Maybe I have scar tissue from COVID prices but $20k to install a ductless heat pump vs. a $200 to throw a window A/C in or $700 for a portable heat pump. While I get that these heat pumps are better for the environment and much more efficient it's a last mile issue. The installers charge an arm and a leg and I'm not hurting enough to self install. I'm hoping the window heat pumps that just run off mains will be available to more markets soon, I could buy one of those for every room in my house for less than the install on a single mini split.
Where it did make sense was when I was getting solar. It was only a few thousand since I already had the trades out and reducing the load was important for the ROI on the panels.
We can cut HVAC install costs in half, and a lot of people are already working on it including Jetson (where the author works) and Electric Air, my company.
Average install is about $20K in California (varies by state). Here’s how that usually breaks down:
- Equipment: $3–5K for a basic swap (some go up to $10K for single system)
- Direct labor: $3–4K (about 15–20%)
- Materials: $2–3K
- Permits and testing: around $1K total
That leaves about a 45% margin to cover overhead:
- Indirect labor: $2.5K (installers when not installing, install managers, attending city inspector visits, call backs when installers make mistakes)
For comparison, I just bought a house here in Japan. Installed 6 minisplit heat pumps across various rooms in the house. All together it cost me 750,000 yen ($5,000) for the hardware and 90,000 yen ($600) for the install.
This is similar to just about everything mechanical (e.g. auto maintenance). The labor is always the biggest fraction of the cost, not the parts. You always have the option to DIY.
Can you do the installation yourself? In my country i have to make a HVAC technician come to check the installation and sign a paper before i can start mine (200€ for a 15 minutes job, but it's less than the 2-4k it would cost to not do it myself)
[edit] i say that because my hardware is 2.5k euros, so ~3k¯dollars, so we probably have the same high end stuff, and i guarantee you it's not hard to install, and it can be quite fast if you have help from your SO.
Newer units (not all) in the US come pre-charged up to a certain size of lineset. Manufacturers can sell you a whole unit with a charge. The rest is easy to source locally though I haven't tried to get nitrogen myself.
Of course you have exactly one chance with your install this way until you have to call someone.
Depends on where you live. Someone that has the tools can do it themselves and then shut the fuck up, which is how I suspect most of them in America get installed. Code/planning enforcement commonly surveils residences via satellite or air images but they're not noticing a mini split installed.
Central air system with indoor blower & outdoor condenser generally don't come with pre-charged lines so self-install without certification isn't really an option in US.
It's not just certification/permitting. The manufacturers often state that the unit must be verified to be installed by a qualified technian or the warranty is void.
Around here anyway, I was getting quotes of 20k for the install & equipment of a central air handler and the outdoor unit.
I'd be dead before the thing paid for itself in electricity cost savings. $20,000 ÷ (~90yrslife - 40yrsold) = $400 / year of neccesary savings to break-even as my casket is lowered into the ground.
Most don't have a payback if the cost of electricity is too high. Let's make them lower cost up front and lower running costs so it's a no brainer when replacement is due.
I got my EPA 608 universal for free after 2 night of cramming and an online proctored test. Skillcat, I think they charge like $50 if you want a printed card, worth it to me because I wanted to be able to walk into supply houses and buy refrigerant.
Getting the 608 is mostly rote memorization and the only thing required at the federal level. On the state level if you want a trade license that generally takes 4 years, but where I live residential owner-builder doesn't need it.
Me too, except I got it in the SkillCat free trial. Did it while rocking my then baby over a few weeks. Super easy for anyone that is a “good” test taker and has high school level reading
Japan is where early air-source heat pumps first achieved market success, so it's unsurprising that they are much cheaper to install there, because of the relatively large number of installer options.
In the US, they are struggling to break out of the eco-luxury product niche (where they have been stuck for a long time).
Compared to a conventional A/C compressor (which they replace), heat pump compressors are much smaller, quieter, and less ugly.
As for the indoor units, they can either be the "ugly" ones (the indoor head units visible on the wall), recessed "cassettes", or they can use traditional A/C air handlers in a utility room to distribute conditioned air via existing duct-runs and registers.
There are also companies like Quilt that are making heat pump systems with much more attractive indoor wall units.
I was curious about sound for both the indoor and outdoor pieces. The outside condenser for my current AC is very loud. Are the heat pump units quieter, and if so, why?
Speaking as an apartment dweller, my new apartment's ductless setup is much quieter (inside) than my old apartment's blower. At the old place, the fan was either on or off and must have added another 10 or 20 db of noise forcing you to always keep the TV remote nearby in case the fan turned on or off. It's very convenient that I can control my ductless unit's fan speed with a remote.
Better variable frequency drives for both fans and compressor is a big part of it (see other comments about being less prone to short-cycling).
This isn't exactly new or unique to heat pumps (and some older heat pumps lack both), but as the technology has gotten cheaper and more reliable, coupled with the drive for better efficiency, it has become commonplace.
Another person living in Japan. Sounds about right. A unit from a good brand (daikin, mitsubishi) costs ~$800? More or less depending on the room size. We had them installed when we built the house, installation price included. Two are enough to keep our house cool or warm in any season (it's a well insulated house). We have another in the guest room, use it only for when guests stay.
Our renovation company had rip-off pricing on years-old models, so we just asked a few electronics stores for quotes. First looked up the cheapest online options as baseline pricing, and then used the in-store sale deals to stay at the same total price but get the units in the bigger rooms upgraded to fancier/higher grade options.
Mini-splits these days are available as multi-head (I think that’s the term) units, where a single outside unit can supply 2,4, or 6 units individually and independently.
They’re remarkable, and I would go for a mini-split system over a central unit 100 times out of 100.
> where a single outside unit can supply 2,4, or 6 units individually and independently
In my current home, I have two "heads" attached to a single outside unit, but they cannot operate independently beyond setting different fan speeds or closing the vent really. If one of the mini-splits is set to heat and the other switches to cooling, they will booth start cooling, or vice versa, the head units just blindly blow air over what ever is being pumped through the line and the last unit to send a command to switch mode "wins".
Maybe there are clever heat pumps that truly allow fully independent control of the head unit when connected to multiple heads, but given the flow of refrigerant has to reverse direction completely when switching between heating and cooling, I don't see how they can operate fully independently when they are sharing the same refrigerant lines.
There is only one reversing valve inside the outside unit for all the head units connected to one outside unit in my experience, but would love to see examples of systems that do permit this if they exist.
An extra clever system would include every temperature controlled appliance in the house. Heat could be exchanged between the hvac, water heater, refrigerator, and oven.
When the oven is done cooking it can dump heat into the water heater (and or furnace in the winter). The fridge and HVAC could dump heat into the water heater before pumping it outside in the summer.
It's units in 6 different rooms (3 bed, office, living, dining) so 6 sets of units.
After reading some other comments I realize one vital detail is that they were installed in a renovated house that already had suitable holes to the outside and power outlets where the units were going, so the install job was just mounting the units, pulling the tubing and gassing it, no cutting things up or doing electrical work.
The price would at least double if we needed all the holes cut open, and I have no idea what the electrical work would cost.
It’s very normal here in Portugal. If you looked carefully and weren’t picky about the brands, you could have 6 mini-splits installed for $3000 all-in.
I would expect that installing six is maybe twice as expensive as installing one. All the overhead of scheduling the technician, traveling to the location, getting the tools out, etc stay the same. Installing six is vastly more efficient and that should be reflected in the price
It's the opposite for me, much bigger ROI on the heatpump than solar. Rural property, 10 years old, ~3,500 sq ft + basement, in Canada where summer can be above 30C (86F) and winter below -30C (-20F). Electricity costs (Canadian) 7.6 ¢/kWh off-peak and 15.8 ¢/kWh on-peak here.
I spent C$40K (about US$30k) on a ground source aka 'geothermal' heat pump to replace furnace powered by propane tank. I kept propane for on-demand hot water and whole house generator. I have no options for utilities other than electricity.
A couple of years later I spent another C$40k for a 20kW rooftop solar system, with net metering and no battery. Net metering was critical for getting any return at all. A battery is next to useless here- I generate almost all of my solar electricity in May-Oct but use the majority of it in Nov-April. Net metering lets me 'store' excess from summer and use it in winter.
Annual costs:
Before:
C$8,000+ propane (heating + hot water)
C$2,500 electricity (cooling + misc)
$10,500 total
So I'm seeing about C$8k/yr saving for C$80k investment. The heatpump saved me over $5k a year and the solar about $2,500 a year. The heatpump has pretty much paid for itself after 5 years, the solar will take at least 15 years (unless prices go way up) although should eventually see some return 15-20 years out.
In reality it might have cost even more than that to heat with propane. On the propane furnace we barely heated in winter, burned a lot of firewood to make part of the house livable. I'm trying estimate how much it would cost to heat the house to a comfortable 20C (68F) although the thermostat now with the heatpump is set to 22C (72F) in winter so there's an improvement in comfort as well as the ROI.
> Net metering lets me 'store' excess from summer and use it in winter
FYI net metering is unsustainable for the grid and policies will probably change (reducing rates for energy, increasing rates for delivery fees to offset the "freebies") as soon as adoption reaches a critical mass.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘unsustainable’ nor ‘critical mass’ here. Of course not everyone can net meter- on a sunny but mild day with no-one using A/C nor heating and everyone contributing back to the grid it doesn’t work.
My local utility is well aware of that, applications for permits to net meter have to be made, and only a fraction (something like 15%) of properties in each area can net meter. Also the government is aware and there are no grants for net metering, only for battery systems.
I’m giving details about my personal system for one property in one location, not in any way making a statement about what works for anyone else.
I'm jealous of your financial learnings. However, your model is not accurate as it doesn't factor in the 4 degree improvement in comfort and indoor pollution from propane furnaces: Propane furnaces can cause indoor pollution through the release of pollutants like carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen dioxide (\(NO_{2}\)), and benzene, which are byproducts of combustion.
