, so confirm dates with your energy advisor.
No. Any upgrade completed before the pre-retrofit assessment isn’t eligible for a rebate. Book the assessment before demolition or exploratory openings begin.
In the assessment stream, homes heated primarily with Enbridge natural gas can receive up to $5,000 in total rebates. Homes heated with electricity, oil, propane or wood can receive up to $10,000.
Semi-detached and end-of-row houses are eligible for 75% of the maximum wall, basement and crawl-space rebates; middle-of-row houses for 50%. Shared walls earn no rebate.
It can be, but it has to be designed. Interior insulation makes old brick colder and wetter, which raises the risk of freeze-thaw damage and affects joist ends embedded in the wall. The NRC’s best-practice guide sets out how that risk is assessed. We insulate brick walls when they’re open for other work and can be detailed properly — not to chase a rebate.
Don’t disturb it or remove it yourself. Health Canada advises having it tested by a professional. If it contains asbestos, removal by a qualified contractor comes before any insulation or electrical work in the attic.
A house originally built as a single-family home with a suite added later is eligible, assessed as a whole, with central heating. Houses built as duplexes, triplexes or other multi-unit buildings are not.
Complete ENERGY STAR certified units with frames qualify at $100 per opening, minimum three windows or one door. Replacing glass or sashes alone doesn’t qualify, and restoring original windows isn’t a rebate item.
