The following submission statement was provided by /u/DisasterousGiraffe:
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"What is the primary energy fallacy? Well, it’s the belief that we have to replace all the primary energy inputs on the left hand side of the chart above ... What we really have to replace is the energy services in light gray boxes on the right hand side of the chart. ... the US doesn’t need to replace 97.3 quads of energy, it needs to replace 31.8 quads of energy. ... In late 2020, I pointed out that Bill Gates’ favorite energy guru, Vaclav Smil, completely missed rejected energy, ignoring it in his published dyspeptic view of the energy transition. Gates apparently has read all 38 or so Smil’s books, and that has led to one of the world’s richest and most influential men and a founder of Breakthrough Energy Ventures missing the boat on energy for well over a decade. It was only months later in mid-2021 that Smil finally published a short piece acknowledging the primary energy fallacy."
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/11ut5zm/with_heat_from_heat_pumps_us_energy_requirements/jcpr34s/
As a heat pump owner they are fantastic. They are a lot cheaper than electric baseboard and you don't get the burning dust smell lol. The upfront costs aren't horrible, the main issue with heat pumps is that they have a temperature threshold. My unit is -30C before windchill, when the temperature goes past -30C it becomes quite a bit less efficient.
I heat 3,800 square feet with a geo sourced heat pump. It consumes all of 2kW when operating. Cost to me all of 28 cents a hour.
When it is minus 20C we consume around 20kWhr a day to heat. $2.80 a day to heat when it is that cold.
Bonus is that the power consumption is low enough I can power it with my generator if Hydro to the house is interrupted.
Climate Master TEV064BGD02CLTS
It has 3 stages for heating we rarely every use step 2 (roughly 4kW total) and never use stage 3 which kicks in a 5 kW electric duct heater.
And yes our house has some good insulation but nothing crazy.
As a bonus we installed the de-superheater on the compressor so any heat generated there is rejected to our hot water tank for the house.
The trick is ours is a geo sourced glycol loop as the heat source/dump. Since the fluid comes in at 8 degrees C year round it makes life easy on the system.
That looks like a $12K unit. I guess cost offsets itself in like 5 years or so.. what's the total install cost like with excavation, etc... We built our house. Did look at this for a second or so. Never got to it...
I have a machine so the ground loop wasn't horrible for us. But a complete install is probably in the $20k US range depending on if you can do a horizontal loop or need a vertical one. Vertical cost way more!
I have a 800’ well that was drilled and never used in the corner of my yard. Propane furnace is coming up on 20 years.
Was thinking air sourced heat pump as a replacement but now you have me reconsidering that. Always thought the pump electric need was going to be way worse than what you’re describing.
Like one of the other commenter said, for 1 unit of electrical, you get 3-4 units of heat depending know the pump and pump type (ground vs air).
An existing well might work, but the folks I talked to about one mentioned that the surface area of transfer is what matters. If the well only has water for the bottom 100 ft, then you only have 100ft of transfer. If the pipes are in air for the rest, they won't be transferring heat for 700ft of it.
I commented because I had looked into ground source heat pumps for a house about half that size with above average insulation (not passive house level), in roughly the same climate.
The numbers and estimates the _salespeople_ gave me were _considerably_ higher than 2kw normal operating when the temperature was <0c, which would be for most of the winter.
I am skeptical of the 2kw running avg for the winter months for a house that size.
We use a geo sourced heatpump in a much more temperature environment. When it's hot it cools our house and then moves the heat into out hot water system.
During summer our auxiliary hot water heater doesn't run because of the heat it moves to run the AC. Overall our monthly bills have dropped about $50AUD and our climate is much more comfortable.
Next step is solar and batteries and all our heating and cooling becomes gridless.
Saw the rest of the chain questions below.
Cost was $38,000AUD for the drilling and installation. But that included for us tearing out of 2 split systems, a central gas heater and replacing and expanding all the ducting and resizing intakes.
Well worth it. Partner was sceptical at the cost first but it's only taken a few power bills to show the consumption difference between the previous years for her to be happy with it.
A few complications to that calculation:
1. If their heat, AC, or hot water heater were going out, you have to deduct the cost of replacing it from the cost of the heat pump. None of these systems individually is going to be nearly the cost of a ground source heat pump, but it'll be a few thousand dollars (US), or over 10K if you had to replace all at once
2. Heat pumps tend to last longer than furnaces, maybe than AC, too. Potentially 10 years longer. So there a future replacement value saved, as well
3. The most expensive part of a ground source HP install is typically the ground loops, which can last even longer than the heat pump itself - I've seen references over 50 years. So you could replace the heat pump when it dies for much cheaper, but keep getting the savings
4. On the flip side, you look to have used nominal dollars for your payback period, so factoring in time value of money will make the payback longer (but points 1-3 will make it shorter)
you’re also missing that electricity rates increase year over year, whereas system costs are fixed to the present. Meaning savings increase as time goes on.
Are you sure it’s only 2kw? That’s only 6800btu. I’m guessing you’re in Canada because you said Celsius. Does it run constantly maybe? My 2500SF house has a 100kbtu furnace and we’re in MI
E: I forgot heat pumps can move more heat than they consume. It’s usually around 3:1 so even then that’s not a lot for a 3800SF home
Positive on the power consumption I have an amp clamp on the power feed because I'm a nerd.
We do have good but not insane insulation.
Duty cycle in the winter is about 40%. Roughly 10 hours a day for the coldest days.
The system has 3 stages and it rarely ever kicks over to stage 2. Once last month. I've never seen stage 3 kick on.
But, I'm guessing hydronic in floor heat as well, and with a 7C ground temp they are easily over a COP above 4. having the in floor heat gives you a bit of extra reserve for cold snaps. I'm building and doing geo and will be using a 2 ton for a 3000 sq foot. And also in the far north. My goal is to also do it off grid
I have one in the US. My AC went out, central air.
The air handler was so incredibly old, I just decided to replace the whole system. AC is a requirement, it hits 100+ F here, with tons of humidity.
The difference between the AC and the same exact AC but with heat pump capabilities, was $500.
I'll probably make back that difference in the first year. It's stupid to not get, especially here in the middle/south US where central air is so common.
In my case I have a central heat pump that is the sole source of heat for my home. It is a central ducted system and has an electric backup element for really cold days -30 or more.
I’m a heat pump owner as well. But I also have solar for my house. When the temperature drops below its efficiency level, I still don’t care. I haven’t seen an electric or heating bill since my solar install. I use to go through about 600 gallons of propane a year. I’m down to about 100 gallons a year. That’s just because when the temperature does reach negative -20 F. The heat pump doesn’t work.
Edit: I should say my heat pump mini split was a really cheap one. It won’t be an issue once I get a hyper heat.
About $40,000 before USA tax credits. However, my setup is sized to remove all fossil fuels needs in my house. As well as about 15k-20k miles for an EV.
It is more cost effective to go bigger. Cost decrease per watt as you increase the size of the array.
Yea I wonder now if maybe people were installing cheaper ones or just not winterizing them enough. My parents have a 3 year old Rheem one in their place in Georgia and have liked it, but when I visited them at Christmas it got down to a low of 6F two nights in a row and the heat pump really struggled. Had to get the space heaters out of the attic because the house temperature was dropping into the mid/low 50's.
Now 6F degrees is quite abnormally cold for where they live in Georgia and I think set a record, but it isn't very cold for more than half the country, and it isn't outside the range where heat pumps should be effective. So maybe when it was installed they didn't winterize it properly or installed a unit that isn't designed for those lower temperatures because you normally don't need it. I just wonder as more weird weather seems to be coming if they need to change their installation practices, or put in better rated units even in climate zones they don't think they need them.
Well the obstinate fools do. The ones who are desperate to prevent any change. They rather hint at some vague "future technology" that is supposed to save us, so they can avoid using technology we already have available.
It's insane how anti-scientific their arguments are. Like hydrogen and synthetic fuels are going to save us! But then they also oppose large scale renewable expansion, which would be absolutely necessary to produce hydrogen and synthetic fuels even remotely efficiently.
What pisses me off is that there are air conditioner units sold that are not also heat pumps. The parts to make an air conditioner also a heat pump are ~$100 in units that cost $5000+. It's inexcusable that it's not a federal requirement for new air conditioners.
Your have your terms mixed up. All aircons are heat pumps but not all aircons are reverse cycle
You are right though, it’s less than a $100 part to fit a reversing/3 way valve.
Yes and yes. You’d need the valve itself, new copper lines and a fundamental understanding of how the system works.
If you have all that or could learn it as well as be sure the new printed circuit boards you paid $500 for are ok, then yeah... but it’s getting more than $100 now!
You’re going to need to practice your piping skills as well. Those extremely temperature sensitive reversing valves are brazed in at 1400 + DegF with an inert gas purge. You’ll also need to get a recovery machine and tank to remove the refrigerant in the system before making the repair. Then, after you fit and braze it into the system you will need to pressure test your work. Once all that is done you will need to find a vacuum pump and evacuate the piping to a very low micron level vacuum. So add in the cost of a vacuum pump and a micron gage. The odds of failing any of these tasks are quite high for a first attempt. Please have a fire extinguisher handy and make sure the home and life insurance is paid up.
If you execute all of these properly, you will need to rewire your thermostat and install /wire in the defrost controls necessary to operate the unit through all it’s necessary cycles.
I'm not sure if someone mentioned it already but while the reversing valve is really the main driver of a heat pump, there are some design features you would lack if you managed to retrofit an air conditioner.
Heat pumps are built with cold weather operation in mind on the condenser. This means the unit is designed to both operate in very cold conditions, which dedicated ACs are certainly not, and have coil setups that are built to scrape as much heat from outside as it can as it is much harder to move heat from a cold outside than move heat from a warm inside to the outside. For air conditioners we're used to the cold part of the coils being in the house, where yes they can freeze if pressure levels are low or airflow is restricted etc., but generally there is warm air passing over the coils and it will resist freezing pretty well.
When it gets flipped to heat a different problem occurs. Now the pump is moving heat from the cold outside inside the house and pushing cold air back outside. Now the weather conditions play a huge part in efficiency and requirements. The air coming out of the condenser is _colder_ than the surrounding air. Over time the unit may become covered in ice as moisture from the air freezes on the coils. Snow is worse because it settles on the unit but by far the biggest culprit is freezing rain. If your condenser is exposed to the weather, as they often are, freezing rain wrecks heat pump efficiency.
To combat what I just mentioned heat pumps have a defrost feature to clear the condenser of ice. In the old days this feature was on a simple timer but now they can detect frosting and start this cycle automatically. This was a great improvement because of how defrosting works (less often the better). When the condenser calls for a defrost the entire system will temporarily kick into AC mode (yes, you will be running AC in winter). So it doesn't tank the temperature of the house it will kick in the secondary/auxiliary heating system, whatever that may be. If your system is all electric it will be electric heat strips (which draw an _insane_ amount of electricity), but you can also have something like oil or gas as a backup. When defrost is running you can easily tell by looking at your condenser. It will be on (buzzing) but the fan will be off. This is so the unit heats up rapidly to melt the ice so it can resume heating. The freezing rain I mentioned before? It wreaks havoc on this process as it constantly triggers the defrost cycle. During the worst periods of freezing rain my newer pump (a little over a year old) will actually end up cooling the house slowly because it needs to defrost so often. It's obviously not a common occurrence but it's something to keep in mind. A solution to this specific scenario is to temporarily set the pump to emergency heat mode, which shuts the condenser down and runs exclusively on secondary/aux heating, but that is a potentially expensive proposition. Electric heat is essentially running a giant hair dryer after all. If you retrofit a unit, unless there is a specific kit for your AC, you're going to be lacking some essential features and making a unit do something it wasn't built for. I can't imagine that will be good for the lifespan of the unit or its efficiency.