It also doesn't include the negative externalities because of tragedy of commons. Sadly, these kind of flawed 'financial' calculations are widespread.
What is inspiring from the OPs comment is that this is doable in harsh Canadian winters with negligible solar and it breaks even. Most of the world is living in significantly more sunshine, so it should work out a lot better financially for >99% of the population.
I've lived most of my adult life in houses with forced air furnaces (albeit powered via natural gas, not propane), and what you are saying is inaccurate regarding indoor air pollution unless your furnace is in need of immediate replacement.
A modern furnace works via a heat exchanger, where the combustion produced pollutants never mix with the indoor air being pushed through. All pollutants are expelled outside via a property functioning chimney. This is one reason why you should have the furnace (and chimney function) inspected annually. Aging heat exchangers will show hotspots before there is a possibility of air being mixed, giving plenty of time to plan for a replacement. Of course there is a possibility of failure, which is why you should have a carbon monoxide detector.
For externalities or immediate health benefits, heatpumps are pretty defensible. However, solar isn't a saint. Rare earth/mineral mining is hazardous plus only a fraction of solar panels are getting recycled properly.
> this is doable in harsh Canadian winters with negligible solar and it breaks even
It's doable alright. OP got subsidies (See comment re: risk free loan and grants). Talk about externalities, this is definitely wealth transfer.
I hope we can agree that fossil fuel consumption is something to be avoided. Subsidies are an effective means of incentivizing people to avoid fossil fuels.
If you believe the externalities of solar are a problem, what do you propose to do instead? Should we subsidize some other alternative? Redirect resources from oil to nuclear? Other?
You're making different/absolutist arguments. Even the most ardent electrification proponents agree that you can't replace downstream chemicals/materials.
As for subsidies, you're thinking too narrow if you feel it necessary to only spend limited government budget on energy to improve lives.
Can you please share your definition of "whataboutism?" And explain how bringing up a single alternative (plus flaw) is addressing the critique and NOT changing the subject?
"Whataboutism", like "dog whistle", is a name for an imaginary discussion pattern that doesn't occur in real life, but is super easy to point out in most conversations, allowing one to cry foul and "win" the argument (or whole discussion) through violence instead of reason.
This is pretty much the same as accusing a colleague of insulting you through PR they asked you to review, because there's an added line that says:
class HOLEInstance ...
i.e. obviously they're calling you "assHOLE".
- "But wait, it's no such thing; it's a Handle for OLE component instances - it's part of support for COM stuff in those legacy reports..."
- "AHA! See also here, dear readers:"
class HOLEClientSite // TODO: : public HOEComponent?
"Surely, you see how bad my coworker is! They badmouth our customers too, and even call them public harlots! Don't believe their lousy defense that this was a typo, either!"
This is what pointing out "whataboutism" and "dog whistles" is. Artificial, cross-cutting pattern that match easily, but don't correspond to any real phenomena.
Indoor propane furnaces exhaust outdoors in most cases. Space heaters that exhaust indoors are rare - more used for garrage heat than house. If you use them of course actount for it, but most are not.
Theoretically yes, in practice no. There is (according to my sensors) a fairly large CO2 increase inside a room when a modern furnace (with external exhaust) is running. I've confirmed this with several units (all made in the last 10 years), and it's not that the windows are closed - when the furnace turns off, the CO2 drops. And it's not that the exhaust is placed in a bad spot either.
Yes, fossil fuels are the best to keep pollution away, just need to installed perfectly, configured and maintained regularly, monitored to make sure everything is running correctly, and have additional properties lying around vacant just in case there are leaks, misconfigurations, poor installation, etc. But we must use fossil fuels, there are no other options!
Looks pretty good to me over 25 years. Not many safe/guaranteed investments that will reliably return 8% these days. And as utility rates will no doubt rise over time, savings in future years will be greater.
Yes the people selling solar systems all factor in aggressive future electricity increases, it's best to also see how it looks with more conservative rate increases. By my calculation in a reply above with the interest free solar loan it's an 8% return over 14.3 years.
It will be interesting to see if this will make natural gas a more attractive source of residential heating as the price has remained relatively stable over the past 20 years.
The push for electrification seems like it relies on us metaphorically drowning in excess cheap electricity and want somewhere for it to go but right now the opposite it happening.
There’s also the argument to be made (this has manifested in other countries) that as gas usage wanes and more homes electrify, nat gas costs will increase as the infrastructure costs are spread among fewer and fewer people
> There’s also the argument to be made (this has manifested in other countries) that as gas usage wanes and more homes electrify, nat gas costs will increase as the infrastructure costs are spread among fewer and fewer people
This has kinda wonky incentives though - if your fixed costs for gas are high but your marginal costs remain low and for whatever logistical reasons you can't cut the gas connection entirely, then your motivations are to move as much of your heating load over to gas as possible.
I skimmed the article (so forgive me if I'm off.) It appears to reference non-US markets and the parent was assuming US (my assumption).
AFAIK, the US has a mid-long outlook of gas oversupply. EU's market is broken and has 3x the price (c.f. Henry Hub v. TTF). I haven't seen any major forecasters predict reaching parity anytime soon. Hence, LNG export projects keep getting (over-)built to chase the arbitrage.
Which to me is funny, when the electricity prices will clearly not rise when there is solar energy production from said panels. But might in other times.
I think the argument is that on average people are buying heat pumps and EVs faster they are installing solar panels but it’s not completely convincing though, power stations can be added.
Further north where I am solar can only ever be a small component of total electricity generation due to the dark snowy cloudy winter months with close to zero solar generation for weeks on end.
The issue for me with batteries is that in the summer I can produce in a day much more than I can use, and in winter I consume a lot and barely produce anything. This is where net metering steps in- I can ‘store’ all of my excess summer consumption in the grid in summer and get credit for it in winter.
A cheaper smaller system right sized for summer consumption with a battery would have my second best option, but for me never showed any potential payback due to the fixed costs of installation and the extra battery costs.
Yes the figures are my approximate bills so include net metering revenues.
You're right about the 8 year negative IRR for the heatpump, although I'm being very conservative about propane costs, it's likely much shorter. I was pretty conservative about the solar savings too, I generally go for the worst case in these estimates.
Your overall NPV calculation seems a bit off. It's ~21 years to zero NPV at 8% discount rate, spending $80 up front to save $8/year. Factoring in the 10 year interest free government solar loan makes it more like 14 years. My working:
For me it helped with the ROI because I couldn't go any larger than a 6kw array due to roof shape/exposure. Only roof mounted solar is permitted in my community :/ So a ductless saved us energy in the summer months vs. window units, so I could bank more with net metering when the sun was shining.
Excellent data, thanks! Net metering does look necessary for economics. Have you factored in relative replacement/maintenance costs for the geo pump vs furnace? Also curious how much your investment was discounted thanks to tax subsidies.
There was a C$7k government grant at the time for the heatpump, which roughly matched the tax.
The current Ontario solar grant is weird- it only applies to battery systems without net-metering. They also offered a 10-year interest free loan though so I took that, improves the ROI a little. I think battery systems do make more sense for people who are further sound and using more electricity at the time of year that they are generating it. The solar sales people estimated a 10-year ROI but they had to include a pretty high annual energy cost increase in their calculations (I think 8%/year), I estimated more like 15 years.
I didn't really consider replacement, by all reports the WaterFurnace pump should last 25-30 years and the propane furnace was probably 5 years old so would have lasted about the same. I would think that the WaterFurnace costs a little more to replace, maybe a winter's worth of propane.
Several people told me that ground source heat pumps were too expensive, but years later it still feels like the best investment I've ever made, the gentle heating and cooling is more comfortable too. Anyone with enough space who has to have fuel delivered (propane, oil, etc.) should seriously consider it.
Err, be careful. You made these improvements sequentially, not independently. Each one halved your costs and might still have done exactly that if done in the opposite order.
Look closer. How could his 20kW rooftop solar electricity have halved his initial monthly costs, when >3/4 of those costs were for propane heating fuel? (Vs. <1/4 for electricity.)
People told me that, but I did the calculations myself and the impact on my energy bills is real. Net metering is essential though, so not everyone can do it.
Compared to say SoCal I generate 2/3 as much per year, much less evenly- a lot more in summer than winter, whereas further south there's less variation year round. Cooler temperatures improve solar panel efficiency too. There are online solar potential calculators if you want to compare for yourself.
Right, but you have to compare it to the opportunity cost of the money. A solar panel is an annuity. There is a one time sunk cost for a relatively consistent, long-term payout.
If I put $100 into the stock market in approximately seven years I will have $200. If I put $100 into solar panels, in 10 or 15 years, I will have $100 worth of savings. Financially, it is not much better than just putting it under a mattress.
I get that the non-economic parts of solar are pretty much all upside. I’m not saying nobody should do it. Just that they should view it as a luxury, not an economic opportunity. But until the finances work out, it will not achieve widespread adoption, and the finances are a function of how much sun you have and your energy prices.
Those of us up north have little sun and lower energy prices. We would be a lot better off just putting your money in the stock market and paying for your electricity if you were only considering money. That is not true of the American southwest.
I have homes in both Phoenix and Cleveland and I have done the math on both. I actually can’t put solar in Phoenix, I wish I could, it would be a great investment. I could put solar in Cleveland, but I might as well throw my money down the drain. I can’t imagine the math is any better in Canada.
Right, that’s a bad financial investment. If I put $100 in the stock market, in 10 to 15 years, I will have $200 to $300, on average. If I put $100 into solar panels, in 10 or 15 years, I will have break even.
This is talking about cold-climate heat pumps. A $200 window AC isn't going to heat your house when it's way below freezing outside.
$20k USD is insane though. I live in Ontario and we paid $12k CAD (pre-government subsidy) for a modern heat pump with a backup high efficiency furnace for when temperatures dip down to -40 or lower.
True. We have natural gas and an existing steam radiator setup though, for the two months a year window heat pumps can't keep up. The upfront investment alone would heat my house for 10-20 years.
