Furnace Installation in Ottawa: Who Is Legally Allowed to Do It, and the Three Numbers to Ask For

Ask for three numbers before you sign: the company's TSSA fuels contractor registration and its expiry date, the certificate class of the technician who will switch the new furnace on, and, if the quote includes a new electrical circuit, the 7-digit ECRA/ESA number of whoever runs it. Each one is a public fact you can check in a few minutes. None of them is an opinion about workmanship.

This page publishes no prices at all, on purpose. Two of the companies currently on page one of Google for this search price the same job and disagree with each other, and our own Ottawa furnace and air conditioner cost guide already sets out sourced ranges with the publisher named beside each one. What no page we could find answers is the question underneath the price: who is permitted to do this work, and how you confirm that the people arriving at your house are.

September is the month you get to choose. January is the month you take whoever answers

Ottawa searches for furnace replacement collapse through the winter. Read from Google Ads volume for the exact phrase, location Ottawa, pulled 2026-09-20:

September is the top of the year and January is the bottom, eleven steps apart on the bucketed scale this tool reports in. Nobody stops needing heat in January. What changes is that the search moves to repair: our own seasonality data for Ottawa shows the repair shape running the other way, climbing through December and peaking in the new year. The two phrases are measured differently, one carrying the city and one not, so the levels do not compare and no ratio between them is claimed here. The shapes are opposite, and that is the part you can act on.

The practical reading of that table: a furnace replaced in September is a decision, and a furnace replaced in January is a rescue. Every check below takes an afternoon and is much easier to insist on before the house is cold.

Number one: the company's registration, which expires every twelve months

O. Reg. 212/01 (Gaseous Fuels), made under the Technical Standards and Safety Act, 2000, is short about this. Section 21 (1): no person shall act as a contractor unless the person is registered for the purpose. TSSA says the same thing in plainer words on its own register, that Registered Fuels Contractors are the only businesses legally authorized to do fuels related work in Ontario.

Three details in that section change how you use it.

• It expires one year after it is issued (s. 21 (3)). A screenshot of a registration proves nothing about today. The register shows an expiry date; read that, not the fact a record exists.
• It is on the van in your driveway, by law(s. 21 (7)). All field vehicles other than delivery trucks, leased or owned, shall be clearly marked with the contractor's name and registration number. The same subsection requires the registration to be displayed in a conspicuous place at their business premises.
• It is not a competence test (s. 21 (6)). The director shall issue or renew a registration if the applicant pays the fee and is not in arrears. That is worth knowing because it tells you where the competence actually lives, which is the next number.

TSSA's register is searchable by company name or by authorization number, and filterable by fuel type, so you can confirm a company is registered for natural gas rather than only for fuel oil. Two limits TSSA states itself: the tool is updated at the beginning of each month, and the listing does not constitute an endorsement or referral. It answers whether a company is allowed to do the work. It does not answer whether they are any good, which is what reviews and finished jobs are for.

Number two: the certificate of the person who turns it on

Section 6 (1) of O. Reg. 212/01 attaches to the individual, not the firm: no person shall install, alter, purge, activate, repair, service or remove any appliance employed in the handling or use of gas unless that person holds a certificate for the purpose. The certificates themselves come from O. Reg. 215/01 (Fuel Industry Certificates), which lists thirty-six designations. Three of them turn up on a house.

The row that decides a furnace job is the last one. Section 22 (2) is a single sentence: a G.3 holder shall not perform the initial activation of a new appliance or a newly converted appliance. A G.3 can absolutely be on the crew, and often is, because that is how the trade trains people. The question to ask is narrower and more useful than "are your guys licensed", which always gets a yes. Ask who is commissioning the unit, and what class they hold.

The 400,000 Btuh ceiling on a G.2 is worth knowing for the opposite reason. A residential furnace is nowhere near it, so a G.2 is not a lesser ticket for your house. It is the ordinary one.

Number three: where the gas ticket stops and somebody else has to start

Section 20 (2) of O. Reg. 215/01 is the most quietly useful passage in either regulation. It lists ten things a gas technician may also do in order to finish an appliance installation, and four of them end with an explicit stop:

• Water piping may be disconnected and reconnected to get the appliance in, and the pipe needed to complete that reconnection replaced. Any additional plumbing needs a certificate in the plumber or steamfitter trade (paragraph 3).
• Air conditioning work is limited to the gas side of the unit. Beyond that needs a refrigeration and air conditioning systems mechanic or a residential air conditioning systems mechanic (paragraph 6).
• Wiring may be run from an existing branch circuit that has overcurrent protection. The person shall not run wiring back to the electrical supply panel or do any additional wiring without an electrician certificate (paragraph 7).
• Sheet metal work stops at the plenum connection. Anything past it needs a residential low rise sheet metal installer or a sheet metal worker (paragraph 8).