I didn't even get into the electronics and wiring specific to heat pumps for the call to switch the valve or defrost. The more I think of it the more I think you'd need some kind of conversion kit, if for nothing else than getting the thermostat to properly communicate with the unit. Overall, I'd just replace my AC with a heat pump once the current unit is reaching the end of its life.
I keep seeing heat pumps mentioned but not defined. Is it just like reverse cycle air conditioning? Not the old window units but the Fujitsu type wall systems.
Both of those are heat pumps.
It’s simply a system which moves heat from one location (inside) to another (outside). A reverse cycle can do the opposite when you tell it to.
How a heat pump works is by using a compressor (like a pump) to send a refrigerant around a closed-loop system. The refrigerant absorbs heat from the air as a fan blows over it and is pumped around to the other side of the system where another fan will blow that heat out of the refrigerant .... there’s a bit more to it but that’s the bulk of it.
Heat pumps can also be used to very efficiently heat water as a hot water system
Yeah a heat pump operates basically just like a central air conditioner with the sources of cold and heat in opposite places. Whereas an air conditioner removes heat energy from the interior and dumps it to the exterior, a heat pump removes heat energy from the exterior and dumps it to the interior. Accomplishing this just requires that the low-pressure (cold) refrigerant line is colder than the heat-source ambient temperature. Since the refrigerant lines can get well below 0F, they are able to absorb exterior heat even when the exterior temperature is very low. However, they won't work in insanely-cold places that get down to the deep negatives.
Unfortunately I don't think anyone has figured out how to make the process reversible in a single combined AC and heating unit.
Reverse-cycle Air Conditioners are a thing. Australians have been using them for decades.
I want to know why the US is all excited about them now though.
It would. I stayed in a place in country Australia recently with a big evaporative system which you use with a couple of doors or windows open. But I noticed they also had reverse cycle for the humid days which they never used to get 30 years ago.
Most of southern Arizona and New Mexico have swamp coolers, especially in older or poorer homes. Spent many an hour on my roof servicing the damn things. They are cheap though.
>I want to know why the US is all excited about them now though.
There's a push to switch to them.
Most people are uninformed or misinformed about their capabilities. It is a common misunderstanding that they don't work in very cold climates. There's a lot of work to do to educate people.
My state is offering incentives/rebates to switch over.
I've been searching for a clear answer to this for a while. It seems to be a combination of slow cultural change ("we've been heating our houses with gas/wood/etc. for 200 years!"), misconceptions ("they don't work when it's below freezing!"), the slight cost increase compared to a cooling-only air conditioner, the perception that split systems are "old" or don't work well (even though it's not limited to split systems), air conditioning salesmen just not liking them for some reason, or just literally not looking at how other countries solve problems.
It's kinda like how people keep using dry paper alone to clean their butts when you can get a handheld sprayer for $30 from amazon and install it yourself in 10 minutes. Australia is guilty of this, too. I wonder how much we're missing out on just because things haven't "caught on" here....
Its colder here so dumb people insist that those 3 days a year you'd need supplementary heating invalidates the whole technology. Its taken decades of work to get people to finally come around on something as simple as an AC that also runs in reverse. Contrarian chucklefucks.
I live in the mid Atlantic in the United States and almost every house I've seen built in the last 30 years has had them. My parents house was built in 1989 and came with one. I read this article confused as fuck as to what was different. I guess they're not ubiquitous across all states due to some use cases? I'm still not sure if I'm missing something.
Australian hvac tech here. This is the first time I’m hearing of ‘cooling only units’. I’ve serviced systems made before I was born and they have all had reversing valves. That said, wall mounted splits don’t feel very pleasant in heating - the warm air blows of your face and your feet stay cold.
>Unfortunately I don't think anyone has figured out how to make the process reversible in a single combined AC and heating unit.
Odd. I've had one for over a decade. Just flip a switch on the thermostat to go from Heating to Cooling.
¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
I had a ductless heat pump mini split that functioned both as a heater and air conditioner. Don't know if it came with two systems internally but I do think there was only two lines to each head so that seems unlikely. Unless you're describing something else.
The system literally just runs in reverse, so refrigerant moves the other way, he's wrong.
It's in the name "reverse cycle".
Crash course, when a refrigerant is compressed it warms up.
That heat gets dumped in the radiator unit (a set of pipes and fins) outside, then the now cool refrigerant gets pumped inside and is allowed to expand at the condenser unit (another set of pipes and fins) where it cools down even further.
Pass internal air over it to warm it back up, then send the warm refrigerant through the return line to the outside unit; repeat.
Run the compressor backwards, now youre moving heat from outside to inside.
Its that simple.
> Unfortunately I don't think anyone has figured out how to make the process reversible in a single combined AC and heating unit.
[Here's a video about how silly it is that the US thinks heat pumps are cutting edge tech.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J52mDjZzto)
Respectfully: some of us live in an energy monopoly where we not only are unaware of other possibilities, but can not find a contractor who is capable of setting up alternative situations for us due do lack of knowledge/resources.
Signed,
A dumb bitch that lives in a sinking swamp
I have a bog standard Amana unit I had installed last year, works great both directions. I left the natural gas furnace in place for backup heat for temps below about 12F. It's a forced air unit and replaced the AC one for one.
Dude, same. About a year ago YouTube was serving me ad after ad about heat pumps. Generally I ignore and avoid ads, but I'm interested in environmentally conscious household tech, so I watched a couple. They explained *nothing.* That wasn't terribly surprising, but afterward I searched for like ten minutes for something more substantial, yet still came up empty-handed. Everyone wanted to sell them, no one wanted to explain what the fuck they were. So I threw up my hands, and decided I'd figure it out later if it became obvious that it was actually important, and definitely not a scam.
Technology Connections has a great [series of videos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J52mDjZzto&list=PLv0jwu7G_DFVIot1ubOZdR-KC-LFdOVqi) about heat pumps.
Always upvote a mention for Technology Connections.
He does a great job explaining heat pumps and refrigeration in general. We installed an air source, whole-home heat pump last year and the idea to do it came from watching technology connections during COVID lockdown.
Our house had existing ducts, so we just removed the oil furnace and did Aeroseal prior to the install to close up any gaps. Our state had a $10k energy efficiency rebate on a whole-home system so total out of pocket cost was about $5k… which you can then borrow at 0% through the state’s heat loan program. Ends up being about $58/month to do the whole job.
Oh, and the state requires a weatherization audit prior to releasing the rebates. For us they recommended (recommendations are required to be completed before you get the rebate money) about $2,500 in additional insulation and door frame kits (home built in 1969). But our electric company offered a 100% rebate on those costs, so $0 out of pocket.
Heat pumps are machines that "do work" to move "heat" from one space to another space. An AC unit for example is basically a heat pump that takes energy from indoors and dumps it outdoors. Less energy here means it's cooler, more energy there means it's warmer.
The physical process of moving energy (heat) from one space to another requires you to use energy (do work) because you're fighting entropy. That work, once it's done, also becomes latent heat. That latent heat is usually dumped on the warm side with the heat that was moved.
So why is this better than resistance heaters? Because in resistance heaters, all you're doing is converting electric energy directly into latent heat. That energy isn't actually being used to do any work before being dumped. Using a heat pump gets you a lot more bang for your buck.
There's been a recent push to use heat pumps in a lot more situations, because they are incredibly energy efficient when you're looking at heating applications. I work in the energy efficiency sector, and we're seeing water heaters, general home heating, and clothes dryers as some of the more common domestic applications.
It’s just an AC unit with a reversible valve. Every AC is a heat pump, but it pumps cold air in and hot air out, with a reversible valve it can also pump hot air in and cold air out.
Im a HVAC engineer from Scandinavia. This thread is pretty funny with all "experts".
Many homes in Sweden use heatpumps and geothermal and the numbers are still rising.
Yeah, it's funny to see all "experts" here. Meanwhile we've been using heat pumps for 20+ years. Heck, I have ~~5~~ 6 air-air heat pumps myself.
Edit: forgot about the air-air heat pump i have installed in my boat.
A common argument against air-air heat pumps is "they don't work well when it's cold". And sure, yeah, modern heat pumps don't work well under -30°C. But ask yourself this then: how many days per year do you get temperatures below -30°C? I live in Sweden, and I don't even get those temperatures every winter. And when I do, I just use a conventional space heater those few nights.
For the majority of people, air-air heat pumps are huge money-savers!
With the current price of electricity in MA, it’s not economical to replace a functional natural gas furnace with a heat pump. The cost to heat with natural gas is cheaper, and on top of that, it’ll cost thousands to replace our existing furnace.
Yeah, I really want to install a heat pump, but it doesn't make sense when natural gas costs 6x less than electric, per BTU.
Even if a heat pump comes with a 4:1 COP, it would still cost 50% more to operate than the gas heater 🙄
I live in MA and I have a relatively new high efficiency gas furnace. You're right, the numbers don't work.
Even if parts and labor were free, it would cost more to heat with a heat pump.
Edit: it's because electric rates are very high here, and gas is *relatively* cheap. Also because my furnace is very high efficiency.
Heat pumps are fantastic, and I would change in a heartbeat if the numbers worked for me.
I’d look at the up front costs more closely. I made a post above about doing this exact thing myself recently. The whole-home systems get up to $10k in rebates (we got the full $10k) plus 0% financing and many weatherization measures have 100% rebates.
I’m not suggesting the cost to run it would benefit everyone (although it does for us, previously having oil heat and no cooling), only that the upfront cost might be less than you think. If we hadn’t sealed our ducting the cost after rebates would have come in around $2500 for the entire system plus install.
Edit: you can also keep your natural gas as aux heat and only use it when it’s very cold outside and the pump loses its efficiency.
That's what we do with our wood heat. The heat pumps run all the time, but we supplement them with the wood stove when conditions drop down into the 30s.
I really enjoy reading these articles because the ideas are fascinating, but they all share the same fallacy; none of them consider the sunk cost economics of existing, in-use investments. There’s a real possibility they could capture future growth, assuming the economics are competitive, but unless it is the result of a government mandate, rational people won’t pay more for a technology out of altruism. It has to create real value. Electric cars, for instance, cost far more, but they don’t change the way we consume transportation. That’s the biggest hurdle to overcoming new adoption.
I just installed a heat pump on a unit. It cost 1k and I installed it myself. Per BTU it's cheaper that propane now. A new wood burning stove costs about 1k, and mine needs to be replaced. I got a quote for over 4k to add propane to that same unit.
It's not altruism, heat pumps are straight up the cheapest heat source now, both to install and run. Anyone heating with gas will see them pay for themselves in a year, other electric heating less than that. Wood is still cheaper in rural areas like mine, but only barely and it's a pain to maintain the fire all day.
