Three kinds of roof, three different projects
The majority case is straightforward. 56.7 percent of Dollard-des-Ormeaux dwellings are single-detached houses, which means the owner controls the roof, the electrical service and the panel outright, and nobody else has to approve the idea before quotes are worth collecting. If that is you, the rest of this page is about the roof itself and the two approvals.
Row houses are 16.6 percent of the stock, and they are the group most often surprised. A row house typically shares roof structure with its neighbours, so fixings, penetrations and future access to the roof are not purely your own business. Settle that with the adjoining owner in writing before a design exists, and cover who pays when the covering is eventually replaced. The usable area on your section may also be narrower than it appears from the street, so ask for a look at the actual roof planes rather than a satellite estimate.
About a quarter of dwellings, 16.1 percent low-rise plus 8.2 percent high-rise, have no private roof. There the roof is a common element or belongs to the building's owner, and the route is a written proposal to the syndicate or the landlord covering cost, ownership of the equipment, insurance and roof replacement. That is a different piece of work from getting three quotes, and it is worth knowing that before you start. Semi-detached at 2 percent and duplex at 0.2 percent are small enough that two-owner negotiation is a rare case here, unlike in much of Quebec.
What decides output once the ownership question is settled
For a house, production comes down to orientation, shading and the roof covering. An unshaded slope facing generally south produces the most; east and west slopes still produce usefully but give up output; a north slope rarely repays the hardware. There is no way to compensate for a bad plane with better equipment, so plane selection is the most consequential decision in the design.
Shading is the most expensive variable, because it removes production in the middle of the day when the array would otherwise be at its strongest. Insist on an assessment that considers the whole year rather than the hour of the site visit: a bare tree in April is a full canopy by July, and mature trees are a common reason an installation underperforms its estimate.
Check the roof covering before anything else is decided. Panels outlast most coverings, so a covering within a few years of replacement should be replaced first rather than paying later to remove and reinstall the array. On a row house that check matters twice over, because a later re-roof involves the neighbour as well.
Hydro-Quebec, two approvals and the credit bank
Hydro-Quebec distributes electricity in Dollard-des-Ormeaux, and connecting an array means enrolling in the option d'autoproduction. You do not file it yourself: a licensed CMEQ electrician submits the installation request, and Hydro-Quebec evaluates whether the local network can accept your generation before granting conditional acceptance. There are two distinct gates there, the conditional acceptance and the final authorisation after inspection, and the system cannot be energised until the second one is granted.
Ask that both appear as milestones in your contract, and ask who follows up with Hydro-Quebec if the file stalls between them. Ask as well which electrician signs the request and whether they are on the installer's staff or subcontracted, because on a project whose main external dependency is that filing, the availability of the person making it is a fair question.
Residential billing is Tarif D, a two-tier block rate rather than time-of-use, so no hour of the day is cheaper and nothing is gained by shifting when you run appliances. Surplus banks as a kilowatt hour credit and offsets later consumption at parity, carrying summer production into winter bills, but the bank resets every 24 months and any balance left is settled well below the retail price you pay to buy electricity back. Size to twelve months of your own kilowatt hour totals rather than to the roof area available.
Grants and financing
Hydro-Quebec's LogisVert residential solar grant pays 1,000 $ per kW of installed capacity and covers up to 40 percent of eligible project costs, typically landing around 5,000 $ to 6,000 $ on a residential system. Installations must be completed on or after June 30, 2025, and the claim is filed through the LogisVert portal within 9 months of the installation date. Hydro-Quebec projects that this brings a typical residential payback from 25 to 30 years down to roughly 10 to 12 years.
If the project belongs to a building rather than to a house, settle who the official applicant is before the work is done. The claim window runs from the installation date and cannot be reopened afterwards, and a syndicate discovering after the fact that nobody filed is a bad conversation to have. Decide it in the contract along with who keeps the itemised cost breakdown.
Federally the options have narrowed. 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 still being funded. The Canada Greener Homes Affordability Program replaced it in September 2025, delivering no-cost retrofits through provincial partners 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.