$2000 for Healthy and Climate Smart Home

Staggering heatwaves and smoke-filled air. Is this how we will think of summers now? This summer, I moved our mattress downstairs to sleep under the cool air of our new ductless heat pump. Being too hot to sleep is not how I remember British Columbia (BC) summers when I moved here 15 years ago. Back then, our summer weekend adventures were often rained out. Now they are cancelled for other reasons - smoke and heat.

As we experience the results of a changing climate, many are starting to get serious about climate adaptation – how can we make our homes more livable in the face of heat waves and wildfire smoke? How do we protect children and elderly from extreme heat and smoke? While we have limited control over summer wildfire smoke, we can do something to reduce smoke in the winter: chip and compost yard waste at home, or drop it off at Cowichan Valley Regional District (CVRD) Recycling Centres rather than burn it; and, upgrade old wood heating systems.

Like most people, I love sitting by a cozy woodstove when it’s cold, but I also know that wood smoke contains fine particles called PM2.5. PM is short for

$2,000 FOR HEALTHY AND CLIMATE-SMART HOME

Rebates!

The CVRD offer:

• $2,000 to upgrade a woodstove or outdoor wood boiler to a new heat pump • $750 to upgrade an outdoor wood boiler to a pellet boiler • $350 to upgrade an old woodstove to a new EPA/CSA woodstove or pellet stove

1,200 residents in the valley have used the CVRD rebate to upgrade old woodstoves to healthier home heating systems and the local air quality is slowly improving! This trend is

particulate matter and the 2.5 means that the PM is smaller than 2.5 microns in diameter. PM2.5 is strongly correlated with heart and lung diseases. When I first moved here, I did not put much thought into air quality and was disheartened to learn that Cowichan’s air quality was worse than many other areas in BC. As a result, people living here, especially children, elderly and those with pre-existing health conditions, suffer. Based on Island Health data, the rate of hospital admission for children with respiratory illnesses is much greater than the BC average. Also, chronic respiratory illnesses for people over the age of 45 is more common.

Why do we have poorer air quality?

One reason is the local topography. Living in a valley is like living in a soup bowl: smoke from backyard burns and woodstoves gets trapped here and can stick around for days. During the winter, weather inversions - a phenomenon where

hot air gets trapped under layers of cool air - are common. Another reason is that many homes still use woodstoves as their primary heating source. In addition, many woodstoves are old and inefficient, using about one third more wood and producing more PM2.5 than new CSA/EPA certified woodstoves. While we have limited control over summer wildfire smoke, we can reduce the smoke we breathe in the winter by upgrading old woodstoves to better heating options. As many folks have discovered during recent heatwaves, heat pumps can help you stay cool and improve indoor air quality on smoky days.

This data shows concentrations and exceedances of Provincial Air Quality Objectives and Canadian Ambient Air Quality Standards for PM2.5 at the Cairnsmore monitoring station from January 2010 to April 2019, excluding impacts from wildfire smoke.

very encouraging! Apply for a CVRD rebate at cvrd.bc.ca/woodstove. You can also find information on woodsmoke health impacts and real-time air quality on this site.

Rebates to support changeouts from gas, propane and/or oil home heating systems can be found at betterhomesbc.ca.