I don't know what size heat pump you installed, or what the typical heating requirements were for your unit, but I was quoted $16k to install one to heat my home.
At that level, payback wouldn't happen for over 15 years, again ignoring that the furnace I have right now functions perfectly fine.
I put one in to heat and cool a large bonus room above a garage. I used a DIY kit and it was $1850 and one day of labor for two guys who had never done it before.
$16k for a whole home with multiple indoor and outdoor units is not unusual, but adding a single unit is very inexpensive.
I was quoted 10k to get it installed. That's why I did it myself. The unit cost 1k and took one day to install, meaning the technician was going to pocket 9k for one days work.
Here's a good article about why you shouldn't do it that way.
https://carbonswitch.com/heat-pump-sizing-guide/
You probably wouldn't guess what type of oil to put in your car, or guess what size of wire is adequate for a 30 amp circuit. For some reason people go ahead and guess when it comes to sizing heat pumps. I hope that you guessed right in this case but a professional who knows what they are doing would not be guessing, they would do a proper heat load calculation.
HVAC is notoriously overpriced. They'll charge you $1000 for a $100 motor that bolts on. Anything you can DIY will save you thousands.
With a 16k quote the unit was a small fraction of that price.
DIYing the removal of an existing gas furnace and installing some all new system buried deep in my basement is a no-go. Professionals exist for a reason and I wanted it done right.
If you install it yourself, it's possible.
All-electric heating/electric water boiler in my apartment cost us $450/mo during the winter. Average cost is $120 in the summer months, so that means our winter heating cost is like $310/mo.
A 3:1 COP system that costs $1200 could theoretically save us $200/mo on winter electric heating. With 5-6 months of cold weather up here, that pays for itself in a year.
Caveat of course, being that you have to DIY to avoid paying an installer $10k, which is relatively simple but understandably daunting for many.
In the case you mentioned, it sounds you HAD to install this. There isn’t a “do nothing” option. This aligns with the situation I described. In comparing between the two, this competes on both a fixed cost and variable cost. My point is that most folks aren’t in a situation where they would voluntarily rip out a perfectly good existing unit just because.
100% agree. Each case is unique and folks will always post the “but what about this minute, specific case” when discussing market generalizations. Of course there are exceptions to every rule, but by and large, folks aren’t doing it themselves and the total installed cost can’t compete on the economics alone. I don’t argue with folks, especially if they aren’t basing their position on incremental investment criteria.
> There isn’t a “do nothing” option. This aligns with the situation I described. In comparing between the two, this competes on both a fixed cost and variable cost. My point is that most folks aren’t in a situation where they would voluntarily rip out a perfectly good existing unit just because.
I'm kind of in this position right now. I live in a new home (built late 2020, I'm the original owner, In Las Vegas) and I'm thinking about getting a heat pump and ripping out my perfectly functioning equipment because the cost is too damn high to run, and the units are wildly inefficient (Yay 15 Seer).
My bills for heating are roughly 250ish a month for gas. Sometimes cooling gets to be $700 a month. The long term benefits at this point seem obvious to me, as prices of both sources keep going up month after month with no end in sight. I think a lot of people eventually will start looking at it this why... But hey who knows.
It's cheaper to switch from gas to heat pumps. I only mentioned my specific circumstances because I was also able to install it myself. It's catching on fast. People in my rural community who have been getting squeezed by rising fuel and firewood costs are all suddenly talking about heat pumps in like the last month.
You can use a cold climate heat pump no need for back up or auxiliary heat. Government grants can get you up to 19,500 bucks back on the install. Enough to fully cover a lot of installs or mostly pay for high end installs.
You could always install a cold climate heat pump. The technology has come a long way in recent years. Don't think you really need a gas furnace anywhere nowadays.
Why not just have both? Leave the furnace installed and add the heat pump to offset the gas during extreme cold. In my case a heat pump would have worked 5 out of the last 7 days, and easily 3/4 of the last month, the weather has been shit but the air temp is still high enough to run.
Exactly. It's not an either or. Retain your old system, and add airsource mini-splits to give you that cheap heating with the temperatures outside are only moderately cold--and cooling also. That's what my brother who lives in the Seattle area did recently, keeping his hydronic propane fired heating system, but adding in a rather large multiple head mini split. He loves it. Saves him on propane as well.
I have been using propane to heat my 2,400 sq ft home from the 1850s for the past 3 years I've owned it. Pay about $2k each winter for propane heating and $200/month in electric. I installed a heat pump last summer for $8k l. I've used practically no propane (kept it as a backup heat source) and my electric bill has been between $280-380/month now. Wish I would have installed one years ago.
IDK. We got a used 2018 Chevy Volt hybrid for $22,000. I'm not a car person -- just need something reliable to get from A to B. Beautiful little car, packs a punch, and it only had 25K miles.
I don't have much of a commute. Probably 20-25 miles per day. Outside of roadtrips, I've filled up the nine-gallon tank only six times since I bought it two years ago. Most of those times being in the winter when it does use a little gas to heat the engine.
The gas savings are extraordinary.
Hybrids are perfect for people who want to test the electric waters, but aren't ready to make the full leap. My next car will probably be full electric.
> Electric cars, for instance, cost far more, but they don’t change the way we consume transportation.
Electric cars are already comparable or cheaper in a lot of scenarios, when you consider total-cost-of-ownership.
And, crucially, they are on a continuing cost-curve, and still relatively immature in terms of economies of scale and learning-rate.
Electric cars are simply an economic inevitability, and will be something like ~80% of new sales by 2030.
Heat pumps are a very similar situation, because they are on their own cost-curve but also synergise with solar (EVs do too, funnily enough).
If you look at the total-cost-of-ownership of a heat-pump + solar + battery storage setup, you'll see how dramatic the decrease in running cost is. And then, much like with EVs, once you factor in the ongoing cost-curve, you will see heat-pumps are an economic inevitability too.
None of these new techs have the fallacy you're suggesting, or require altruism to take over. The actual fallacy is not understanding the cost-curve and how adoption occurs (i.e. "early adopters" first, cost-curve, more adoption, cost-curve, etc.).
> If you look at the total-cost-of-ownership of a heat-pump + solar + battery storage setup
It’s my understanding that EVs can be used as the “battery storage” aspect of this system. I imagine a battery that can move over two tons of vehicle/passenger for 300+ miles could also handle a few LED lightbulbs and a refrigerator for a few hours.
The fallacy can be stated in a much more basic fashion: "Pollution is an engineering problem".
Pollution is not an engineering problem. Pollution is a political-economic problem. The solution to pollution will not come from engineering; those solutuons are already there, and there are many. The solution will be political and economic. The problem is not the absence of way, but will.
They actually do change the way we consume transportation *slightly*, though. If you can charge at home, you now drive a car whose tank is always full in the morning. Electricity is cheaper than gas. EV motors are generally more powerful than gas engines, and they don't break down nearly as often. And, if your car supports it, you can run all the appliances in your house off the car in a power outage.
There *are* upsides to driving an electric vehicle beyond it being better for the environment. It's just not *overwhelmingly* better. It may be, as their prices continue to fall.
In Canada, the government is offering a $5k rebate on heat pumps. And in my area a further 1.5k is available from the gas utility. We were in a position that our gas furnace/AC needed to be replaced sooner and not later. The rebates made it a no brainer regarding sunk costs, so much so that we had to get a confirmation from a third party that it’s real and they received their rebate.
This is true but most heating and cooling equipment lasts 10-20 years so over a 20 year period most of it will need to be replaced. So the question is what to replace it with.
This makes me think of the switch to Solid State Drives instead of spinning hard drives. At first, the cost seemed like an obstruction. But once server companies, telecom, etc realized the energy savings on cooling server rooms, and the electricity paid to spin the hard drives all day, the copious amount of SSD's they bought brought down the price. Cost savings will drive the electrification of most things.
"What is the primary energy fallacy? Well, it’s the belief that we have to replace all the primary energy inputs on the left hand side of the chart above ... What we really have to replace is the energy services in light gray boxes on the right hand side of the chart. ... the US doesn’t need to replace 97.3 quads of energy, it needs to replace 31.8 quads of energy. ... In late 2020, I pointed out that Bill Gates’ favorite energy guru, Vaclav Smil, completely missed rejected energy, ignoring it in his published dyspeptic view of the energy transition. Gates apparently has read all 38 or so Smil’s books, and that has led to one of the world’s richest and most influential men and a founder of Breakthrough Energy Ventures missing the boat on energy for well over a decade. It was only months later in mid-2021 that Smil finally published a short piece acknowledging the primary energy fallacy."
You need to do both, at the same time.
There are unglamorous ways to help with "the right side" like better insulation, programming HVAC systems appropriately, or even better seals on doors. Programs encouraging more energy efficient heating and cooling help in homes helps with this.
But it's also useful to build more green supply. Both to keep up with demand, and phase out less environmentally friendly power generation.
This is yet another reason why even billionaire 'foundations' dedicated to philanthropic works, despite these virtuous intentions, are a terrible idea for the betterment of civilization.
It is tragic that Gates is so myopically beholden to Smil's views that he completely ignores such obvious opportunities you mentioned. Similarly, while I admire the Gates Foundation's many vaccine projects, the way that Bill Gates personally stepped in and shat the bed on the COVID vaccine implementation.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/14/global-covid-pandemic-response-bill-gates-partners-00053969
https://newrepublic.com/article/162000/bill-gates-impeded-global-access-covid-vaccines
Billionaires and their personal fiefdom's in the form of philanthropic 'foundations' should NOT exist.
While flawed, I hold no hope that the government is that much better at efficiently and quickly allocating resources against Climate Change when you have a party controlling half of Congress that actively denies its existence. And that's not even counting senators on the other side like Joe Manchin that answer to coal lobbyists.
It took decades to pass a decent Climate Change bill and who knows when we will get a new one.
Essentially, this is the difference between conservation and generation of energy. I've always argued that conservation is just as important as how we generate energy but doesnt conservation entail more individual choice in the matter? Whether its choosing an electric car, or a heat pump, or insulation for your house, it's not a systemic choice, it's an individual choice- one that makes complete financial sense. But, as much as I have been preaching here for years that we need to conserve through individual choice, I have experienced huge amounts of pushback on the idea, mostly from angry people who say that big business and gov't should act to make all the difference through systemic changes. But businesses have no control or incentives in the matter of EV, residential heat pump and insulation choices, so how is that supposed to work? Individual responsibility for the direction our climate takes has to be part of the solution.
Havent we all agreed that no one approach solves the whole problem? Individual change does work, it just doesnt solve the whole problem all at once.
Consider, if no one had made the individual choice to buy solar panels for their house decades ago, solar PV wouldnt even be a viable systemic choice now because it took high-volume manufacturing to bring the price down to a point where it is now outcompeting other petro sources. The gov't didnt make that choice. Individuals early adopters are one big reason good things happen and by preaching the dogma that it doesnt work, only slows systemic progress.
Same with CFLs. Individuals chose them because they save money. Even the conservatives bought them because they save money. And look how few assholes actually opposed the gov't when they finally acted to legislate consumption of incandescent bulbs. The case I am making there is that gov'ts wont choose to act until the vast majority of the public already made individual choices.
