Applying to Burlington Hydro, and the two deadlines
Burlington Hydro handles residential net metering directly. The route starts with an optional pre-consultation, which is worth taking even though it is optional, because it is the point at which questions about your service and your part of the distribution system get answered before an application is formally in. You then submit a Net Metering Connection Application, known as Form C, with a single-line diagram of the proposed installation.
From there, Burlington Hydro issues an Offer to Connect within 30 days. That is the utility's commitment, and it is a useful benchmark to hold an installer's schedule against: if a project is waiting materially longer than that with no explanation, something is missing from the submission rather than sitting in a queue. Once you accept the offer, a system under 12 kW has 180 days to be energized.
That second window is the one homeowners underestimate. A hundred and eighty days sounds generous until equipment lead times, roofing work, an electrician's availability and Electrical Safety Authority scheduling are all stacked inside it. If your project involves reroofing first, or a panel upgrade, sequence those before accepting the offer rather than after, so the clock starts when the work can actually proceed.
Burlington's permit exemption list, and why solar is not on it
Burlington's rule is that every construction project related to a building or structure needs a building permit under the Building Code Act unless it appears on the city's exemption list. That is the default, and the exemption list is the only thing that changes it. Reading that list carefully is what stops a project going wrong.
The only solar entry on the exemption list is a collector that is not mounted to a building and has a face area under five square metres, which is about 54 square feet. Both halves of that description matter. A roof-mounted array fails the first test regardless of its size, and a large freestanding array fails the second. So the practical answer for a homeowner putting panels on a roof is that a building permit is required, and anyone telling you otherwise is likely reading the exemption for detached collectors and applying it to the wrong thing.
Burlington also issues no electrical permits at all. The city directs owners to the Electrical Safety Authority for that part of the work, reachable at 1-877-372-7233. So the approvals for a Burlington install come from three separate places: the city for the building permit, the Electrical Safety Authority for the electrical work, and Burlington Hydro for the connection. None of them tells the others what it has done, and an installer's proposal should be explicit about who handles each.
How your credits behave, and what time-of-use changes
Under Ontario net metering, exported electricity is credited kilowatt hour for kilowatt hour at the retail rate against future bills. Burlington Hydro banks that surplus as a bill credit for up to 12 months before it resets, and there is no cash payment for a net annual excess anywhere in the province. The credit is a rolling clock rather than a lump sum, which means a system that consistently produces more than the household consumes will keep aging credits out unpaid.
The sizing question that follows is not how many panels fit on the roof but how the running credit balance moves month by month against your consumption. A well-matched system builds a balance from spring through autumn and spends it over the winter. Ask an installer to show that balance as a line rather than showing you a single annual production number, which hides the behaviour entirely.
Burlington Hydro's customers can be on time-of-use pricing, and where you are, self-consumption gets more valuable than the headline arithmetic suggests. A kilowatt hour consumed the moment it is generated avoids a purchase at the price applying in that window, and running flexible loads such as laundry, dishwashing or vehicle charging during daylight costs nothing to arrange. Battery storage does the same job with equipment instead of habit, which is why Ontario's main rebate programme pairs solar with storage rather than funding panels alone.
Half of Burlington's homes are not detached houses
Single-detached houses make up about 50.3 percent of Burlington's dwellings. Row houses account for about 18.8 percent, apartments in buildings of five or more storeys about 17.5 percent, apartments in buildings under five storeys about 8.1 percent, and semi-detached houses about 4.2 percent. So roughly half of local households live in something other than a detached house, and for most of them the roof is not theirs to decide about.
In a high-rise the roof is controlled by the building rather than the resident, and the practical route is a conversation with the condominium corporation or the owner rather than an installer. In a row house the roof planes are narrower and the structure is often shared, which changes both the layout an installer can propose and whose agreement is needed for penetrations into it. A semi-detached house brings a shared party wall and often a shared chimney to work around, which is a design constraint more than a legal one.
For the detached half, the usual questions apply and are worth being specific about. Which planes face closest to south, what the pitch is, what shades them in the low-sun months rather than in July, and how much service life the roof covering has left. Panels commonly outlast the shingles under them, so a roof close to replacement is cheaper to redo before the array goes on than after.
The rebate, and the configuration question it raises
Ontario's Home Renovation Savings Program offers combined rebates of up to $10,000 for solar PV paired with battery storage. It launched in January 2025 and was expanded for the 2026-27 programme year, which runs from April 1, 2026 to March 31, 2027. That makes it the main incentive a Burlington homeowner is likely to be shown.
It also raises a question that matters more here than the rebate amount. Homeowners taking the HRSP solar incentive are generally directed to a load-displacement configuration rather than full net metering, which is a different arrangement from the Form C route described above. Before you apply to either, ask an installer to explain which configuration your system will be in, what that means for exported electricity, and whether the rebate and the net metering agreement can coexist on your installation. Confirm the current rules rather than relying on how a project was handled last year.
On the federal side, the Canada Greener Homes Loan, interest-free up to $40,000, stopped accepting new applications on October 2, 2025, and only previously approved loans are being funded, so it is not an option for a project starting now. The Canada Greener Homes Affordability Program launched in September 2025 and delivers no-cost retrofits through participating provinces, which do not currently include Ontario, for low- to median-income households, with solar PV federally eligible but each province setting its own technology list. Canada has no federal investment tax credit for residential solar. Some municipalities and utilities offer local financing such as local improvement charges, so it is worth asking what is currently available in Burlington rather than working from an older summary.