Paragraph 7 is the one that bites on a modern quote. A like-for-like gas furnace usually reuses the circuit that fed the old one, so the gas technician can finish it. A heat pump, or a move to a bigger air handler, often needs a new run to the panel, and at that point the job has quietly become electrical work.

The Electrical Safety Authority is unambiguous about who may do it. Only a Licensed Electrical Contractor can be hired to do electrical work in a home in Ontario, identified by a 7-digit ECRA/ESA licence number that appears on their vehicles, business cards and estimates. Certified electricians and Master Electricians hold real qualifications and still cannot be hired directly. ESA also requires that electrical work be reported by filing a notification before the work starts, filed by whoever is doing the work, and lists it as a red flag if a contractor asks you to file it in your name.

So on a heat pump quote there are two numbers, not one, and they usually belong to two different companies. Our Ottawa electrician cost guide covers what that second trade charges, and the Home Renovation Savings Program guide covers the provincial rebates a heat pump can earn, read from the programme's own terms.

A furnace sold at your front door is void, not merely regrettable

Section 43.1 (1) of the Consumer Protection Act, 2002 prohibits a supplier from soliciting you at your dwelling, or entering into a direct agreement there, for prescribed goods, unless you initiated contact and specifically asked them to come for that purpose. O. Reg. 17/05 section 35.1 (1) sets the list, and furnaces are paragraph 1. Air conditioners are 2, water heaters are 5, and duct cleaning services are 10.

The consequence is unusually hard. Section 43.1 (3): an agreement entered into in contravention is void. Section 43.1 (4) voids the related credit agreement and any security given for it. Section 43.1 (5) deems the goods unsolicited. This is not a cooling-off period you have to act within. The contract never had effect.

One trap sits in the exception. Section 35.1 (2) sets out what counts as you initiating contact, and it expressly carves out a response given during a supplier-initiated phone call. If they called you and you said come over, you did not initiate contact and the restriction still applies. A supplier who relies on your invitation has to keep the record of it for three years under section 35.2, so the evidence is their problem rather than yours.

TSSA runs the safety half of the same warning. It states that its inspectors do not go door to door and never sell products or services, that they attend a home only for an incident investigation, a suspected uncertified worker, a request from the fire service or police, or because a homeowner asked. And the line that matters most in a cold snap: no one can force you to have your furnace inspected. TSSA encourages an annual inspection and says plainly that you are the one who asks for it. If you doubt who is at the door, TSSA publishes 1-877-682-8772 for exactly that call.

What the estimate itself has to survive

A furnace quote signed at your kitchen table is a direct agreement, with all the contents and cancellation rights that carries. Those are set out in full in our guide to choosing a contractor in Nepean, and two of them apply to every heating job in the city.

Section 10 (1) of the Act caps an estimate: a supplier shall not charge an amount that exceeds the estimate by more than 10 per cent, and section 10 (2) lets you require the work at the estimated price if they try. Section 43 gives you ten days to cancel a direct agreement without any reason, and one year instead of ten days if the copy you were handed does not meet the statutory requirements. Both apply where your total potential payment obligations exceed a prescribed amount, which O. Reg. 17/05 section 34 sets at $50. That threshold is a statutory figure rather than a market price, and it is the only dollar amount on this page.

The alarm the new furnace obliges, and the permit question we will not guess at

Ontario's Fire Code (O. Reg. 213/07) applies its carbon monoxide section to every building containing a residential occupancy where the building contains a fuel-burning appliance, a fireplace or a storage garage. Division B article 2.16.2.1 (1) then says where the alarms go: adjacent to each sleeping area in the suite, and on each storey without a sleeping area. If your house is going from electric or oil to gas, that requirement arrives with the appliance. Settle it while somebody is still standing in the mechanical room.

We are not going to tell you whether your particular furnace swap needs a City of Ottawa building permit, because we could not read the City's own page to check. ottawa.ca sits behind a bot challenge that returned an interstitial rather than the content on 2026-09-20, and a permit rule quoted from memory is worse than no answer. Put the question to your installer in writing, ask them to name which permits the job needs and who applies for them, and confirm it with the City directly. A registered contractor will have had the conversation before.

What to ask before you sign

• Your TSSA fuels contractor registration number and its expiry date. Then look it up. Registration lapses annually under s. 21 (3), and the register shows the date.
• Which class of certificate does the technician commissioning the unit hold? A G.3 may not perform the initial activation of a new appliance.
• Does the quote include a new circuit back to the panel? If yes, the ECRA/ESA number of the Licensed Electrical Contractor doing it, and confirmation that they file the ESA notification rather than you.
• Is this an estimate or a fixed price? The word changes the legal ceiling. An estimate carries the 10 per cent cap in section 10 (1).
• Which permits does this job need, and who applies? In writing, in the contract.
• Where will the carbon monoxide alarms go? Adjacent to each sleeping area and on each storey without one.

None of that tells you whether the ductwork will be balanced or whether the crew will clean up. It does clear out the companies that cannot answer, which is most of the work and all of the part you can do from a chair.