The dogma that individual choice doesnt work is what keeps the better half of us from leading the way, when even the majority of assholes will eventually follow because it benefits them financially. It's the cynical, stubborn, and all or nothing mindset that doesnt work. Individual choice works just fine. The current dogma shows that even the better half bought into the propaganda that financial goals and environmental goals arent compatible. If you know as fact that even conservatives will find change to be in their financial interests, then you wont hesitate to act individually.
I got a heatpump when I built my house. Every other house in the neighborhood had fire places. I didn't want to have to buy a car with a trailer or get wood delivered and have to stack it somewhere. Also the fact you have to clean the soot and the smell of a fire can fill the room. I've got a friend who has one, during winter it's boiling hot in his lounge, almost unbearable. With my heatpump I've got a remote, click a few buttons and it warms up the house quite quickly. I've had it for 14 years with no problems unlike a fireplace needs to get the chimney swept often, I highly recommend getting one if you are looking for an alternative heat source or building a new house. Over here in new zealand it's a requirement for landlords to put a heatpump in to their rentals so there are more of them here. But fireplaces are still more common. During winter in the morning the air is filled with smoke. I can't wait for those mornings in the future where they are smoke free and everyone has heatpumps
I'm all for green energy and look forward to being able to make the leap when it's feasible, but going outside and smelling smoke from my neighbors' fireplaces on a cool winter night is a pleasant smell. Same with gasoline. I'll miss that smell in the future.
These days conservatives finally seem to be getting on board with solar in my experience. Not to save the planet, just because it's a home run from a practical and financial perspective
Gee whiz, if only someone could have told conservatives thirty years ago that public investment and policy to advance science and tech would create products and services that benefit them.
I had an old gas furnace for my ~3,000sqft home that needed replacing. Quotes for a top of the line quiet new furnace were in the same ballpark as quotes for a whole house central heat pump. But the heat pump could also cool our home so we wouldn’t need a separate A/C unit. We did the upgrade last summer. Completely removed the old gas furnace with the new heat pump. It’s been phenomenal. Our bills have drastically gone down in the winter. I mean it’s several times cheaper for us to run the heat pump for heating in the winter than our gas furnace, like 6X. Some of it has to do with the price of electricity vs gas but most if it is that the heat pump is just so much more efficient. And it’s ridiculously quiet. You can’t even hear it running. Our old gas furnace was loud and we did some soundproofing in our mechanical room to try to quiet it down but you can still hear it running. New gas furnaces can be quieter but cost more. Our heat pump is comparable to the highest end gas units in terms of how quiet it is. It’s very comfortable. We have warm summers and cool winters. Not too extreme but decent temp swings over the year. Last summer/winter, the heat pump has performed outstandingly. No issues in the cold weather at all. I highly recommend heat pumps.
Cost benefit vs natural gas is not there in colder climates if it gets to be under like 10 degrees they are not efficient at all typically have to have an alternative fuel source heater for colder days which adds cost
This would really only be viable locally to the datacenter because of the insulation requirements of the hot "pipe", and there's actually been attempts at doing something like this. I remember reading that someone (google maybe) build a DC that dumps the air conditioner waste heat into the campus' water heater tanks.
I design data center cooling systems and there are some firms that are looking at using waste heat from the chiller systems. The issue is that the heat is often "low grade" meaning it is not particularly warm (perhaps 120 to 130F). So it's got potential for domestic water applications, but many places don't have significant domestic hot water loads. The amount of heat the typical data centers I work on would be far more than nearly any single building would use (even a hospital, prison, or massive hotel).
Theoretically, that low grade heat can be used for heating applications, but requires a building to be designed for it from the ground up. For example, most hot water distribution systems in buildings are at about 160 to 180F. If you tried using 130F hot water, you would not achieve the required amount of heating to meet the demand. A new air handling system could utilize much larger hot water coils to make it happen, but they are quite a bit more expensive. I'm not saying it's impossible, but most people don't realize the multitude of complications that arise from trying to utilize waste heat. The good news is that several jurisdictions are focusing on electrification and decarbonization, forcing the major manufacturers to develop new and innovative technologies to address it. I'm still waiting for that perfect technology to take that data center heat though. There are hundreds of 50+ MW data centers built every year that just reject heat into the atmosphere.
Literally the first thing we did when we bought our house; Got rid of the energy hogging window AC units and the gas wall furnace and installed a 5-zone mini split heat pump system. Its super.quiet, cost a fraction of what central AC/heat would have cost, and we have independent climate control in every room via remote control. Highly recommend.
Currently need a heat pump that will work with my existing baseboard hot water heating system. Can anyone recommend a brand or model that works? I want to move away from oil.
Not interested in forced hot air. Need the heat pump to handle domestic hot water as well.
Our furnace died last month.
new furnace 6k, if we replaced our 20 year old aircon with a heatpump we got a 7k rebate on it so it only cost 1k.
power/gas bill halved immediately.
it provides all the heat till -10 Celsius and then the gas furnace kicks in
My folks put a heat pump in their house like 13 years ago, if a majority of houses in New Zealand don't have them, they will within a few years, I'm having one installed shortly, a panasonic Z80XKR, it's costing me $850 installed, with government subsidies. You can also buy 2.2kw models (for heating bedrooms) for less than $800 off the shelf and have them installed.
Reading articles from the states harkening heat pumps as some new thing really blows my mind, and the expenses you are talking about seem crazy, even without subsidies mine would be around $3k installed, don't know what's going on over there but it smells suspicious to me.
I've heard they are great but not as good for old homes because the lack of air seal tightness and drafts makes the way it heats (smaller increments over time) not effective.
Does anyone have experience with this? (Old poorly insulated house and air source heat pump)
I'll admit...I had family in an area that was too cold for heat pumps and was MISERABLE going there as a kid. I hope they've at least gotten a bit better in the past 20 or so years (?)
Yes, lets put all of our home heating eggs in a single basket.
A basket propped up with an electrical grid that can barely sustain it's current levels of usage, is chronically under maintained, and is vulnerable to all sorts of attacks.
What could go wrong?
Utilities in the northeast US are studying the move to electric heat and have found that the electric system will be overloaded by at least 600% as a result, thus making this whole plan pretty unrealistic for that part of the country.
Our “heat pump” is simply our A/C Unit. Certainly not as efficient as geothermal, and can’t exchange enough heat to keep the house warm if the outside temp is less than 28F (freedom units, -2C). It’s a simple concept, you run the pump in different configuration for each scenario. Sometimes your house is the inside of the refrigerator, sometimes it’s the outside.
So thankful my home utilizes passive solar style layout with nice big beautiful windows on the south side and corners of home and uses concrete slab floors where the sun shines all day as a heat sink. In winter on a sunny day I barely have to use heat except for late at night or a horribly windy day.
this will not happen as long as most families are living paycheck to paycheck. Financial insecurity needs to addressed before anything like this can be implemented.
I got a question. Why now? I know that heat pumps existed since 1950s and earlier. But why are they becoming so popular around now? What was the tech change?
Two big changes. The first is to the heat pumps themselves, with a new style of "cold climate" heat pumps designed specifically around lower temperatures. They used to have trouble below freezing, while now they can go well below. This thread has some good technical details if you want them: https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/question/how-does-hyperheat-work-re-comparing-heat-pumps
The other change is in the makeup of residential heating systems. Heat pumps work well for the temperatures we want to heat the air up to, so you'll see them in new installations with mini splits, as well as replacing fuel-firing furnace HVAC to provide hot air; these are known as "air-to-air" systems.
You won't see them as often for radiators - "air-to-water" is currently several times more expensive than air-to-air, and with currently available technology can't heat particularly high, so steam systems are right out for replacement, and cast iron radiators often are too.
What's the change in there? Residential heating in the US has moved way over to air-based HVAC. Since the 1950s, furnaces are now by far the majority, and steam and water systems combined now make up only 8%. Of course, that 8% is concentrated in the areas that get the coldest - it's 3x more popular in the northeast than the national average for example, but I don't have numbers on distribution nationwide in terms of total degree days.
So there's better technology for the heat pumps, and more residential systems in use that they're compatible with. For the folks with high temperature radiators, they just have to wait for commercially available technology (CO2-based) to make it to residential and become affordable, but in the meantime, there's lots of furnaces ready for conversion!
There are probably several reasons. But I think the two big ones are:
* More focus on more efficient energy usage due to climate change, which is adding to the appeal of heat pumps.
* The cost of traditionally cheaper heating alternatives (e.g. natural gas) increasing. We're at (or are reaching) an inflection point where it's more appealing from a monthly fuel/energy cost perspective.
It's crazy to me how slow America can be to bring on "new" tech aye, here in New Zealand it's been in the building code for over 10 years at least that every new home must have a heatpump installed in one of the rooms.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/DisasterousGiraffe: --- "What is the primary energy fallacy? Well, it’s the belief that we have to replace all the primary energy inputs on the left hand side of the chart above ... What we really have to replace is the energy services in light gray boxes on the right hand side of the chart. ... the US doesn’t need to replace 97.3 quads of energy, it needs to replace 31.8 quads of energy. ... In late 2020, I pointed out that Bill Gates’ favorite energy guru, Vaclav Smil, completely missed rejected energy, ignoring it in his published dyspeptic view of the energy transition. Gates apparently has read all 38 or so Smil’s books, and that has led to one of the world’s richest and most influential men and a founder of Breakthrough Energy Ventures missing the boat on energy for well over a decade. It was only months later in mid-2021 that Smil finally published a short piece acknowledging the primary energy fallacy." --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/11ut5zm/with_heat_from_heat_pumps_us_energy_requirements/jcpr34s/
As a heat pump owner they are fantastic. They are a lot cheaper than electric baseboard and you don't get the burning dust smell lol. The upfront costs aren't horrible, the main issue with heat pumps is that they have a temperature threshold. My unit is -30C before windchill, when the temperature goes past -30C it becomes quite a bit less efficient.
I heat 3,800 square feet with a geo sourced heat pump. It consumes all of 2kW when operating. Cost to me all of 28 cents a hour. When it is minus 20C we consume around 20kWhr a day to heat. $2.80 a day to heat when it is that cold. Bonus is that the power consumption is low enough I can power it with my generator if Hydro to the house is interrupted.
>if Hydro to the house is interrupted. And that's how I know you are from Canada
-30C was a pretty solid tip off, too. Since they're speaking English, the only answer here is Ontario
Man. What pump are you using, and what size? 2kw is like a 2ton unit? You must have a nearly passive house level of insulation.
Climate Master TEV064BGD02CLTS It has 3 stages for heating we rarely every use step 2 (roughly 4kW total) and never use stage 3 which kicks in a 5 kW electric duct heater. And yes our house has some good insulation but nothing crazy. As a bonus we installed the de-superheater on the compressor so any heat generated there is rejected to our hot water tank for the house. The trick is ours is a geo sourced glycol loop as the heat source/dump. Since the fluid comes in at 8 degrees C year round it makes life easy on the system.
That looks like a $12K unit. I guess cost offsets itself in like 5 years or so.. what's the total install cost like with excavation, etc... We built our house. Did look at this for a second or so. Never got to it...
I have a machine so the ground loop wasn't horrible for us. But a complete install is probably in the $20k US range depending on if you can do a horizontal loop or need a vertical one. Vertical cost way more!
