Halifax Regional Municipality has a very cool program on the go, with a new round of registrations opening up 1 March 2014. The program is called Solar City, and it is a way that homeowners can benefit from installing a solar hot water system without having to pay all of the equipment and labour costs up front. The installation program is currently limited to a single system configuration that is provided by Dartmouth’s ThermoDynamics. There are a couple of ways to finance the installation of this system:

A traditional, but 0% interest, 5-year loan from Efficiency NS (via TD Trust)
A 3.5% interest, 10 year loan from HRM that you pay off via your property tax bill

The Efficiency NS financing option obviously has it’s merits in terms of no interest, but a shorter loan period means you will have a bigger monthly payment on the money borrowed. If you sell the house within that loan period, you end up paying for the whole cost of the system regardless of when you pay it out. The Efficiency NS financing option is also open to a wider range of system configurations, as long as they are CSA approved.

The HRM financing option (scroll down to #11 in the linked sample contract pdf) has interest associated with it, so you will be paying more over the long run for the system than with a no-interest loan, of course. However, it’s a longer loan period and so the payment will be smaller. The cool thing with this loan, is that the loan ‘stays’ with the property. So if you sell at the 2 year anniversary, for example, you are only paying for 2 years of the loan period and whoever buys your house pays for the rest of the system cost. The HRM financing is available only through the Solar City initiative.

HRM is clear that you can pay off financing at anytime with no penalty, but I couldn’t find that specific bit of info on the Efficiency NS site.

The HRM loan is known as a PACE (Property Assessed Clean Energy) bond or loan, where the municipality went out and found financing to be able to offer this to homeowners. It’s a great way to make a big change in local markets, depending on how it’s structured.