Grants and Rebates – How to be Successful
If you haven’t heard, Fortis grants were here and provided a significant boost to your buying power. At the time of the writing of this original blog in 2019, if you were faced with replacing your furnace or boiler that year, we had good advice on how to make sure that you got the Fortis Grant / Rebate, and got it without delay. Updating and re-writing this information now is important even with the program having been finished since these grant and rebate programs are always coming and going but the core practices remain the same. Here are the top 3 MUSTs of the time.
Choose the right company. R&B is a Fortis BC Trade Ally company. This means we’ve met their standards for licensing, quality and experience. One of the things we like to say at R&B, is if you want the best brand of furnace, you have to choose the right company to Install it. With so little difference between brand choice, and so many different offers out there it can become difficult to compare cost vs. quality. One of the things you can do, is pick the best installer.
Choose the right model of furnace or boiler. The lists of eligible equipment for grants are often long and generous. It can be hard for the homeowner to choose the model that’s right for their home. Having an in-home estimate by R&B will remove the guess-work and still allow you to pick within your budget without having to worry about the quality of the manufacture, proper sizing for your home, or whether or not it will meet the grant standards.
Having everything you need after the installation to get the money. This is where choosing the right company will win the day for you again. R&B provides the permit numbers, and in many cases prefilled form for you, and most importantly, all the correct photos that getting your grants will require.
At R&B, we’ve been to the ‘rebate rodeo’ enough for us to have learned a thing or two from experience. The biggest question we get from homeowners is, “How long until the money arrives?” The standard answer four-six weeks, but I’ve had one homeowner who is still waiting for his money after four months! Here is the secret to success.
- Make sure to fill out every box of the application form. If it asks for your account number, write it in. You may be thinking that since the provider already has your name and address – often from pre-qualifying, surely they can fill in this blank? They won’t.
- Include all the pictures, particularly the most boring ones showing the pipes coming from the furnace. In one case the two-pipe system was essential to receiving the grant.
- Submit it right away. The time limits on the grant process are non-negotiable. Don’t expect to put this off, slightly miss the deadline and get any sort of leeway.
So what is the process going to be like for you? Learning from the experience of our customers, we’ve gathered the Top Ten in anecdotal feedback and advice for your consideration. The opinions expressed here are directly from the customers’ experience and reports and do not necessarily represent the opinions of R&B.
“Fill out every box!”
This customer’s experience with a Fortis grant was to have his entire application mailed back by “snail mail “ even though he’d applied on-line. His delay was three months
“The Fortis grant can increase your buying power for ‘bells and whistles’ but it didn’t change our buying intentions in terms of efficiency, it helped us buy a better unit.”
“Wish that R&B could have handled the entire process for us, because there was so little that we did.”
For that application, the Fortis BC grant of the time required the homeowner to submit the application on their own.
“We downgraded as a result of the Fortis Grant. It put us in touch with an honest contractor (that’s US!) who didn’t end up selling us something that we didn’t need. From a customer perspective it’s the ‘wild west’ out there, and we didn’t know who to believe.”
R&B was replacing an older furnace that was way bigger and with way more functionality than they needed for their simple needs and smaller house.
“The whole thing was easy, and we got the money pretty fast”
They did everything right.
“The rebate helped; it took about 5% off the total cost. The increase in efficiency will help us to recover a significant amount in energy savings as well. It’s a program that more people should take advantage of while they can.”
“I liked that it was easy to combine the savings.”
The Fortis grants program encouraged homeowners to combine incentives for space and water heating. When coupled with manufacturers’ discounts it really added up.
“Contact is a problem. I couldn’t resolve the missing information from my form by phone or email. Everything after my initial claim had to be done in a very dated way.”
“Have very little confidence in the timing of getting the rebate money.”
Due to some of the processing delays, some caution might be prudent if you’re using grants to plan cash flow.
“It wasn’t easy to check up on processing or where the process actually was. Was a cheque mailed out? Are they mailing the forms back to me? Did it get lost in the mail? No way to tell”
A furnace or boiler replacement is a stressful expense for a homeowner to manage. Adding to that stress is the fact that most replacements are unplanned. As a long-time heating contractor, we will help you make the best choices for your home, to meet your budget and give you everything you need to make any grant rebate process a success. Call us today for your free estimate, it takes less than an hour to find out how much you can save