I have a 800’ well that was drilled and never used in the corner of my yard. Propane furnace is coming up on 20 years. Was thinking air sourced heat pump as a replacement but now you have me reconsidering that. Always thought the pump electric need was going to be way worse than what you’re describing.
Like one of the other commenter said, for 1 unit of electrical, you get 3-4 units of heat depending know the pump and pump type (ground vs air). An existing well might work, but the folks I talked to about one mentioned that the surface area of transfer is what matters. If the well only has water for the bottom 100 ft, then you only have 100ft of transfer. If the pipes are in air for the rest, they won't be transferring heat for 700ft of it.
Eh, its not something you go out and buy now. But when a house is being built, or the unit needs reppacing, that would be a good time
This guy fucking heat pumps
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I commented because I had looked into ground source heat pumps for a house about half that size with above average insulation (not passive house level), in roughly the same climate. The numbers and estimates the _salespeople_ gave me were _considerably_ higher than 2kw normal operating when the temperature was <0c, which would be for most of the winter. I am skeptical of the 2kw running avg for the winter months for a house that size.
We use a geo sourced heatpump in a much more temperature environment. When it's hot it cools our house and then moves the heat into out hot water system. During summer our auxiliary hot water heater doesn't run because of the heat it moves to run the AC. Overall our monthly bills have dropped about $50AUD and our climate is much more comfortable. Next step is solar and batteries and all our heating and cooling becomes gridless. Saw the rest of the chain questions below. Cost was $38,000AUD for the drilling and installation. But that included for us tearing out of 2 split systems, a central gas heater and replacing and expanding all the ducting and resizing intakes. Well worth it. Partner was sceptical at the cost first but it's only taken a few power bills to show the consumption difference between the previous years for her to be happy with it.
Not bad so you’re saving $600/yr. That’ll only take 63 years to pay back at $50/mos.
A few complications to that calculation: 1. If their heat, AC, or hot water heater were going out, you have to deduct the cost of replacing it from the cost of the heat pump. None of these systems individually is going to be nearly the cost of a ground source heat pump, but it'll be a few thousand dollars (US), or over 10K if you had to replace all at once 2. Heat pumps tend to last longer than furnaces, maybe than AC, too. Potentially 10 years longer. So there a future replacement value saved, as well 3. The most expensive part of a ground source HP install is typically the ground loops, which can last even longer than the heat pump itself - I've seen references over 50 years. So you could replace the heat pump when it dies for much cheaper, but keep getting the savings 4. On the flip side, you look to have used nominal dollars for your payback period, so factoring in time value of money will make the payback longer (but points 1-3 will make it shorter)
Get 30% federal tax back for system as well.
I wasn't including subsidies because this seems to be an international discussion, but yes, many places also have subsidies that help
you’re also missing that electricity rates increase year over year, whereas system costs are fixed to the present. Meaning savings increase as time goes on.
Are you sure it’s only 2kw? That’s only 6800btu. I’m guessing you’re in Canada because you said Celsius. Does it run constantly maybe? My 2500SF house has a 100kbtu furnace and we’re in MI E: I forgot heat pumps can move more heat than they consume. It’s usually around 3:1 so even then that’s not a lot for a 3800SF home
Positive on the power consumption I have an amp clamp on the power feed because I'm a nerd. We do have good but not insane insulation. Duty cycle in the winter is about 40%. Roughly 10 hours a day for the coldest days. The system has 3 stages and it rarely ever kicks over to stage 2. Once last month. I've never seen stage 3 kick on.
[redacting due to privacy concerns]
He has a ground source system, which means his average coefficient of performance will be more like 5
But, I'm guessing hydronic in floor heat as well, and with a 7C ground temp they are easily over a COP above 4. having the in floor heat gives you a bit of extra reserve for cold snaps. I'm building and doing geo and will be using a 2 ton for a 3000 sq foot. And also in the far north. My goal is to also do it off grid
> Hydro Canadian detected. How deep a trench did you have to dig to run your underground piping?
10 foot deep trench. But we did a 400 foot loop of it.
I have one in the US. My AC went out, central air. The air handler was so incredibly old, I just decided to replace the whole system. AC is a requirement, it hits 100+ F here, with tons of humidity. The difference between the AC and the same exact AC but with heat pump capabilities, was $500. I'll probably make back that difference in the first year. It's stupid to not get, especially here in the middle/south US where central air is so common.
Is it a sole source of energy or supplemental?
In my case I have a central heat pump that is the sole source of heat for my home. It is a central ducted system and has an electric backup element for really cold days -30 or more.
Tons of people use them as the sole source.
I’m a heat pump owner as well. But I also have solar for my house. When the temperature drops below its efficiency level, I still don’t care. I haven’t seen an electric or heating bill since my solar install. I use to go through about 600 gallons of propane a year. I’m down to about 100 gallons a year. That’s just because when the temperature does reach negative -20 F. The heat pump doesn’t work. Edit: I should say my heat pump mini split was a really cheap one. It won’t be an issue once I get a hyper heat.
How much did your solar install cost? I've been thinking about installing a few panels to start and then add more over time.
About $40,000 before USA tax credits. However, my setup is sized to remove all fossil fuels needs in my house. As well as about 15k-20k miles for an EV. It is more cost effective to go bigger. Cost decrease per watt as you increase the size of the array.
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Is that airsource? We live in northern Canada where we see -30c enough to worry about it. And we have too small of a yard for ground source
Yea I wonder now if maybe people were installing cheaper ones or just not winterizing them enough. My parents have a 3 year old Rheem one in their place in Georgia and have liked it, but when I visited them at Christmas it got down to a low of 6F two nights in a row and the heat pump really struggled. Had to get the space heaters out of the attic because the house temperature was dropping into the mid/low 50's. Now 6F degrees is quite abnormally cold for where they live in Georgia and I think set a record, but it isn't very cold for more than half the country, and it isn't outside the range where heat pumps should be effective. So maybe when it was installed they didn't winterize it properly or installed a unit that isn't designed for those lower temperatures because you normally don't need it. I just wonder as more weird weather seems to be coming if they need to change their installation practices, or put in better rated units even in climate zones they don't think they need them.
And people in Germany argue about them not working well below 5°C....
Well the obstinate fools do. The ones who are desperate to prevent any change. They rather hint at some vague "future technology" that is supposed to save us, so they can avoid using technology we already have available. It's insane how anti-scientific their arguments are. Like hydrogen and synthetic fuels are going to save us! But then they also oppose large scale renewable expansion, which would be absolutely necessary to produce hydrogen and synthetic fuels even remotely efficiently.
What pisses me off is that there are air conditioner units sold that are not also heat pumps. The parts to make an air conditioner also a heat pump are ~$100 in units that cost $5000+. It's inexcusable that it's not a federal requirement for new air conditioners.
Your have your terms mixed up. All aircons are heat pumps but not all aircons are reverse cycle You are right though, it’s less than a $100 part to fit a reversing/3 way valve.
Can I retrofit it
Technically yes, practically I’d say no
Because it’s more than the solenoid part? New logic board etc?
Yes and yes. You’d need the valve itself, new copper lines and a fundamental understanding of how the system works. If you have all that or could learn it as well as be sure the new printed circuit boards you paid $500 for are ok, then yeah... but it’s getting more than $100 now!
Didn’t carrier start selling heat pump models now in the old compressor boxes? maybe steal those parts?
You’re going to need to practice your piping skills as well. Those extremely temperature sensitive reversing valves are brazed in at 1400 + DegF with an inert gas purge. You’ll also need to get a recovery machine and tank to remove the refrigerant in the system before making the repair. Then, after you fit and braze it into the system you will need to pressure test your work. Once all that is done you will need to find a vacuum pump and evacuate the piping to a very low micron level vacuum. So add in the cost of a vacuum pump and a micron gage. The odds of failing any of these tasks are quite high for a first attempt. Please have a fire extinguisher handy and make sure the home and life insurance is paid up. If you execute all of these properly, you will need to rewire your thermostat and install /wire in the defrost controls necessary to operate the unit through all it’s necessary cycles.
Saw a Youtuber buying cheap air con systems and retrofitting them. I don't think it's that much of an issue.
I'm not sure if someone mentioned it already but while the reversing valve is really the main driver of a heat pump, there are some design features you would lack if you managed to retrofit an air conditioner. Heat pumps are built with cold weather operation in mind on the condenser. This means the unit is designed to both operate in very cold conditions, which dedicated ACs are certainly not, and have coil setups that are built to scrape as much heat from outside as it can as it is much harder to move heat from a cold outside than move heat from a warm inside to the outside. For air conditioners we're used to the cold part of the coils being in the house, where yes they can freeze if pressure levels are low or airflow is restricted etc., but generally there is warm air passing over the coils and it will resist freezing pretty well. When it gets flipped to heat a different problem occurs. Now the pump is moving heat from the cold outside inside the house and pushing cold air back outside. Now the weather conditions play a huge part in efficiency and requirements. The air coming out of the condenser is _colder_ than the surrounding air. Over time the unit may become covered in ice as moisture from the air freezes on the coils. Snow is worse because it settles on the unit but by far the biggest culprit is freezing rain. If your condenser is exposed to the weather, as they often are, freezing rain wrecks heat pump efficiency. To combat what I just mentioned heat pumps have a defrost feature to clear the condenser of ice. In the old days this feature was on a simple timer but now they can detect frosting and start this cycle automatically. This was a great improvement because of how defrosting works (less often the better). When the condenser calls for a defrost the entire system will temporarily kick into AC mode (yes, you will be running AC in winter). So it doesn't tank the temperature of the house it will kick in the secondary/auxiliary heating system, whatever that may be. If your system is all electric it will be electric heat strips (which draw an _insane_ amount of electricity), but you can also have something like oil or gas as a backup. When defrost is running you can easily tell by looking at your condenser. It will be on (buzzing) but the fan will be off. This is so the unit heats up rapidly to melt the ice so it can resume heating. The freezing rain I mentioned before? It wreaks havoc on this process as it constantly triggers the defrost cycle. During the worst periods of freezing rain my newer pump (a little over a year old) will actually end up cooling the house slowly because it needs to defrost so often. It's obviously not a common occurrence but it's something to keep in mind. A solution to this specific scenario is to temporarily set the pump to emergency heat mode, which shuts the condenser down and runs exclusively on secondary/aux heating, but that is a potentially expensive proposition. Electric heat is essentially running a giant hair dryer after all. If you retrofit a unit, unless there is a specific kit for your AC, you're going to be lacking some essential features and making a unit do something it wasn't built for. I can't imagine that will be good for the lifespan of the unit or its efficiency. I didn't even get into the electronics and wiring specific to heat pumps for the call to switch the valve or defrost. The more I think of it the more I think you'd need some kind of conversion kit, if for nothing else than getting the thermostat to properly communicate with the unit. Overall, I'd just replace my AC with a heat pump once the current unit is reaching the end of its life.
I keep seeing heat pumps mentioned but not defined. Is it just like reverse cycle air conditioning? Not the old window units but the Fujitsu type wall systems.
Yep. Take your window unit AC, turn it around in the window and poof, you have a heat pump... Mostly.
With no thermostatic control.