Honestly, just piling more insulation in the attic and doing an energy audit will probably put the ROI out another 10+ years...
I'm hoping the newer window units that are being rolled out to the NYC market will be good enough to put downward pressure on the outrageous prices in the installation market. Or maybe I'll just dedicate a weekend to DIYing :P
There’s another alternative: a mini-split. Larger than a window unit, with a refrigerant lines you run yourself but with the actual refrigerant pre-charged inside the unit, so you don’t need to handle it yourself (which usually requires a license).
Mini-splits tend to be much cheaper than full installations.
I looked into the precharged DIY option and the lengths just didn’t work out for what I needed in my space. I ended up paying a licensed installer C$12k to put in a three head system (two conventional, one ducted), and then a separate guy $5k to do the ducting for the bedroom level.
It would have been nice to do it as one, but the HVAC firm didn’t want to get their hands dirty with my wacky ducting plan, and the duct guy wasn’t licensed to charge the refrigerant lines.
2k NZD to install minisplit vs 160KWh per winter month to heat my bedroom. Thats about $150 in power or 16 yrs to pay itself at COP 5. Or install 1 additional $130 solar panel to make about 650 KWh per year.
I do heat house main (using hp) just for comfort (and because it’s cheap). And I come from further than saaskwatch so I know what freezing pipes mean haha.
My point tho is - hp’s are not panacea in my use case.
Heat pumps are not inherently expensive though. It depends on how competitive (or not) your HVAC industry is. Sounds like New Zealand has issues with this (probably due to being a small market).
Similar for me, also in Ontario. I got a three zone mini split this year that I’m hoping can cover most of the shoulder seasons and keep me from using the gas boiler, though it remains to be seen if that’ll actually pan out; so far the kids have complained that their rooms are a lot less evenly heated when it’s the heat pump running rather than the rads.
Actually its probably most efficient way because you have best control. That said having whole house ducted you also get benefit of fresh air via ERV (arguably more important than heating).
We just got quoted $20k for the minimum setup for our house. Meanwhile, I have two "free" window units which probably cost me an additional $300 in the summer. I really want heat pumps, but I just can't see how I can justify it for $20k.
That’s wild. Is it something that plugs into a central air so not the usual consumer heat pump? I just got a nice heat pump in Finland for two floors with two indoor units for about $3000 with install. It should handle 99% of our heating needs. The most expensive units on the market are about $3000-4000 and for install I got quoted $1k fixed without shopping around. That includes drilling through two brick outside walls. The units are all made in China and labor is cheaper in the US if anything. Where are these prices coming from ?
The materials they install are small copper pipes and insulation and a 16A capable electric cable and some plastic. Maybe $100-200. I feel like you guys are getting screwed.
Its most simply summed up as what I call the tradesman's protection racket.
On one side of the coin you have any moron, calling himself a repair man which can and does end in disastrous jobs which can be unsafe. This though has much lower pricing.
The flip side is, basically a protection racket where suppliers only sell to you if you have a 'loicense' and the hurdles required to become said VIP are so high, giving your body to a master tradesman to get a piece of paper over many years and be allowed to practice installing said systems results in a huge shortage of qualified people. Prices then skyrocket.
I wish I could live in a world somewhere in the middle, but as I've seen both ends of the spectrum, they both suck for different reasons.
You think HVAC is bad, plumbers and electricians have their protectionism written into law in many states. You must pay for their stamp. "Here is what I have and it is demonstrably within code" is not sufficient.
> giving your body to a master tradesman to get a piece of paper over many years and be allowed to practice installing said systems results in a huge shortage of qualified people.
The job is physically difficult and does not provide steady hours. It involves driving long distances each day and working in hot and cold and rainy conditions, in cramped corners, in houses with varying levels of cleanliness.
People with options tend towards other careers, resulting in lower supply of qualified people, and hence higher prices to compensate for the drastically lower quality of life at work.
Have you considered that the second path you outlined, "giving your body to a master tradesman to get a piece of paper over many years" (in the figurative sense), is in general a necessary prerequisite to avoid the first path of any moron being allowed to "[call] himself a repair man which can and does end in disastrous jobs"?
> I wish I could live in a world somewhere in the middle […]
This world would just be a mixture of both, with many more semi-skilled tradesmen doing many more half-assed jobs, but not having to train as long.
I've done a lot of that type of work myself. It isn't hard to learn how to do it right from books - and I have passed inspection reports to prove it. I've also seen those professionals do a terrible job - to the point inspectors admitted to hurrying my job because they knew the next would be a mess.
I believe you. But not everyone is an autodidact. Most people, for whom becoming an electrician or plumber is the best option among all viable careers, do not have the discipline, aptitude, and intelligence to learn the theoretical and practical knowledge of a trade completely on their own. And vice versa, people who would be able to pull this of, typically have options that are better-paying, higher-status, or less physically demanding.
My 30 year old central air which covers 1 floor of my home went out recently so I got a bunch of replacement quotes, most vendors I asked for both a traditional central air & a heat pump central air quote.
The quotes were generally 50% more expensive for the heat pump option.
Vendor A: $12.5k AC, $17.7K Heat Pump + extra electrical work for the heat strips.
Vendor B: $8K AC, $11K Heat Pump + they don't think the existing ductwork is sufficient for comfortable heating and would recommend redoing some of it.
And I wouldn't qualify for any tax credits because it doesn't cover full home (there are upper floors without ducts that already are on mini splits & baseboard heat).
Also worth noting the range of HVAC quotes for the same spec cooling in the same home are insane. Every quote I got seemed to widen the range.
Yup, got similar quotes. I'm really not going to pay that for a day's work (2 people). The price difference over installing A/C is staggering and don't know where it comes from.
That is insane. I paid 1000EUR for an install on two floors (two indoor units) plus a few hundred for extra copper pipe not included in the quote. Took two guys about 7h. At least an hour of that was figuring out how to get power to the unit with a big enough fuse (my bad)
Of the $20k, let's assume $5k is the hardware. Now $15k is the work. Let's consider the installation a highly skilled job, commanding $100/hour. This is 150 hours, or a tad more than 6 business days for a team of 3, working with full load 8 hours a day.
Does a split system indeed take so much work? What is so effort-intensive?
2-3 hours planning, parts list, client management,
4-6 hrs to run electrical,
2-4 hrs to mount condenser,
4-8 hrs for medium line set,
4-8 hrs air handler, duct, platform integration,
1-2 hrs with thermostat and condensate protection,
1-2 hours nitrogen testing and pull vacuum,
1 hr documenting photos for incentive programs,
1 hr spending time educating customer about the system.
Messing up a parts order and figuring out a solution 4 hrs too often.
Total: 28 hrs, or 2-3 days of 2 people depending on the travel from their shop to customers home. I agree. Let's get that down to 12-16 hrs or single day and the best shops and installers can do that.
CA Labor law allow about 6-7 hrs of work on site as installers often have to start at their shop.
$3-4k of labor cost for small-mid size. Best might be be 2-3K labor cost. Minor equipment 1-2K, permit and testing required $1K. Then 50% gross margin is the target, net costs $2.5K indirect labor, $2K sales cost, project management, trucks, insurance, software, 10-20% net margin.
COVID prices just aren't a good comparison. I needed to replace a tankless water heater and was quoted $4k. I laughed, paid $1100 for a top of the line one and had my neighbor help me who used to be a plumber. Took 30 minutes and a bottle of a tequila for my neighbor.
One question I would have is how distorted is your area, economically?
I live in the Appalachian mountains, so one would think it should be reasonable labor rates for an area with a middle-low cost of living.
Except that we have a lake the next town over which is entirely covered in millionaire lake houses, so anyone working a trade here can and will charge obscene rates to local, normal people because they can command that rate from a rich transplant that is price insensitive.
You can occasionally find a good, reasonable guy or company still, but you’ll be calling around for days to find them.
Having previously spent a decade in a hot-market (Charleston, SC) you’ll find similar stories, there are plenty of workers in the area, but they’re almost always expecting to charge rates to wealthy price-insensitive transplants.
If they’re really charging $10-20k then just fly someone in from a cheaper area with a reasonable hourly rate lol. It’s about 3-6h of not very intense labor
You've kind of exposed me, I'm not in the US, my question was in the first person but it was more that I'm curious as to the causes of what the commenters report. You may be right about the area just being HCoL, though.
It's a good idea. I'll do that in the Spring. Any recommendations on makes / series that do well in the cold and support some form of home assistant offline control (no cloud integration, zigbee or matter or similar)?
Edit: it seems that the market has decided that every manufacturer will ship the same cloud garbage and that the community has decided it actually isn't that hard to bypass and replace their wifi modules with ESPHome devices.
Agreed. They feel massively overpriced. Covid and government rebates had everyone using them as cash cows.
I installed a 24k btu one for my recording studio myself. Took me 3 hours. It’s a cheap Mr Cool one, but seems good enough for me and has been problem free. $1300 from Costco.
The quotes I got were $10-30k for one to five head units around my house. Nope!
If I’m going to spend that much I’m going to be looking into geothermal for heating
A third of the country rents. Renters pay the utility bills. Landlords pay for appliance upgrades.
Why would the landlord put any effort into upgrading appliances when the cost of not upgrading them is borne by the renters?
I've never rented at a place where they didn't want to fix broken equipment with the cheapest possible replacement. And no renter would ever consider purchasing a major appliance like this since they'll end up priced out before they recover the cost in utility bills.
They're a nice technology, but our incentives are all wrong for a lot of housing stock.
In some locations you can't rent out places without minimum energy efficiency ratings, which then leads to insulation and heat pumps getting installed.
This is referred to as "Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards (MEES)" and seems to have been pioneered in the UK and adopted by Netherlands and France and then the EU generally.
That doesn't square with the fact that new rentals are built with granite countertops and stainless-steel appliances. Tenants do shop around on the basis of amenities.
The combination with air conditioning and dehumidifying is genuinely compelling for the simplicity. Especially in new construction.
