These guides teach the three methods this site is built on: reading public heating data correctly, turning the heating season into a capacity plan, and running a quarterly review that ends in decisions. Each one uses real, linked figures from Statistics Canada, labels our own calculations, and gives you worked numbers to redo with your company's records. You don't need to hire anyone to use them.
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Capacity math from the gas season: a worked guide
Monthly residential gas deliveries trace the shape of the heating year. Turn that curve into a monthly demand index, set it against your crew hours, and you have a capacity plan.
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The quarterly owner review: an agenda you can run yourself
A quarterly review is a ninety-minute meeting with a fixed agenda that turns your scorecard into three written decisions. Here is how to prepare it, run it and follow it up.
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How to read Statistics Canada's heating-system table for your province
Table 38-10-0286-01 is the most detailed free picture of how Canadian homes are heated, if you read three things correctly: the percentage base, the quality flags and the 2023 category change.
Reading Statistics Canada's heating-system table
How to read Statistics Canada's heating-system table walks through Table 38-10-0286-01 step by step. It covers the two different percentage bases, the E and F quality flags, the categories added in 2023 that make recent furnace declines look larger than they are, and how to turn a ten-year trend into a planning question.
It is the guide to read first, because the other two assume you can read the market context. It ends with a worked reading of British Columbia.
What you will learn:
- Why "80% of furnaces burn gas" and "80% of homes burn gas" are different claims
- Why a suppressed cell is not zero
- Which comparisons across years are safe
- How to turn a trend into a question about your own installs
Capacity math from the gas season
Capacity math from the gas season turns Statistics Canada's monthly residential gas deliveries into a demand index for your province. It sets that index against crew hours, separates weather-driven work from plannable work, and shows where the gaps fall in a worked Ontario example.
It also compares how concentrated the heating season is across provinces, from Manitoba's sharp peak to BC's flatter curve, which is useful before opening a second location.
What you will learn:
- How to build a monthly demand index in a spreadsheet
- Why winter demand usually exceeds capacity, and what to do about it
- How to use shoulder and summer months
- Why triggers beat fixed dates for staffing
Running a quarterly owner review
The quarterly owner review is a ninety-minute agenda with preparation steps, a scorecard reading method, a market check and a template for three written decisions. It includes a seasonal calendar of what each quarter's review should focus on.
What you will learn:
- What to prepare a week ahead
- How to read a scorecard by equipment line
- How to write a decision that actually gets done
- How a decision log builds value over time
How the guides connect
The three guides form a loop. The data guide tells you what market you are in. The capacity guide tells you how that market moves through the year and what your crew can handle. The review guide makes you look at both every quarter and decide something. Over a year, that loop is most of what a well-run heating company's planning consists of.
Each guide also maps to a service, for owners who want help: market data briefs, season and capacity planning and the quarterly owner review.
How we write them
We follow the same rules here as everywhere on the site. Every external figure links to a source we have loaded, with a date. Every calculation is marked as ours. We don't publish industry benchmarks, because we haven't found trustworthy public ones for Canadian heating companies. And because we are a marketing and consulting service, not a contractor, the guides cover business and marketing decisions only, never technical or code questions.
A short note on dates: each guide carries the date we last checked its sources, and we revise a guide when a source table is updated. If a guide raises a question about your own company, call, text or email. You can also browse our provincial pages for the same data applied to each province.
Frequently asked questions
Are the guides free to use?
Yes. They are written so you can do the work yourself. If you would rather have us do it, the matching service is linked from each guide.
How current are the figures in the guides?
Each figure is dated and linked. The heating-system data are for 2023, the business counts are the June 2026 edition, and the gas data run through December 2025.
Will you add more guides?
We add a guide when we can back every figure in it with a source we have loaded. We would rather publish three solid guides than ten thin ones.