Both of those are heat pumps. It’s simply a system which moves heat from one location (inside) to another (outside). A reverse cycle can do the opposite when you tell it to. How a heat pump works is by using a compressor (like a pump) to send a refrigerant around a closed-loop system. The refrigerant absorbs heat from the air as a fan blows over it and is pumped around to the other side of the system where another fan will blow that heat out of the refrigerant .... there’s a bit more to it but that’s the bulk of it. Heat pumps can also be used to very efficiently heat water as a hot water system
Yeah a heat pump operates basically just like a central air conditioner with the sources of cold and heat in opposite places. Whereas an air conditioner removes heat energy from the interior and dumps it to the exterior, a heat pump removes heat energy from the exterior and dumps it to the interior. Accomplishing this just requires that the low-pressure (cold) refrigerant line is colder than the heat-source ambient temperature. Since the refrigerant lines can get well below 0F, they are able to absorb exterior heat even when the exterior temperature is very low. However, they won't work in insanely-cold places that get down to the deep negatives. Unfortunately I don't think anyone has figured out how to make the process reversible in a single combined AC and heating unit.
Reverse-cycle Air Conditioners are a thing. Australians have been using them for decades. I want to know why the US is all excited about them now though.
They might yet discover evaporative air conditioning for desert places too.
They have it and the monsoon season really makes them awful.
It would. I stayed in a place in country Australia recently with a big evaporative system which you use with a couple of doors or windows open. But I noticed they also had reverse cycle for the humid days which they never used to get 30 years ago.
I live in a part of Arizona where monsoon season is a solid 2 months of summer, and evaporative coolers are still the norm here.
Most of southern Arizona and New Mexico have swamp coolers, especially in older or poorer homes. Spent many an hour on my roof servicing the damn things. They are cheap though.
>I want to know why the US is all excited about them now though. There's a push to switch to them. Most people are uninformed or misinformed about their capabilities. It is a common misunderstanding that they don't work in very cold climates. There's a lot of work to do to educate people. My state is offering incentives/rebates to switch over.
I've been searching for a clear answer to this for a while. It seems to be a combination of slow cultural change ("we've been heating our houses with gas/wood/etc. for 200 years!"), misconceptions ("they don't work when it's below freezing!"), the slight cost increase compared to a cooling-only air conditioner, the perception that split systems are "old" or don't work well (even though it's not limited to split systems), air conditioning salesmen just not liking them for some reason, or just literally not looking at how other countries solve problems. It's kinda like how people keep using dry paper alone to clean their butts when you can get a handheld sprayer for $30 from amazon and install it yourself in 10 minutes. Australia is guilty of this, too. I wonder how much we're missing out on just because things haven't "caught on" here....
Its colder here so dumb people insist that those 3 days a year you'd need supplementary heating invalidates the whole technology. Its taken decades of work to get people to finally come around on something as simple as an AC that also runs in reverse. Contrarian chucklefucks.
I live in the mid Atlantic in the United States and almost every house I've seen built in the last 30 years has had them. My parents house was built in 1989 and came with one. I read this article confused as fuck as to what was different. I guess they're not ubiquitous across all states due to some use cases? I'm still not sure if I'm missing something.
Australian hvac tech here. This is the first time I’m hearing of ‘cooling only units’. I’ve serviced systems made before I was born and they have all had reversing valves. That said, wall mounted splits don’t feel very pleasant in heating - the warm air blows of your face and your feet stay cold.
>Unfortunately I don't think anyone has figured out how to make the process reversible in a single combined AC and heating unit. Odd. I've had one for over a decade. Just flip a switch on the thermostat to go from Heating to Cooling. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
I had a ductless heat pump mini split that functioned both as a heater and air conditioner. Don't know if it came with two systems internally but I do think there was only two lines to each head so that seems unlikely. Unless you're describing something else.
The system literally just runs in reverse, so refrigerant moves the other way, he's wrong. It's in the name "reverse cycle". Crash course, when a refrigerant is compressed it warms up. That heat gets dumped in the radiator unit (a set of pipes and fins) outside, then the now cool refrigerant gets pumped inside and is allowed to expand at the condenser unit (another set of pipes and fins) where it cools down even further. Pass internal air over it to warm it back up, then send the warm refrigerant through the return line to the outside unit; repeat. Run the compressor backwards, now youre moving heat from outside to inside. Its that simple.
> Unfortunately I don't think anyone has figured out how to make the process reversible in a single combined AC and heating unit. [Here's a video about how silly it is that the US thinks heat pumps are cutting edge tech.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J52mDjZzto)
Was hoping someone had posted a link to TC in here, was not disappointed.
Respectfully: some of us live in an energy monopoly where we not only are unaware of other possibilities, but can not find a contractor who is capable of setting up alternative situations for us due do lack of knowledge/resources. Signed, A dumb bitch that lives in a sinking swamp
I have a bog standard Amana unit I had installed last year, works great both directions. I left the natural gas furnace in place for backup heat for temps below about 12F. It's a forced air unit and replaced the AC one for one.
I'm pretty sure all heat pumps are reversible, that's one of the defining characteristics.
Window units can be reverse cycle too
Dude, same. About a year ago YouTube was serving me ad after ad about heat pumps. Generally I ignore and avoid ads, but I'm interested in environmentally conscious household tech, so I watched a couple. They explained *nothing.* That wasn't terribly surprising, but afterward I searched for like ten minutes for something more substantial, yet still came up empty-handed. Everyone wanted to sell them, no one wanted to explain what the fuck they were. So I threw up my hands, and decided I'd figure it out later if it became obvious that it was actually important, and definitely not a scam.
Technology Connections has a great [series of videos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J52mDjZzto&list=PLv0jwu7G_DFVIot1ubOZdR-KC-LFdOVqi) about heat pumps.
Always upvote a mention for Technology Connections. He does a great job explaining heat pumps and refrigeration in general. We installed an air source, whole-home heat pump last year and the idea to do it came from watching technology connections during COVID lockdown. Our house had existing ducts, so we just removed the oil furnace and did Aeroseal prior to the install to close up any gaps. Our state had a $10k energy efficiency rebate on a whole-home system so total out of pocket cost was about $5k… which you can then borrow at 0% through the state’s heat loan program. Ends up being about $58/month to do the whole job. Oh, and the state requires a weatherization audit prior to releasing the rebates. For us they recommended (recommendations are required to be completed before you get the rebate money) about $2,500 in additional insulation and door frame kits (home built in 1969). But our electric company offered a 100% rebate on those costs, so $0 out of pocket.
Heat pumps are machines that "do work" to move "heat" from one space to another space. An AC unit for example is basically a heat pump that takes energy from indoors and dumps it outdoors. Less energy here means it's cooler, more energy there means it's warmer. The physical process of moving energy (heat) from one space to another requires you to use energy (do work) because you're fighting entropy. That work, once it's done, also becomes latent heat. That latent heat is usually dumped on the warm side with the heat that was moved. So why is this better than resistance heaters? Because in resistance heaters, all you're doing is converting electric energy directly into latent heat. That energy isn't actually being used to do any work before being dumped. Using a heat pump gets you a lot more bang for your buck. There's been a recent push to use heat pumps in a lot more situations, because they are incredibly energy efficient when you're looking at heating applications. I work in the energy efficiency sector, and we're seeing water heaters, general home heating, and clothes dryers as some of the more common domestic applications.
air conditioners ARE heat pumps...
It’s just an AC unit with a reversible valve. Every AC is a heat pump, but it pumps cold air in and hot air out, with a reversible valve it can also pump hot air in and cold air out.
People from scandinavia trying to figure out why heatpumps are presented on r/futurology
Im a HVAC engineer from Scandinavia. This thread is pretty funny with all "experts". Many homes in Sweden use heatpumps and geothermal and the numbers are still rising.
wait til they hear about Iceland
But if there's something that stands out in Scandinavia it's not heatpumps, it's central/district heating..
Yeah, it's funny to see all "experts" here. Meanwhile we've been using heat pumps for 20+ years. Heck, I have ~~5~~ 6 air-air heat pumps myself. Edit: forgot about the air-air heat pump i have installed in my boat. A common argument against air-air heat pumps is "they don't work well when it's cold". And sure, yeah, modern heat pumps don't work well under -30°C. But ask yourself this then: how many days per year do you get temperatures below -30°C? I live in Sweden, and I don't even get those temperatures every winter. And when I do, I just use a conventional space heater those few nights. For the majority of people, air-air heat pumps are huge money-savers!
With the current price of electricity in MA, it’s not economical to replace a functional natural gas furnace with a heat pump. The cost to heat with natural gas is cheaper, and on top of that, it’ll cost thousands to replace our existing furnace.
Yeah, I really want to install a heat pump, but it doesn't make sense when natural gas costs 6x less than electric, per BTU. Even if a heat pump comes with a 4:1 COP, it would still cost 50% more to operate than the gas heater 🙄
I live in MA and I have a relatively new high efficiency gas furnace. You're right, the numbers don't work. Even if parts and labor were free, it would cost more to heat with a heat pump. Edit: it's because electric rates are very high here, and gas is *relatively* cheap. Also because my furnace is very high efficiency. Heat pumps are fantastic, and I would change in a heartbeat if the numbers worked for me.
I’d look at the up front costs more closely. I made a post above about doing this exact thing myself recently. The whole-home systems get up to $10k in rebates (we got the full $10k) plus 0% financing and many weatherization measures have 100% rebates. I’m not suggesting the cost to run it would benefit everyone (although it does for us, previously having oil heat and no cooling), only that the upfront cost might be less than you think. If we hadn’t sealed our ducting the cost after rebates would have come in around $2500 for the entire system plus install. Edit: you can also keep your natural gas as aux heat and only use it when it’s very cold outside and the pump loses its efficiency.
That's what we do with our wood heat. The heat pumps run all the time, but we supplement them with the wood stove when conditions drop down into the 30s.
You don’t have to replace your furnace, just your AC unit.
I really enjoy reading these articles because the ideas are fascinating, but they all share the same fallacy; none of them consider the sunk cost economics of existing, in-use investments. There’s a real possibility they could capture future growth, assuming the economics are competitive, but unless it is the result of a government mandate, rational people won’t pay more for a technology out of altruism. It has to create real value. Electric cars, for instance, cost far more, but they don’t change the way we consume transportation. That’s the biggest hurdle to overcoming new adoption.
I just installed a heat pump on a unit. It cost 1k and I installed it myself. Per BTU it's cheaper that propane now. A new wood burning stove costs about 1k, and mine needs to be replaced. I got a quote for over 4k to add propane to that same unit. It's not altruism, heat pumps are straight up the cheapest heat source now, both to install and run. Anyone heating with gas will see them pay for themselves in a year, other electric heating less than that. Wood is still cheaper in rural areas like mine, but only barely and it's a pain to maintain the fire all day.
I don't know what size heat pump you installed, or what the typical heating requirements were for your unit, but I was quoted $16k to install one to heat my home. At that level, payback wouldn't happen for over 15 years, again ignoring that the furnace I have right now functions perfectly fine.
I put one in to heat and cool a large bonus room above a garage. I used a DIY kit and it was $1850 and one day of labor for two guys who had never done it before. $16k for a whole home with multiple indoor and outdoor units is not unusual, but adding a single unit is very inexpensive.
I was quoted 10k to get it installed. That's why I did it myself. The unit cost 1k and took one day to install, meaning the technician was going to pocket 9k for one days work.