But these things trickle down to renters last. And if the landlord installs it, you bet your ass the rent is going up more than your savings on electricity.
Lose lose lose, if it gets installed then the current residents probably get priced out anyway. It eventually trickles down but we could do so much better.
Sure, but those amenities are highly visible. Lots of units have a stainless dishwasher exterior, but most will still be the landlord-special plastic tub inside. Who is shopping around based on whether or not there’s a heat pump? I would consider myself relatively well-educated on this and still the heat/cooling source is an afterthought.
Honestly the ductless mini split system in my new apartment was a big factor for me. But it was the first time I'd seen one over here in the mid-atlantic.
I listed a reason that impacts a third of houses. I didn't write an essay because the article lists plenty of others. It was just weird that they never mentioned the misaligned incentives.
They are efficient but do not have as high of an energy output as a smaller and cheaper gas furnaice. Apart from that, the water temperature is lower, so you need much larger radiators. Due to the lower energy output, you also need better insulation or a relatively massive heat pump. And the tech was not around 20 years ago (for reasons unknown to me).
The water temperature which you deliver to radiators are not defined by capacity of the heatpump, but how hot the radiators can be for safety/comfort reasons. If the radiators are too hot people could burn by touching them or stuff like platsic chairs would melt. Also the piping in the walls and floors cannot support too hot temperatures.
The temp for water used in radiators 60-70C is easily achievable by an air-top-water heat pump. It does not depend on the energy source, gas/oil/electricity.
Condensing gas boilers similarly run more efficiently at lower temps.
If the water returning to the boiler isn't below 54C then there will be no condensing at all, and the advertised 90%+ efficiency won't happen till the return value is more like 46C.
That translates roughly to max winter temp of 65C leaving the boiler and lower when lesss heating is required.
This can be tweaked by the end user and save 10-20% on heating bills.
From context I can't tell if they mean the heated coils in a heat pump head, or somehow connecting to a traditional radiator.
In older homes there isn't necessarily HVAC at all and instead there are actual radiators. I've lived in two like that, there is just no forced air to rooms.
Right on. I have a heat pump water heater and a heat pump heating system in my HVAC. Getting those installed felt like swimming upstream. Most contractors would try to dissuade me from them.
Luckily, I found a contractor who was skilled and knowledgeable about heat pumps and rebates (back when govt thought climate change was real). Very happy with my heat pump tech.
I’m in California, I have two heat pumps installed. I can sum up the problems as follows:
1. They are EXPENSIVE. The equipment itself isn’t that expensive tbh but installation is pretty expensive. The government subsidies have made sure that the contractors jack up their own prices by as much.
2. I end up paying more in utilities because electricity is very expensive and heat pumps aren’t nearly as good at heating in the winters as old fashioned gas furnaces when it comes to the cost.
I made the massive investment because I could and I eventually want my house to run completely on rooftop solar as a way to reduce my carbon footprint. But the cost is nowhere near mass market adoption price range.
I was shocked when I saw the price of heat pump installation in the US, even with an existing ducted system. There’s no reason a reversible heat pump system should be significantly more expensive than a cooling only one.
It’s bonkers. I bought a pre-charged ductless mini split to DIY. Took my dad and I about four hours to do the install. So call it 8 hours of semi-skilled labor.
The unit was $1350, I added a line set cover, pad and feet for another $200, and needed about $200 in electrical equipment - it was a long wire run and code requires installing a disconnect box. The only special tool was a hole saw bit for running the coolant lines.
So maybe $1850 all-in, plus 8 hours labor. I’m sure a pro could do it in half the time. But the low end for a pro install is $5k.
I get that they have insurance and warranty or whatever, but that’s a damn juicy margin.
It's not that different for other contractors either. That's part of the reason housing prices are so high. As unbelievable as it is, someone must be willing to pay the high prices. Economic inequality is the basic reason for the housing shortage.
I did the same thing and spent slightly less than you did because I did not need the extra linesets, etc. I was also able to install this in a location that few professionals would have tolerated (interior wall). My thinking was that even if the unit died, I would have saved so much on installation that it wouldn’t even matter. It’s a great unit too. Installation costs are kind of a racket.
In New Zealand a pretty basic 3.5kW (the internet told me that’s about a “ton”) mini split will cost about NZ$2000 including basic installation - that’s with the units on the same wall, ground floor, including the line set cover and running a new circuit if you need one. A 9.7kW model is only $3500. Again New Zealand dollars so halve that for US. Also that includes a 10 year warranty.
I know our labour costs are going to be lower, but not that much lower. Glassdoor indicates that salary for a US HVAC installer is about US$60k, and in NZ a local equivalent says NZ$60k, so I’d expect the numbers to be the same.
Oh and that price includes all taxes and excludes rebates (which most of us don’t qualify for anyway)
Lol it's protected by the licensing mafia. You'll have to change $5 capacitors for $1000 a pop for 4 years first while being paid peanuts to do it.
Hardly anyone wants to do that so we're stuck with the status quo. You're basically stuck either paying through the nose or finding a family/friend with the equipment and expertise or doing it yourself.
I don't know why you're being downvoted (it shows as slightly greyed out). This is true. I had a roommate who is a HVAC salesman. Very smooth talked. The 'HVAC' company offers free HVAC maintenance. They techs go in, do some stuff and they point out some problems. Sales guy goes in, smooth talks his way to 5K - 70K bill to most people. Of course, when something goes out and people don't have a choice (like in peak summer or winter), they make out like bandits.
Most of the local firms (Dick's local $town hvac/plumbing/electrical) are owned by massive PE firms (Saudi + other billionaires) which pretty much own the entire businesses all over US. They keep the local name to make people believe they are giving business to a local guy.
Another roommate of mine was a plumber.
The guys who do the actual work get paid close to nothing ($20 - $22/hour) and live on day to day basis.
Plumbing company quoted me $3000 to replace a broken water heater in the middle of peak winter. I paid my guy $300 for labor (heaters are $500 - $1000 from lowes depending on how long of warranty you want) and he was super happy for making a lot of money.
The good local contractors have all the work they can handle on commercial accounts. Residential is an annoyance. That leaves the very small fish (if you can find them) and the PE-owned scam companies.
The equipment is actually a lot cheaper if you’re a pro - the DIY pre-charged line-set adds about $500 over an equivalent unit. Pulling a vacuum and adding coolant is not hard, just requires specialized tools that still aren’t that expensive.
I mentioned warranty and insurance.
You don’t need to “schedule workers” if you are owner operating. Maybe you want a (non-skilled) helper to speed up the install, but you absolutely could install solo. That said, you will need a licensed electrician to run the circuit.
In my metro, hvac contractors can get ten-packs of permits for mini-split installs, and at most one out of ten is inspected. It’s a rubber stamp if you’re a pro, and the individual permit is maybe $50.
And that $5k I mentioned is the low bid, which you’ll only see if you know how to find contractors who aren’t private equity fronts. These guys are not advertising, but they stay busy by having the best price. There are shops that will happily charge you double for the same work.
I never said it’s a get rich quick scheme. It is just highly compensated for owners without requiring the level of expertise of something like a plumber or electrician. I’m curious what is happening in the market to support these margins.
Devils advocate here, it cost me ~$1500 in equipment to buy the vacuum pump, vacuum gauge, nitrogen air tank to flush the lines and pressure test, pressure manifold set and gauge, air lines, good flaring tool, copper bending tool, schrader valve pulling tools, various air tools, and a book on mini split installations.
Then it took me 2 days between pouring concrete pad for the heat pump, installing the heat pump and bolting it in, running the copper lines, drilling the exit hole, running the drain piping, learning how to use all the tools, running the electric and control cables and installing a new breaker and 220 subpanel, pressure testing, vacuum testing, flaring, releasing vacuum and all the stuff you have to do. I also had to spend several nights watching youtube and get a EPA 608 certification for handling refrigant which took another day.
Wouldn't have been worth it for a single unit, but was worth it for installing 3, and now I can do additional units for basically $0 overhead and of course no one would even have to know if I installed it and now I can order unlimited amount of refrigerants to my doorstep.
Having plumbed my entire house, and done my entire house electrical system, I would say the level of expertise to install a mini split is higher than either alone. You have to do electrical, plumbing, refrigerant handling, pressurized equipment handling, be liable for massive federal/EPA fines if you do something wrong, and on top of that I had to do masonry work.
There is a 0.00000% chance of getting into EPA trouble installing one minisplit. You got crews dumping 5 a day into a bucket of water all over and no one will answer a report
It's going to vary by installer, of course, but when I looked into getting a heat pump it was about $1500 more than just replacing the A/C condenser and evaporator with a like-for-like unit. Keeping the existing natural gas furnace as backup. This was in the PNW, about three years ago. $4500 for A/C, $6000 to replace it with a heat pump instead.
Tuning a heat pump vs resistive heat is a much tougher game than it should be. In a moderate climate, I use my ecobee to ensure aux heat doesn't come on until it's below freezing, and it should only come on if something has gone wrong at that point too. Unfortunately, many thermostats by default will use resistive heat in relatively normal scenarios, of worse, when you've programmed home and away times intended for efficiency but disparate enough to activate resistive heat.
That said, I've found that in most cases (assuming you're on the right electric rate plan, that's a whole other conversation, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42763695), most homeowners in california actually see operating cost parity or a slight decrease, even with super expensive electricity. Silicon Valley Clean Energy recently did a study substantiating this: https://svcleanenergy.org/wp-content/uploads/Bill-Impacts-of...
> most homeowners in california actually see operating cost parity or a slight decrease, even with super expensive electricity
But you’re missing my first point though, installing a heat pump system comes with a price tag of tens of thousands of dollars. I’m not doing that if my operating cost is at parity or a slight decrease. It’s the same reason people are no longer incentivized to install solar. And to add to that, installing heat pumps also come with additional costs that can range anywhere from a few thousand dollars to replace the main electrical panel to tens of thousands of dollars for a full electrical upgrade if your house is on knob and tube wiring to reduce fire risks.
If you DIY everything and go with server rack batteries you can keep the costs low enough for a reasonable break even point. Any middleman is going to gouge.
Home solar makes perfect sense in Australia - a market with similar Labour costs to California - because they do it for 1/3rd of the cost.
It makes no sense in California when the subsidies alone are higher than the total costs for utility scale solar.
I just got 10 new 585w panels and inverter for under $5k. A battery is gonna cost me $1500 but at $350 month for electricity, not sure how you can claim it not worth it.
> installing a heat pump system comes with a price tag of tens of thousands of dollars.
Mine cost US$250 for the machine, refrigerant included, and another US$80 for the installation. We've had to have it fixed twice due to factory defects. Its heat output is 3400W, nominally consuming 941 watts of electrical power. It's not a great machine, but you're smoking crack.
In Southern California it costs $120 just for a guy to come out and look at your HVAC. Not fix anything--not install anything--just to look at it and give you an estimate for how much the repair is going to take. I went to the website for a local installer and they give a ballpark of $13,000-$25,000 for a heat pump installation.
I don't know why it's so expensive here. It shouldn't be, it makes no sense. But it is.
Skilled labor in the US is expensive! Most of the install costs come from labor, not equipment. Tens of thousands of dollars is pretty typical for a heat pump installation.
(For what it's worth, the person you're quoting is referencing a whole home system, either ducted or multi-zone ductless. I think you're referencing a single-zone ductless. Those are cheaper, but still are typically $5-10k installed from a licensed contractor in the states)
Yes, it's just a mini split. Two guys (skilled, but AFAIK not licensed) installed it in about 6 hours. I'm in Argentina, but I don't think US$1000 an hour is a common labor rate even in the US? Maybe for a famous lawyer or surgeon?
Ha. It's not straight labor. So much other overhead to consider - workman's comp insurance, back office staff, technician utilization, vehicle repair and maintenance, etc... There are lots of other costs that get baked in when you're looking at a licensed company compared to a guy in a truck
Okay but US$5k for half a day of work? It would have been faster if the guy had had his own ladder instead of us moving my desk so he could stand on it to work. (He's bought one since then.)
A half day of work, a half day of office rent, a half day of truck use, a half day to pay for loan servicing, a half day to pay overhead costs, a half day to add to reserves for the half day you don't work, and so forth.
The first point is very valid too. There was an energy commission study a few years ago, and up front cost is pretty consistently one of the biggest barriers to heat pump adoption.
I think there's some nuance to that, though. Even replacing a furnace + AC in California amounts to tens of thousands of dollars! It's not that heat pumps are expensive, it's that construction work in general is expensive.
When you frame it in terms of percentage of home cost, it actually feels a lot more reasonable. Robert Bean is a pretty respected voice in HVAC, and shared this article a few years ago (https://web.archive.org/web/20150210053806/http://www.health...). The gist is (and this is focused a bit on new construction, so not entirely apples to apples) that you should budget 3-5% of the home's cost for a bare minimum code compliant HVAC installation. When you look at it in that lens, $20k to replace the most complicated mechanical system in a $3M home is less than 1%.
"Productivity growth in the goods sector raises the wage in that sector, but also raises the output of that sector. So the ratio of wage to output - a measure of the cost of a unit of output - stays constant over time. Higher wages in the goods sector put pressure on wages in the service sector, so wages rise over time there. But (taking the exteme position) productivity is not growing in services, and so output is not growing. The ratio of wages to output in services - a measure of costs - is thus rising over time. This is the “cost disease of services”."
While I don't think that's all of it, it is a helpful framing of the economics around these dynamics.
There are some companies out there that are truly price gouging. But many are just pricing around the true cost of labor and to run a construction business. I've done a little writing around this topic too: https://www.heatpumped.org/p/pricing-transparency-peeking-be...
Ultimately, I would love to see upfront prices & operating costs for heat pumps both fall. But there are a lot of tough realities baked into the cost of these systems. They are still a very logical choice for most homeowners at the time of failure. Especially with rebate & incentive stacks in many places, a heat pump actually works out cheaper than a new furnace + traditional AC for many homeowners.
I got a heat pump with a backup gas furnace this year. A heat pump just felt like a no-brainer of I was going to get an AC anyway. But gas in PA tends to be cheaper, so the system will use gas at a certain point. The problem is I couldn't have picked a whose installer if I was throwing darts at the wall, but that's another story.
I ended up self-installing my HP-WH. Professionals either tried to talk me out of it like you described, or charged a premium for the upgrade. My county has a rebate that allows for self-installs. It was rather straight forward and ended up being ~$700 in the end. The old unit I tore out took an extra $350/year in electricity, so I've already broken even.
I had a similar problem too. Was unable to find anyone who was willing to quote me on a heatpump when I was installing my air conditioner. I assume it will be better in 5-10 years when I have to replace them.
Unlikely. Private equity is swooping in, especially in places like New York that have taken bizarre regulatory stances against gas.
In my area, about 75% of the HVAC companies have been swept up. Prices are up 75-150%. I got my gas furnace replaced to to beat the ban, and had a fireman who works a side gig do the job for $15k. The bids from the companies ranged from $25-85k
I guess I lucked out; our house had a (very old) whole-home (that is, ducted) heat pump system for heating and cooling when we moved in. When it was time to replace, our local contractor knew exactly what we needed. They even do mini-splits, had we wanted one.
No, no ductless magic without mini splits. I feel like a lot of people refer to heat pump systems interchangeably with ductless mini splits, so I wanted to clarify that. Maybe that's just an issue with the people I speak with, though.
You are right. Most do heat pumps with mini splits for each zone. However, ducted houses can certainly use heat pumps with an air handler. Typically this translates to heat pump replaced outdoor condenser (ac unit)and the air handler replaces the indoor furnace.
Yes, the actual refrigeration and heating cycles are always based on compressing and decompressing a gas. But the gasses used differ based on temperature range, and further you can have air to air, air to water, or water to water for the heat transfer. The overall costs are the system can be very different based on whether you have a split unit that requires a single wall penetration, a central unit in the basement with ducting, or a geothermal system that requires digging deep trenches or wells. It makes for difficult conversation when some people are talking only about air to air minisplits when others are including all of these and more.
In Asia, manufacturers sell direct or through highly competitive retail channels and the installers really only have to know minisplits.
Minisplits in the US get sold by the brand -> distributor -> dealer (contractor) -> homeowner with each step being a 20% market up. Sometimes there is even a master distributor in there AND usually there is a “rep group” taking points too.
That is fundamentally what drives up costs. That and the fact that the US housing marketing is very heterogeneous so contractors have to know boilers, ducted heatpumps, furnaces, packaged units, ductless, etc.
I recently got a Mr. Cool DIY minisplit at Costco for $1600. I called an independent electrician to run the wiring for $200 and he helped me install the thing for another $200. So I got a fully installed minisplit for $2k and it works great.
Rates for my northeast town increased by ~25% in 2024 and are going up by another ~10% this year. It's a hard sell to spend a large amount of up-front money (even after rebates, which decreased this year) to convert to a system that will cost you more than you pay today, and may not work as well in cold weather (every heat pump company I talked to suggested keeping my existing gas heating in place and automatically switching to it when it gets cold enough).
I was also told that the electrical grid in my area is having difficulty keeping up with the push towards heat pumps, which increase load exactly on the coldest nights of the year, when you need heating most.
>Rates for my northeast town increased by ~25% in 2024 and are going up by another ~10% this year.
Don't forget that those costs are going up in large part because heat pump subsidies are being rolled into electricity prices.
Imagine being a ~$100k HHI household and paying $300+/mo for electricity so that $200+k HHI doctor/lawyer/HN households can have subsidized heat pumps and our sleazy contractors, and the dealers, and everyone else upstream) can over-charge us for the privilege (thereby getting their cut of the subsidy).
It's a miracle we haven't all caught hot lead yet.
Costs are a big thing, sure, but for me it's electrical reliability. For better or worse our heating oil and natural gas supply are both more reliable than our electricity supply. I don't need the heat going out in the dead of winter when some wind storm drops a bunch of branches on power lines.
I'm aware that both my boiler and a natural gas furnace have electric blower motors. It's a lot easier to power them from a generator than it is to have a generator than can power a house worth of heat pumps.
You can have both, though. A person doesn't have to make a binary decision of heatpump OR natural gas.
Please remember that traditional aircon is also literally a heat pump. It's perfectly acceptable to have a ducted heat pump and a ducted natural gas furnace both sharing the same ductwork.
In this use, the heat pump and the furnace are just installed series with eachother, with one singular blower motor that is used for both roles. This arrangement is very similar (identical, really) to the layout that combined (heat+aircon) systems have used for many decades.
Power out, or simply very cold outside? Your house still has a natural gas furnace (which can be made work with a fairly small generator), and your rig doesn't require expensive-to-use heat strips for the coldest days either.
I have a house where the first floor is served by a gas/ac combo unit, and the second floor with a heat pump.
I literally see no advantage to the heat pump and wish I didn't have it. It takes forever to heat and cool, comparitively, and likes to ice over when it gets too cold in the winter while running 24/7 doing nothing. The emergency heat eventually kicks in and fixes it, so I'm considering just running emergency heat all winter.
The fact that your heat pump setup is also taking longer to cool suggests there's something fundamentally different between the setup on your different floors, not that there is something bad with heat pumps in general.
A heat pump in cooling mode works exactly like an AC unit, because that's exactly what it is. So if your AC unit on the first floor cools more quickly than you AC unit (i.e. heat pump) on your second floor, it's because A) your floors are different sizes or insulated differently or something else is different about their construction, B) your units are sized differently, or C) your heat pump has some mechanical problem. But the fact that it's a heat pump should make no difference to its cooling performance.