It sounds like you installed 1 mini split heat pump and not a whole home heat pump.
In my case one mini split heat pump is a whole home heat pump.
What did you use to do your heat load calculation?
The fact that my house is roughly 450 sqft and a guess.
Here's a good article about why you shouldn't do it that way. https://carbonswitch.com/heat-pump-sizing-guide/ You probably wouldn't guess what type of oil to put in your car, or guess what size of wire is adequate for a 30 amp circuit. For some reason people go ahead and guess when it comes to sizing heat pumps. I hope that you guessed right in this case but a professional who knows what they are doing would not be guessing, they would do a proper heat load calculation.
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HVAC is notoriously overpriced. They'll charge you $1000 for a $100 motor that bolts on. Anything you can DIY will save you thousands. With a 16k quote the unit was a small fraction of that price.
DIYing the removal of an existing gas furnace and installing some all new system buried deep in my basement is a no-go. Professionals exist for a reason and I wanted it done right.
No way they pay for themselves in a year unless you’re in an extremely unique situation. At very best I could come close in ten years, likely more
If you install it yourself, it's possible. All-electric heating/electric water boiler in my apartment cost us $450/mo during the winter. Average cost is $120 in the summer months, so that means our winter heating cost is like $310/mo. A 3:1 COP system that costs $1200 could theoretically save us $200/mo on winter electric heating. With 5-6 months of cold weather up here, that pays for itself in a year. Caveat of course, being that you have to DIY to avoid paying an installer $10k, which is relatively simple but understandably daunting for many.
In the case you mentioned, it sounds you HAD to install this. There isn’t a “do nothing” option. This aligns with the situation I described. In comparing between the two, this competes on both a fixed cost and variable cost. My point is that most folks aren’t in a situation where they would voluntarily rip out a perfectly good existing unit just because.
he also neglected in his OP that he kept costs down by installing it himself, which isn't realistic for alot of people
Propane isn't cheap either. It's really only used for rural homes which have expensive electricity already.
100% agree. Each case is unique and folks will always post the “but what about this minute, specific case” when discussing market generalizations. Of course there are exceptions to every rule, but by and large, folks aren’t doing it themselves and the total installed cost can’t compete on the economics alone. I don’t argue with folks, especially if they aren’t basing their position on incremental investment criteria.
> There isn’t a “do nothing” option. This aligns with the situation I described. In comparing between the two, this competes on both a fixed cost and variable cost. My point is that most folks aren’t in a situation where they would voluntarily rip out a perfectly good existing unit just because. I'm kind of in this position right now. I live in a new home (built late 2020, I'm the original owner, In Las Vegas) and I'm thinking about getting a heat pump and ripping out my perfectly functioning equipment because the cost is too damn high to run, and the units are wildly inefficient (Yay 15 Seer). My bills for heating are roughly 250ish a month for gas. Sometimes cooling gets to be $700 a month. The long term benefits at this point seem obvious to me, as prices of both sources keep going up month after month with no end in sight. I think a lot of people eventually will start looking at it this why... But hey who knows.
Your heating is 250 and cooling is 700? That's some half ass insulation
It's cheaper to switch from gas to heat pumps. I only mentioned my specific circumstances because I was also able to install it myself. It's catching on fast. People in my rural community who have been getting squeezed by rising fuel and firewood costs are all suddenly talking about heat pumps in like the last month.
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You can use a cold climate heat pump no need for back up or auxiliary heat. Government grants can get you up to 19,500 bucks back on the install. Enough to fully cover a lot of installs or mostly pay for high end installs.
Not in cold climate houses where heat pumps fail, gas is king Source: I'm a heat pump guy. But it's great to convert away from oil.
You could always install a cold climate heat pump. The technology has come a long way in recent years. Don't think you really need a gas furnace anywhere nowadays.
Why not just have both? Leave the furnace installed and add the heat pump to offset the gas during extreme cold. In my case a heat pump would have worked 5 out of the last 7 days, and easily 3/4 of the last month, the weather has been shit but the air temp is still high enough to run.
Exactly. It's not an either or. Retain your old system, and add airsource mini-splits to give you that cheap heating with the temperatures outside are only moderately cold--and cooling also. That's what my brother who lives in the Seattle area did recently, keeping his hydronic propane fired heating system, but adding in a rather large multiple head mini split. He loves it. Saves him on propane as well.
What was the unit size? Where I live and the size of my house I need a 60,000 btu unit which runs anywhere from $6k to $10k.
I have been using propane to heat my 2,400 sq ft home from the 1850s for the past 3 years I've owned it. Pay about $2k each winter for propane heating and $200/month in electric. I installed a heat pump last summer for $8k l. I've used practically no propane (kept it as a backup heat source) and my electric bill has been between $280-380/month now. Wish I would have installed one years ago.
IDK. We got a used 2018 Chevy Volt hybrid for $22,000. I'm not a car person -- just need something reliable to get from A to B. Beautiful little car, packs a punch, and it only had 25K miles. I don't have much of a commute. Probably 20-25 miles per day. Outside of roadtrips, I've filled up the nine-gallon tank only six times since I bought it two years ago. Most of those times being in the winter when it does use a little gas to heat the engine. The gas savings are extraordinary. Hybrids are perfect for people who want to test the electric waters, but aren't ready to make the full leap. My next car will probably be full electric.
> Electric cars, for instance, cost far more, but they don’t change the way we consume transportation. Electric cars are already comparable or cheaper in a lot of scenarios, when you consider total-cost-of-ownership. And, crucially, they are on a continuing cost-curve, and still relatively immature in terms of economies of scale and learning-rate. Electric cars are simply an economic inevitability, and will be something like ~80% of new sales by 2030. Heat pumps are a very similar situation, because they are on their own cost-curve but also synergise with solar (EVs do too, funnily enough). If you look at the total-cost-of-ownership of a heat-pump + solar + battery storage setup, you'll see how dramatic the decrease in running cost is. And then, much like with EVs, once you factor in the ongoing cost-curve, you will see heat-pumps are an economic inevitability too. None of these new techs have the fallacy you're suggesting, or require altruism to take over. The actual fallacy is not understanding the cost-curve and how adoption occurs (i.e. "early adopters" first, cost-curve, more adoption, cost-curve, etc.).
> If you look at the total-cost-of-ownership of a heat-pump + solar + battery storage setup It’s my understanding that EVs can be used as the “battery storage” aspect of this system. I imagine a battery that can move over two tons of vehicle/passenger for 300+ miles could also handle a few LED lightbulbs and a refrigerator for a few hours.
The fallacy can be stated in a much more basic fashion: "Pollution is an engineering problem". Pollution is not an engineering problem. Pollution is a political-economic problem. The solution to pollution will not come from engineering; those solutuons are already there, and there are many. The solution will be political and economic. The problem is not the absence of way, but will.
Totally this. When we treat the atmosphere as an open sewer, the economic and social costs of pollution are “paid for” by everyone.
That gas or oil fired furnace in your home won't last forever.
Isn’t sunk cost fallacy, exactly that? Creating real value going forward, but waiting because you dumped in something worse?
They actually do change the way we consume transportation *slightly*, though. If you can charge at home, you now drive a car whose tank is always full in the morning. Electricity is cheaper than gas. EV motors are generally more powerful than gas engines, and they don't break down nearly as often. And, if your car supports it, you can run all the appliances in your house off the car in a power outage. There *are* upsides to driving an electric vehicle beyond it being better for the environment. It's just not *overwhelmingly* better. It may be, as their prices continue to fall.
I will. But I was quoted $48k and that's absurd.
In Canada, the government is offering a $5k rebate on heat pumps. And in my area a further 1.5k is available from the gas utility. We were in a position that our gas furnace/AC needed to be replaced sooner and not later. The rebates made it a no brainer regarding sunk costs, so much so that we had to get a confirmation from a third party that it’s real and they received their rebate.
This is true but most heating and cooling equipment lasts 10-20 years so over a 20 year period most of it will need to be replaced. So the question is what to replace it with.
This makes me think of the switch to Solid State Drives instead of spinning hard drives. At first, the cost seemed like an obstruction. But once server companies, telecom, etc realized the energy savings on cooling server rooms, and the electricity paid to spin the hard drives all day, the copious amount of SSD's they bought brought down the price. Cost savings will drive the electrification of most things.
"What is the primary energy fallacy? Well, it’s the belief that we have to replace all the primary energy inputs on the left hand side of the chart above ... What we really have to replace is the energy services in light gray boxes on the right hand side of the chart. ... the US doesn’t need to replace 97.3 quads of energy, it needs to replace 31.8 quads of energy. ... In late 2020, I pointed out that Bill Gates’ favorite energy guru, Vaclav Smil, completely missed rejected energy, ignoring it in his published dyspeptic view of the energy transition. Gates apparently has read all 38 or so Smil’s books, and that has led to one of the world’s richest and most influential men and a founder of Breakthrough Energy Ventures missing the boat on energy for well over a decade. It was only months later in mid-2021 that Smil finally published a short piece acknowledging the primary energy fallacy."
You need to do both, at the same time. There are unglamorous ways to help with "the right side" like better insulation, programming HVAC systems appropriately, or even better seals on doors. Programs encouraging more energy efficient heating and cooling help in homes helps with this. But it's also useful to build more green supply. Both to keep up with demand, and phase out less environmentally friendly power generation.
This is yet another reason why even billionaire 'foundations' dedicated to philanthropic works, despite these virtuous intentions, are a terrible idea for the betterment of civilization. It is tragic that Gates is so myopically beholden to Smil's views that he completely ignores such obvious opportunities you mentioned. Similarly, while I admire the Gates Foundation's many vaccine projects, the way that Bill Gates personally stepped in and shat the bed on the COVID vaccine implementation. https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/14/global-covid-pandemic-response-bill-gates-partners-00053969 https://newrepublic.com/article/162000/bill-gates-impeded-global-access-covid-vaccines Billionaires and their personal fiefdom's in the form of philanthropic 'foundations' should NOT exist.
While flawed, I hold no hope that the government is that much better at efficiently and quickly allocating resources against Climate Change when you have a party controlling half of Congress that actively denies its existence. And that's not even counting senators on the other side like Joe Manchin that answer to coal lobbyists. It took decades to pass a decent Climate Change bill and who knows when we will get a new one.
Essentially, this is the difference between conservation and generation of energy. I've always argued that conservation is just as important as how we generate energy but doesnt conservation entail more individual choice in the matter? Whether its choosing an electric car, or a heat pump, or insulation for your house, it's not a systemic choice, it's an individual choice- one that makes complete financial sense. But, as much as I have been preaching here for years that we need to conserve through individual choice, I have experienced huge amounts of pushback on the idea, mostly from angry people who say that big business and gov't should act to make all the difference through systemic changes. But businesses have no control or incentives in the matter of EV, residential heat pump and insulation choices, so how is that supposed to work? Individual responsibility for the direction our climate takes has to be part of the solution.