When it’s running in reverse then it’s acting as an air conditioner blowing cold air into the house. So usually the heat strips are used then to reheat the air and prevent it from blowing cold air in the middle of winter. Not strictly necessary but most people demand it.
the aux heat comes in because their output is a multiplier. At 30F, perhaps they produce 4x the heat as the electricity put in. At 0F, perhaps they produce 1.8x the heat. This means the output declines with temperature, until eventually they don't produce enough heat to hold temperature. Enter aux heat.
Cold weather heat pumps help because they stay above 1x for longer, but you also wind up needing to oversize a bit.
Heat pumps are just air conditioners in reverse. They use the same amount of electricity whether heating or cooling. While many people have air conditioners, and grids seem to be able to handle them in the summer, an assertion that the grid can’t handle them in the winter is doubtful. Plus there are fewer people using them in the winter (just because fewer are installed). Most people in the NE heat with oil, gas, or wood, so that would reduce the electric load (compared to summer) even further.
There would be an increase only if people were supplementing the heat pump with electric heat, which to be fair is a possibility.
There’s a lot of misinformation about heat pumps, especially by HVAC people who don’t have a lot of experience with them, so they tend to recommend what they’re more familiar with.
But yes, understanding the electricity cost is essential when considering one.
I would be curious to know the difference. In summer you might find 30c outside and inside 20c so a difference of 10c. In winter it can reach -30c and inside is 20c. This is 5x more!
> They use the same amount of electricity whether heating or cooling
This is completely wrong. The amount of power depends on the temperature delta. When cooling, you are typically not cooling your home to 30 degrees Celsius below the outdoor temperature. However, when heating, you are typically heating your home to around 20 degrees above outdoor temperature. Heating consumes more power than cooling.
It is approximately correct as long as the temperature deltas are approximately the same for heating vs cooling.
(And as long as we're dispelling generalizations: Those deltas do vary wildly based on local climate, such that they're impossible to generalize and typify.
For instance: The city of Saint Paul, Minnesota [USA] has a very different climate compared to the city of São Paulo in Brazil, with accordingly-different heating/cooling deltas.
A heat pump just makes no sense whatsoever for me in my northeast town. The electric bill alone would outpace the old propane bill, not to mention installation.
And it won't even work during some of the coldest winter weeks when you _really_ need it to work.
Maybe I would consider it if I was in, like, Nevada or somewhere.
The notion that heat pumps don’t work at low temperatures hasn’t been true for years. I think you may be surprised to find that just about any heat pump you look at has good efficiency down to very low temperatures.
That’s true, but still doesn’t always make heat pumps the most cost effective choice to operate. For example, last winter I paid an average of $0.24/kWh for electricity vs $0.05/kWh for natural gas. Even if a heat pump had a perfect 4.0 COP all winter, gas would be ~15% cheaper. Electricity prices really need to come down before it will be viable for everyone.
Does your 0.05/kWh include the distribution costs? The thing to do once you go to heating with gas is to just switch completely to electricity and turn off gas. In my experience (admittedly not in the US, but several other countries) distribution cost often more than double the $/kWh for natural gas (especially if you only heat part of the year).
Not to mention, lots of places have time of use electricity pricing which makes it even worse. This is the problem with running my heatpump when its cold, some of the coldest times (right before dawn) coincide with peak time-of-use prices
This varies quite a bit based on location for instance here in Florida natural gas is $0.13/kWh while electricity is about $0.12/kWh, also where I live there is no piped NG so it would be propane delivered to a storage tank which is even more expensive.
Also the winters are mild here so basically everyone has either a heat pump or the further south you go it's just heat strips because heat is rarely used so not worth the cost.
So any kind of blanket statement about heat pumps vs gas heat would be folly, but due to improvements in cold weather heat pumps and solar power are allowing them to make much more sense in more places.
There are many advantages to decoupling fuel combustion from its energy use, burning NG at a power plant relatively efficiently with much better emission controls, then distributing on electric grid for use more than just heating, while allowing the home to heat from many different energy sources and allow for grid down backup as well.
I’ve tried. For it to be at all viable on my property, I’d need to cut down a bunch of trees. I’d rather keep the trees and pay someone else with solar panels.
ASHRAE—an HVAC organization—has data on the coldest and hottest days for areas so that you can design things for the coldest or hottest 1% of the year (4 hottest/coldest days):
I think that if you have an older, leaky/ier, less-insulated house you may need to 'brute force' heating your (probably older) domicile. But if you have a <4 ACH@50 air tightness, and reasonable insulation levels, a good portion of the US population could make do with a heat pump.
Mitsubishi publishes data were they have 100% heating capacity at -15C, which some models being 100% at -20C and -23C:
It is warmer than -16C/3F at Chicago (O'Hare) for 99% of the time (i.e., except for 4 days a year), and warmer than -18.7C/-2F for 99.6% of the time (2 days).
ASHRAE are the folks that publish the heating/cooling standards that are used in building codes for estimate heating/cooling equipment capacities (Manual J) and selecting the right equipment (Manual S).
Here's a PDF with a lot of locations in the US and CA (and other countries further down), and if you look under the "Heating DB" column, you'll find very few US locations that have -30F under the 99% (or even 99.6%) sub-columns:
So unless you're in AK, MN, or ND, long runs of temperatures colder than -20F/-30C don't happen too often. Of course if you have a leaky house with little insulation, you're throwing money out the window/door, so the first consideration for a good ROI is better air sealing and insulation.
I think the comment was saying below 30F and below 10F. Much warmer than you're saying.
Also..
> It is warmer than -16C/3F at Chicago (O'Hare) for 99% of the time (i.e., except for 4 days a year), and warmer than -18.7C/-2F for 99.6% of the time (2 days).
If my heat doesn't work for those days, I'm kind of boned. Four days per year without a working heat pump? That's a mess.
So gas hash higher reliability and is cheap for the times you need heat the most, whereas heat pumps might not work and are not cheap at the times you need them the most?
I’ve had a gas furnace keep me and the water heated multiple times in a cold weather power outage.
That's one of the older style units. Starting in 2007 when Mitsubishi introduced their "Hyper-Heating Inverter" heat pumps, and continuing with Fujitsu and Daikin following with similar technology in the 2010-12 timeframe, and others a few years later, heat pumps got way better in the cold.
Mitsubishi's maintain 200%+ efficiency down to -4℉ (-20℃) and 150% down to -22℉ (-30℃) [1]. Only a few towns in the continental US get below that, and even those aren't going to get cold enough long enough to make it worth it an an all electric home to switch to your emergency electrical resistance heating.
Their capacity doesn't start dropping until you get down to 23℉ (-5℃), dropping to 76% at -13℉ (-25℃).
I've got one about 8 years old, and it does just fine down to 0°F (it hasn't gotten colder than that here). It doesn't even have any kind of auxiliary heat.
It's fine. The only difference when it's super-cold is that the air coming out of it isn't as warm, so the heating cycle stays on for a longer proportion of the time. But it keeps it 70°F inside no problem at all.
Though it’s worth noting that that first 2 ton rated unit is putting out 0.5 tons (6k BTU/hr) at that temp and rating.
That’s not going to be particularly helpful for a structure that needed 24k BTU/hr during warmer temps, meaning the owner of the unit is likely mixing in a lot of 1.0 BTUs to meet the heat loss at -13°F.
> Though it’s worth noting that that first 2 ton rated unit is putting out 0.5 tons (6k BTU/hr) at that temp and rating.
I just did a quick search for "all" units and sorted the result list/table by COP@5F. If one was actually shopping/designing a solution then a more nuanced search criteria would be used.
Further, you'd probably want to do a (US ACCA) Manual J calculation to first determine how much energy is needed (j = joules)
I don't know what sort of heat pump systems are common in the US, but Sweden (and AFAIK Norway and Finland as well), are probably >%80 heat pump for single family homes (most apartments are community heating at least in the larger cities). So it's absolutely now problem to run a heat pump even if it is very cold outside, but if you want to improve efficiency in areas that are super cold you can drill into the ground for a heat sink (those are called Bergvärme in Sweden).
Regarding cost, in most of the countries I've lived in a large fraction of the cost in the gas bill was the distribution cost. So once you switch to a heat pump, you also switch to electric cooking and even if heating with electricity would be significantly more expensive you would still win. Is that different in the US?
It varies significantly by locale. I've seen people post online about how it made little sense to keep just one gas appliance because of significant savings. I'm in Iowa, which typically heats on natural gas in urban areas. I have a natural gas central furnace and water heater. My clothes dryer is electric, and I have a 3 head heat pump which I use for comfort in a couple rooms. The house is an early 2000's standard builder-grade home.
For September, $12.31 of my $27.01 gas bill was variable based on my consumption.
In December, $84.82 out of my $99.65 total was consumption driven.
I've run numbers on whether it'd make financial sense to go electric for heating, and the break even point is in the 30-40 degree vicinity. With temperatures 20 and under a healthy chunk of the year, unfortunately the added expense doesn't make financial sense.
We had a heat pump installed last year. It’s advertised as a cold-climate heat pump and it’s “good enough” for us, but it’ll never again be toasty on a cold night, just relatively warm. When under heavy load, it also has some kind of loud vibration issue, I think in the lines that run from inside out to the condenser. The system is an Ecoer, which is a Chinese company that pretends to be a U.S. company. And it has a really suspicious 4G cellular IoT modem that, of course, feeds all the data to their cloud, with no end-user access.
I will say, it keeps the temperature very stable, which is nice. And it saves money, paying for itself within 10 years. But there’s actually quite a bit that can go wrong during installation and it’s not easy to get them to fix everything, maybe because U.S. installers aren’t used to all of the nuances of heat pumps yet. Our aux heat strips still aren’t working properly, after multiple service visits.
If I could do it over again, I would still get a heat pump. But I would go with a Mitsubishi system and a more experienced installer. The extra cost is worth it.
Everybody seems to agree that installation costs way too much.
There's a few parts to this. Everything has to be carefully sized - power, pipe sizes, unit locations. You need to put a house's thermal profile (how much heat loss, how much air leak, how much thermal mass) along with the regional thermal profile into an engineering calculation which computes what you need.
Thermographic inspections are a thing.[1] Usual price is around $400. They're not very standardized. You get IR images of a house, which is good for finding leaks but not quantitative enough to size a heating and cooling plant.
This would be a great drone application. Fly over and around the house. Build a 3D model of the house and paint heat loss on top of it. Crunch on data to get the engineering info needed to correctly size HVAC. Also discover big heat leak points. Turn this from experienced guessing into measurement.
Then submit that data sheet to multiple sites that offer heat pumps.
I would argue that accurate sizing is not that important as labor constitutes the bulk of the cost. My total bill was about $20K and going for 30% less capacity would net about $19K so its easier just to go for the maximum. Calling in an IR imaging drone would certainly cost more than the potential savings from accurate sizing.
Unlike gas furnaces which basically can only do ON or OFF, heat pumps can regulate the heat with much higher granularity.
What certainly calls for innovation is managing the labor costs. In my case installation involved way too many people and way too many visits.
For commercial applications, modular/off-site builds are a way to reduce labor costs. Yet, homes design are so fragmented that it's hard to build something plug-n-play.
Isn’t it important to right-size non-heat-pump installs anyway? Too large a system causes short cycling, humidity problems, temperature swings. I have read installers habitually guesstimate over size to over charge (rather than do the proper calculations).
The reality is that this is all solving a problem that people don’t have.
Forced air is a terrible way to heat a building yet thats how most homes are heated, and it is good enough for most people.
If you perfectly size a furnace for the coldest days of the year, it is now oversized for the other 90% of days.
The cheapest way is to install a multi stage heating/cooling system that works on first stage most of the time, and second when it needs to, like having 2 small furnaces. This passes the ‘good enough’ test for the vast majority of homeowners.
They oversize because customers who have an oversized system generally don’t complain but customers who have an undersized system definitely will complain when it can’t get to and hold their desired temperature.
This wouldn't work, unfortunately. A lot of insulation has a reflective layer yielding invalid readings from thermal imaging.
There are several other factors like air tightness which requires a blower door to measure and even the number of elbows in the duct system could have an effect. It's a surprisingly complex field. You wouldn't gain anything over a traditional home energy auditor.
The real opportunity is to scrap everything and rethink the system from scratch.
>There's a few parts to this. Everything has to be carefully sized - power, pipe sizes, unit locations.
No. Not even in the slightest. A two bit could make conservative guesses or work off a conservatively spec'd sizing table and then deal with the resulting excess capacity with controls/distribution.
Whether it's a sewer line or a hvac system or retaining wall it's the same stupid situation. The only reason that we do calculated minimum-ish sizing for all this stuff is because if you're being screwed by law into paying to make work for a credentialed professional you might as well make them save you money on the rest of it so that you're only getting screwed out of $0.95 on the dollar instead of $1 on the dollar instead.
You're better off guesstimating yourself than trusting contractors. The contractors are incentivized to severely oversize any AC units they install or else people leave bad reviews on their pages/listings when the installed unit can't keep up the one day every two years that the temperature gets abnormally hot.
I did this myself and insisted on a unit half the capacity that the contractors wanted. Several flat-out refused. But it works perfectly! Approximately one day ever two years it can't keep up. Which means that all the other time it doesn't short-cycle. Perfect.
I had to replace my home HVAC system this year and went with a variable speed system. It was eye-wateringly expensive, but it works much much much better than the system that was in here before, and completely obviated my concerns about sizing (the old system was an oversized single-stage unit, and the house always stayed cooled, but something or other was regularly breaking, probably due to the short-cycling).
With the new system, electricity consumption on a hot summer day is about a third of the prior system, it’s virtually silent and the comfort of the house (due to more granular temperature control and near-constant dehumidification) is substantially better.
People are reluctant to install them because they don't work as well as the good old boilers we'd be replacing. I'm not saying they can't, and I'm not saying that there are zero models out there that work. But in practice, a lot of us that have interacted with heat pumps have the specific experience that they get anemic as the temperature goes down and eventually become unable to do much of anything.
I live in the mid-Atlantic (US) climate zone, where it's certainly not as cold as the north but definitely goes well below freezing regularly for several months of the year. The place I've lived for 15 years had a heat pump and a (oil) boiler with radiators, and when it was below 40°F (~5°C) I had to switch to the radiators. It's because it's old, everybody told me, modern heat pumps are better! So last year when both systems needed repairs at the same time, I not-entirely-willingly switched to a brand-new 2024-model heat pump. It absolutely could not keep up when the temperature was freezing until they came back and installed resistive heat strips for low temperature---these seem to be a fancy version of the heating elements in a space heater or a toaster. They do not seem to be particularly efficient. And to the extent that my "heat pump system" does now more or less keep the house adequately warm, if not as comfortable as the radiators always could, it's not solely due to the heat pump, but the other stuff they had to put in because the heat pump couldn't keep up.
My experience is far from unique. Maybe it's that they only install the good ones in farther-north locations! Maybe it's that the good ones are just way more expensive! I'm perfectly prepared to believe the factual statements about the physics and the tech. But if we're talking about perception and "why aren't more people looking to install heat pumps", it's because lots of people have experiences like the above, and that is what the industry needs to work on.
This is such a weird tale to hear. I heat my 2 story 147m2 house in Sweden with a single heat pump and it's downright cosy down to -10C. I have noticed that my office, which is located at the furthest possible place from the heatpump, tends to get a bit chilly when outdoors temperatures fall below -10°c. usually a blanket is enough to keep me toasty, but on the rare occasion that it gets real cold (below about -15°c), I have a fireplace to save the day. That fireplace actually gets used more for the cozyness of a fire than it does for actual need of heating, but it does help on the worst days of Scandinavian winter.
All this to say: if your pump can't handle +5°c, I wonder if you got scammed or if there are other factors at play? Is your house insulated at all? Do you keep your windows open throughout winter? Your experience is so different from mine it's hard to believe we're even talking about the same technology!
It's the insulation. While it depends on the location and geography, I'd wager that American homes are probably less well insulated than Swedish homes because they didn't have to be.
That contrasts quite a bit with Swedish home standards, which have long been built more air-tight and with considerably better insulated even if they're of comparable age. This has been true for decades, became even more stark in the 1980s, and likely remains very different on the balance: https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings/1984/data/papers/SS8...
Responding to this and more generally to everyone mentioning insulation: I'm not saying that insulation is irrelevant, but when I say it fades out at low temps, I mean that if I put my hand over the forced-air duct it feels at best maybe a tiny bit warmer than the ambient air. (Which together with the forced-air circulation makes the room feel even colder, even if the temp is technically going up, but that's more a complaint about forced air, not heat pumps.) Insulation problems would mean I'm running it more and I'm paying more to heat the place than I might with better insulation. But insulation problems aren't what's causing the emitted air to feel cold.
Also, as noted, I'm sure part of it is that they gave me a heat pump that's rated to 5°C or whatever instead of -15. Probably because they expect that everyone around here has a backup heating system, and it doesn't get Sweden-cold (or Chicago-cold, for that matter) in this area. Cool cool, but that just reinforces the message that heat pumps can't hack it and if you're buying a heat pump system you really need to also buy a second system—which may not be entirely true but there's other people on this very thread with a kind of dismissive "everyone knows" attitude regarding backup heating that fundamentally undermines the original message (which was my whole point).
It depends primarily on your electricity and methane prices. In Ontario, Canada, electricity is cheap enough that heat pumps are cheaper than methane on all but the very coldest days, even if your home insulation is older than 1980 standards.
> The place I've lived for 15 years had a heat pump and a (oil) boiler with radiators, and when it was below 40°F (~5°C) I had to switch to the radiators.
When was the heat pump manufactured? Mitsubishi, for one, publishes data were they have 100% heating capacity at -15C, which some models being 100% at -20C and -23C:
OEMs can optionally have publish data on "Lowest Cataloged Temperature" if it's below 5F/-15C.
Also: how (air) leaky is your house? how much insulation? For a lot of folks dealing with those two things would be more cost effective than anything.
As it stands, even if you are heating with "cheap" methane (née 'natural') gas, propane, or oil, you're throwing money out the window by letting the heat out in winter. (And the heat in / cold out in the summer.)
I have to agree. I've spent about 2/3s my life in houses with heat pumps and the last 5 years with a gas furnace (the rest being wood heat as a child). Mostly in Western NC and Eastern TN near the mountains, so chilly but not extreme cold.
Heat pumps work, but they aren't nearly as _pleasant_. You can write essays about the efficiency of heat pumps, how lukewarm air works just fine to warm the house, how heat pumps are great _most of the time_ and you can supplement with space heaters or whatever when they fall short... But as long as furnaces are accessible and affordable, an awful lot of people are going to choose to have nice warm heat that is always going to be nice and warm regardless of the outside temperature.
I have never had a heat pump, so I wasn't aware of this shortcoming. Could you please explain a bit more how different it is with heat pump compared to furnace?
The heat pump will always produce air that is warmer than the temp in the house, but as the temp outside drops the temp of the air coming out of the vents also drops. So on a very cold day when the house temp is say 70F, the system might only be putting out air that's 75-80F. The air coming out of the vents doesn't really _feel_ warm and it may take an hour or two to raise the temperature in the house when you wake up or get home in the evening.
In my experience at least with relatively modern heat pumps (roughly 2000 and newer) it doesn't matter that much when outside temps are above freezing. But it quickly starts to become noticeable as temps drop into the 20s.
I see. Thanks for the explanation. So the system is slow to come up to the set temperature. Is it good at keeping the temperature though? After the house temp gets to 70, does it consistently stay at 70, or are there shortcomings in this aspect too?
Resistive heat strips are what all electric furnaces use. It's just a bunch of coils of nichrome heating wire. The efficiency of a resistive heater is basically 100%. One Watt of electricity in gives you one watt of heat out.