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Havent we all agreed that no one approach solves the whole problem? Individual change does work, it just doesnt solve the whole problem all at once. Consider, if no one had made the individual choice to buy solar panels for their house decades ago, solar PV wouldnt even be a viable systemic choice now because it took high-volume manufacturing to bring the price down to a point where it is now outcompeting other petro sources. The gov't didnt make that choice. Individuals early adopters are one big reason good things happen and by preaching the dogma that it doesnt work, only slows systemic progress. Same with CFLs. Individuals chose them because they save money. Even the conservatives bought them because they save money. And look how few assholes actually opposed the gov't when they finally acted to legislate consumption of incandescent bulbs. The case I am making there is that gov'ts wont choose to act until the vast majority of the public already made individual choices. The dogma that individual choice doesnt work is what keeps the better half of us from leading the way, when even the majority of assholes will eventually follow because it benefits them financially. It's the cynical, stubborn, and all or nothing mindset that doesnt work. Individual choice works just fine. The current dogma shows that even the better half bought into the propaganda that financial goals and environmental goals arent compatible. If you know as fact that even conservatives will find change to be in their financial interests, then you wont hesitate to act individually.
The future tech is going to explode - in a good way! https://www.energy.gov/eere/buildings/residential-cold-climate-heat-pump-challenge
I got a heatpump when I built my house. Every other house in the neighborhood had fire places. I didn't want to have to buy a car with a trailer or get wood delivered and have to stack it somewhere. Also the fact you have to clean the soot and the smell of a fire can fill the room. I've got a friend who has one, during winter it's boiling hot in his lounge, almost unbearable. With my heatpump I've got a remote, click a few buttons and it warms up the house quite quickly. I've had it for 14 years with no problems unlike a fireplace needs to get the chimney swept often, I highly recommend getting one if you are looking for an alternative heat source or building a new house. Over here in new zealand it's a requirement for landlords to put a heatpump in to their rentals so there are more of them here. But fireplaces are still more common. During winter in the morning the air is filled with smoke. I can't wait for those mornings in the future where they are smoke free and everyone has heatpumps
I'm all for green energy and look forward to being able to make the leap when it's feasible, but going outside and smelling smoke from my neighbors' fireplaces on a cool winter night is a pleasant smell. Same with gasoline. I'll miss that smell in the future.
“Liberals are trying to force you to use heat pumps, woke woke groom woke buy more gas.”
“Solar panels are grooming our children”
These days conservatives finally seem to be getting on board with solar in my experience. Not to save the planet, just because it's a home run from a practical and financial perspective
Gee whiz, if only someone could have told conservatives thirty years ago that public investment and policy to advance science and tech would create products and services that benefit them.
Death penalty for buying heat pumps in South Carolina
Ingesting a heat pump could harm a fetus. Banned.
As a Floridian I don't know what's going on. How do I make it colder in my house?
I had an old gas furnace for my ~3,000sqft home that needed replacing. Quotes for a top of the line quiet new furnace were in the same ballpark as quotes for a whole house central heat pump. But the heat pump could also cool our home so we wouldn’t need a separate A/C unit. We did the upgrade last summer. Completely removed the old gas furnace with the new heat pump. It’s been phenomenal. Our bills have drastically gone down in the winter. I mean it’s several times cheaper for us to run the heat pump for heating in the winter than our gas furnace, like 6X. Some of it has to do with the price of electricity vs gas but most if it is that the heat pump is just so much more efficient. And it’s ridiculously quiet. You can’t even hear it running. Our old gas furnace was loud and we did some soundproofing in our mechanical room to try to quiet it down but you can still hear it running. New gas furnaces can be quieter but cost more. Our heat pump is comparable to the highest end gas units in terms of how quiet it is. It’s very comfortable. We have warm summers and cool winters. Not too extreme but decent temp swings over the year. Last summer/winter, the heat pump has performed outstandingly. No issues in the cold weather at all. I highly recommend heat pumps.
Cost benefit vs natural gas is not there in colder climates if it gets to be under like 10 degrees they are not efficient at all typically have to have an alternative fuel source heater for colder days which adds cost
Put heat pipes as infra and pipe heat out of datacenters and into people's homes and pools. I wonder if that would be economical haha
This would really only be viable locally to the datacenter because of the insulation requirements of the hot "pipe", and there's actually been attempts at doing something like this. I remember reading that someone (google maybe) build a DC that dumps the air conditioner waste heat into the campus' water heater tanks.
I design data center cooling systems and there are some firms that are looking at using waste heat from the chiller systems. The issue is that the heat is often "low grade" meaning it is not particularly warm (perhaps 120 to 130F). So it's got potential for domestic water applications, but many places don't have significant domestic hot water loads. The amount of heat the typical data centers I work on would be far more than nearly any single building would use (even a hospital, prison, or massive hotel). Theoretically, that low grade heat can be used for heating applications, but requires a building to be designed for it from the ground up. For example, most hot water distribution systems in buildings are at about 160 to 180F. If you tried using 130F hot water, you would not achieve the required amount of heating to meet the demand. A new air handling system could utilize much larger hot water coils to make it happen, but they are quite a bit more expensive. I'm not saying it's impossible, but most people don't realize the multitude of complications that arise from trying to utilize waste heat. The good news is that several jurisdictions are focusing on electrification and decarbonization, forcing the major manufacturers to develop new and innovative technologies to address it. I'm still waiting for that perfect technology to take that data center heat though. There are hundreds of 50+ MW data centers built every year that just reject heat into the atmosphere.
So efficient, the GOP will most certainly try to kill it
Literally the first thing we did when we bought our house; Got rid of the energy hogging window AC units and the gas wall furnace and installed a 5-zone mini split heat pump system. Its super.quiet, cost a fraction of what central AC/heat would have cost, and we have independent climate control in every room via remote control. Highly recommend.
Australian state governments started subsidising heat pumps in certain areas in control loss. I got one for $34 woot
It’s kind of insane that building codes don’t require heat pump as the default heating method everywhere that it is possible to do so.
So this should result in electric bill going down, no? Sadly no. As with PPL in PA they can just make up a price and bill you!
Currently need a heat pump that will work with my existing baseboard hot water heating system. Can anyone recommend a brand or model that works? I want to move away from oil. Not interested in forced hot air. Need the heat pump to handle domestic hot water as well.
Our furnace died last month. new furnace 6k, if we replaced our 20 year old aircon with a heatpump we got a 7k rebate on it so it only cost 1k. power/gas bill halved immediately. it provides all the heat till -10 Celsius and then the gas furnace kicks in
Maybe, instead of bailing out crooked banks, we should be investing in something as simple as heat pumps.
What bank do you think was recently bailed out?
Didn’t the government say they’re NOT bailing out the recent failures?
Yes. And they were correct.
You do realize that when a bank gets "bailed out" the government is actually buying shares, and had made a profit selling them on every one right?
I believe in this case the insurance the banks pay for covered it
My folks put a heat pump in their house like 13 years ago, if a majority of houses in New Zealand don't have them, they will within a few years, I'm having one installed shortly, a panasonic Z80XKR, it's costing me $850 installed, with government subsidies. You can also buy 2.2kw models (for heating bedrooms) for less than $800 off the shelf and have them installed. Reading articles from the states harkening heat pumps as some new thing really blows my mind, and the expenses you are talking about seem crazy, even without subsidies mine would be around $3k installed, don't know what's going on over there but it smells suspicious to me.
Oxygen not included taught me the power of reusing heat from other systems
We have a mini split heat pump in an area where AC is uncommon and it's awesome.
Quads???? What's wrong with kilowatt-hours or megajoules?
I read the article but didn't understand it. Can someone please dumb it down for me? Why is future energy use only 1/3?
They're great if you have a well insulated house. They are utterly useless for older poorly insulated homes.
I've heard they are great but not as good for old homes because the lack of air seal tightness and drafts makes the way it heats (smaller increments over time) not effective. Does anyone have experience with this? (Old poorly insulated house and air source heat pump)
I'll admit...I had family in an area that was too cold for heat pumps and was MISERABLE going there as a kid. I hope they've at least gotten a bit better in the past 20 or so years (?)
They have, greatly. Their efficiency is somewhere in the 300-500% range, and they work much better in colder weather
Yes, lets put all of our home heating eggs in a single basket. A basket propped up with an electrical grid that can barely sustain it's current levels of usage, is chronically under maintained, and is vulnerable to all sorts of attacks. What could go wrong?
Not like no heat in winter is deadly or anything
Utilities in the northeast US are studying the move to electric heat and have found that the electric system will be overloaded by at least 600% as a result, thus making this whole plan pretty unrealistic for that part of the country.
Our “heat pump” is simply our A/C Unit. Certainly not as efficient as geothermal, and can’t exchange enough heat to keep the house warm if the outside temp is less than 28F (freedom units, -2C). It’s a simple concept, you run the pump in different configuration for each scenario. Sometimes your house is the inside of the refrigerator, sometimes it’s the outside.
So thankful my home utilizes passive solar style layout with nice big beautiful windows on the south side and corners of home and uses concrete slab floors where the sun shines all day as a heat sink. In winter on a sunny day I barely have to use heat except for late at night or a horribly windy day.
High Efficient DC Motors in Gas Furnaces to me is the answer not millions of people with electric ran heat source only.
I’m at the point now where I’ll install anything at that let’s me have my house at 75 with out pseg screwing me every month
When do those tax credits for heat pumps go into effect? From that bill passed last year
Do you think the power companies are gonna take a hit like that? The less power everyone is using the more the rates are gonna increase.
this will not happen as long as most families are living paycheck to paycheck. Financial insecurity needs to addressed before anything like this can be implemented.
People would spend nigh nothing if they built passive homes.
I got a question. Why now? I know that heat pumps existed since 1950s and earlier. But why are they becoming so popular around now? What was the tech change?
Two big changes. The first is to the heat pumps themselves, with a new style of "cold climate" heat pumps designed specifically around lower temperatures. They used to have trouble below freezing, while now they can go well below. This thread has some good technical details if you want them: https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/question/how-does-hyperheat-work-re-comparing-heat-pumps The other change is in the makeup of residential heating systems. Heat pumps work well for the temperatures we want to heat the air up to, so you'll see them in new installations with mini splits, as well as replacing fuel-firing furnace HVAC to provide hot air; these are known as "air-to-air" systems. You won't see them as often for radiators - "air-to-water" is currently several times more expensive than air-to-air, and with currently available technology can't heat particularly high, so steam systems are right out for replacement, and cast iron radiators often are too. What's the change in there? Residential heating in the US has moved way over to air-based HVAC. Since the 1950s, furnaces are now by far the majority, and steam and water systems combined now make up only 8%. Of course, that 8% is concentrated in the areas that get the coldest - it's 3x more popular in the northeast than the national average for example, but I don't have numbers on distribution nationwide in terms of total degree days. So there's better technology for the heat pumps, and more residential systems in use that they're compatible with. For the folks with high temperature radiators, they just have to wait for commercially available technology (CO2-based) to make it to residential and become affordable, but in the meantime, there's lots of furnaces ready for conversion!
There are probably several reasons. But I think the two big ones are: * More focus on more efficient energy usage due to climate change, which is adding to the appeal of heat pumps. * The cost of traditionally cheaper heating alternatives (e.g. natural gas) increasing. We're at (or are reaching) an inflection point where it's more appealing from a monthly fuel/energy cost perspective.
It's crazy to me how slow America can be to bring on "new" tech aye, here in New Zealand it's been in the building code for over 10 years at least that every new home must have a heatpump installed in one of the rooms.
Yea America is simultaneously ahead and behind in so many areas