The mistake people make is assuming a heat pump can do everything by itself anywhere in any climate. If you have cold winters, you need a dedicated furnace to supplement the heat pump.
I say supplement because while an electric furnace is near 100% efficient at turning electricity into heat, a heat pump can be far more than 100% efficient. And that's the crucial detail: a heat pump can give you more heat per Watt than a resistive heater when outside temperatures are warm enough.
Im in NY, 6 heads across 3 floors with 2 heads per outdoor unit. 2500sf covered.
Mitsubishi h2i (i think im on my phone). Get plenty warm in the winter as my sole heat source. I could have gotten smaller outdoor units and had resistive backup but I didn’t want that.
Yes this is actually the worst – when open minded people get a heat pump for "the right reasons" and then have buyer's remorse. Completely backfires the transition. Do you have a ducted or ductless heat pump? Sounds like ducted, and if so that might be part of it too. The air cools down in the ductwork and if that's not accounted for - i.e. you reuse ductwork that was meant for a furnace – you run into issues like this. And you also need a cold climate heat pump.
(disclosure/transparency I'm the founder of Quilt, a ductless heat pump manufacturer)
Hi Paul - I'm a big fan of Quilt from Vancouver Island.
It seems to me that you're helping to close the loop on some of the quality concerns that the parent commenter has. Inappropriate sizing/installation and poor product selection seem like common issues from HVAC installers that aren't particularly well versed on heat pumps.
Wishing you continued success, and that hopefully it'll be available in Canada at some point! And also I remember you from the Scala meetup in Vancouver :)
We account for duct losses at Electric Air when sizing. It’s baked into industry standard Manual J sizing calculators and other methods. ManJ isn’t perfect find for this purpose.
In this case, contractor should have advised the heat pump would not keep up and recommended a different solution.
When we had our ducted heat pump installed, we also had the ducts in the attic covered with extra insulation, as well as spray foam at the top of the foundation to seal that completely. This all really helped.
That they came back and added resistive heating suggests your contractor may not have been too worried about sizing the system correctly in the first place.
The radiators might make you feel warmer despite not actually making the air in the room warmer: the black body radiation from the big warm radiators affects your perception of warmth in a not insignificant way.
Basically the idea behind infrared (and far infrared) heaters. I'm really curious about them, but there's no good way to trial them without buying and installing.
I have a gas furnace and infrared heating panels (glassheat). The panels make you feel warm when you're standing in their path but they are no where near as comfortable as furnace heated air.
I just wrote a big thread yesterday responding to someone with similar concerns to yours (https://bsky.app/profile/shreyassudhakar.com/post/3m3w3nra2h...). Copying it here if it's helpful to other folks. FWIW, the challenges you are facing seem to be grounded in bad design and application, which happens more than it should and really sucks. We need to move the bar much higher for the contractors installing heat pumps. Here's what I wrote on that thread:
This is why contractor & homeowner education are so so so important to get this energy transition right! I always hate to see reviews like this from folks that have installed a heat pump.
It’s almost always a combo of poorly communicated expectations & installer issues.
A few thoughts…
1) “Air doesn’t come out hot” is a common complaint. It’s by design! You don’t need scalding hot air to have a comfortable space. If you’re targeting a 70 degree setpoint, even 80 degree air will get you there eventually. Heat pumps work best when you let them run - they soak the space with heat.
Your furniture, walls, floors all equalize in temp and radiate heat. A totally different form of comfort than standing in front of a vent that blows hot air at you for 5 minutes and then shuts off!
2) AC doesn’t reduce humidity as well. Unfortunately, this is a classic problem with oversized heat pumps. The key to dehumidification is runtime. A well sized system will run for longer, which will pull the humidity out of the space. If the system is too big, it’ll cycle on and off & not dehumidify.
Your contractor should be do load sizing calculations to determine the size of your heat pump, not using rules of thumb or matching the size of the existing equipment! The very best contractors use performance based load calcs, where they look at your past energy bills to size your new system.
3) Supplemental heat runs a lot - this SUCKS. Electric resistance heat is really expensive to run. It really should be something that comes on for emergencies, if ever. Definitely not regularly.
Many contractors set the temperature where the supplemental heat kicks on way too high. You could be running the heat pump (which is way more efficient) to a much lower temperature, but it’ll switch to expensive aux heat instead. Fortunately, the fix to this is simple - just a thermostat setting.
In other cases, they’ll install a cheaper mild climate heat pump in a truly cold climate. This might save money up front, but it’ll kill you in operating costs when you’re paying 4x as much as you could be in the middle of winter to heat your home. The lowest bid could cost you in the long run!
PS - this homeowner later chimed in that swapping the thermostat helped reduce their electricity bill roughly $30/month! A lot of heat pump issues actually boil down to a poorly configured system. Choosing the right contractor is probably the single most important decision you'll make when you get a heat pump installed.
> 2) AC doesn’t reduce humidity as well. Unfortunately, this is a classic problem with oversized heat pumps. The key to dehumidification is runtime. A well sized system will run for longer, which will pull the humidity out of the space. If the system is too big, it’ll cycle on and off & not dehumidify.
What if I want more humidity?
(The traditional way with a furnace would be with a bypass humidifier, where ultimately, the energy to vaporize the water comes from whatever the heat source of the furnace is.)
This. I had 12 contractors come out for an estimate. I insisted to each that I would only consider estimates accompanied by a Manual J (aka show your work). I got 4 estimates with a manual J, and one of them the vendor said ‘despite that the math says you need a 4 ton outdoor unit, I’m giving you two,’ and refused to budge on that.
I went with a vendor who did the math and sized accordingly and my system works great - great comfort year round and very low energy usage.
If we’re trying to bring down cost the this is the issue with so many contractors coming out. The cost of sales is about 10-15% of the installation in the US. So thats $2-3k in California per heat pump
Try to get an install for $600 like in Japan when you have to pay $2k to find the customer.
Let’s have a lower cost sales process. Review 12 companies online, pick top 3, ask them to come out.
Yeah in case it wasn’t clear - I wasn’t asking a million vendors to price the job, I was asking them to do a manual J so they could price the job. It took 12 to get 4 to do the manual J. The other 8 came on-site and then refused to do the calcs even though I told them before coming out that it was a prerequisite for me to consider their quote.
I got a variety of explanations for why they weren’t going to do it, most of them along the lines of ‘I’ve been doing this forever - I know what I’m doing,’ but a few disappointingly ‘I don’t know what a manual J is.’ Again, this was AFTER my telling them over the phone that I wouldn’t consider a quote that wasn’t based on the calcs.
I've had a similarly frustrating experience trying to get contractors to redo my gutters.
They seem fine with the gutter part, but once I explain my rain collection system and my requirements around specific downspout sizing and simultaneous overflow, they just seem to have no interest in doing the bit of work required to make it all fit together.
Yep, the cost is in the trip is a big factor but sounds like it was their choice to try to sell you. You did the right thing by asking them do the calcs before they came out. Millions of questions are time consuming and costly but better than someone rushing into and pausing mid project with in-decision.
We (I'm cofounder of Electric Air, HVAC contract) have had people pause on day one of install, and that ends up costing the company $10-20K due to delays. Mostly because there isn't something for the team to do for that day or two while we scramble to line up the next customer.
Wild that you put it on the customer to reduce the sales cost.
I can see it being reasonable to explain during the initial contact that you want the standardized estimate, once that happens it's not really on the customer if the contractor goes out to chase the business even if they know they aren't going to do it.
You are right! I was unfair. The customer was clear they wanted ManJ calcs.
It's not the customer's problem to reduce cost. The high cost is the customer's problem through even if they are not to blame. And given I have a first hand experience in the cost stack of HVAC company, I would happy to share how a HVAC contractor thinks.
Heat pumps can make the room 90 degrees if I want. But the point is that you can make the room 72 degrees with 80 degree air running constantly rather than 20 minutes of 100 degree air per hour.
I'm in Northwest Montana. My ground source heat pump doesn't struggle until the highs outside are -20F (actual, not wind-chill). I have the backup heat strip, but the breaker is off. I don't know when it would turn on, I just wanted to know it wouldn't without me knowing it.
Ground source is often the only choice here. While air source can technically work well down to these temperatures, much of the available equipment doesn't suit some homes.
Ground source is largely going to maintain capacity independent of the outside temps, so the resistive would turn on when the heat pump isn't keeping up with the heat loss.
I'm in Canada at a similar latitude with ground source, resistance heating normally kicks in at about -25C (-13F) or so, just a few hours on the coldest nights, doesn't cost much. I could probably leave the breaker off too, I wouldn't mind it a degree or two colder.
Mitsubishi sells heat pumps that produce 14kw of heat output all the way down to 5f at a COP of 2.3.
Resistive heat has a COP of 1, by definition.
Do you know the size of your oil burner? It's likely over 20kw output.
It's not that pumping heat cannot work sufficiently at cold temperatures, it's that you are expecting the electric car rated 100 horsepower to go as fast as the gas car rated at 300 horsepower.
An oil burner sized to the same output as the heat pump also would not keep up.
If you installed two of those Mitsubishi heat pumps (which would require two independent 240v circuits), you would be at 28kw output and would not need resistive heat strips. These units also claim 75% rated capacity at -13f so that would be about 21kw of heat output even when very very cold.
If your resistive heat strips activate at any point other than extreme weather events or emergencies, your "system" is not sized properly. They are a massive waste of power and money.
A big part of the problem is that the contractors who are essentially the point of sale for these systems are just obscenely dumb about them. They will sell you utterly undersized units or sell units that aren't rated for cold, as well as just install things so poorly that they drain condensate into your walls and cause mold issues. They had similar problems with Oil burners, but at least those they tended to upsell bigger systems so their ignorance didn't matter. They seem very bad at doing the planning or design required to actually spec out a system, so you have to be your own engineer.
>and that is what the industry needs to work on.
I don't know how the industry is supposed to force contractors to read their very very clear documentation, or follow the very clear instructions (of boiler manufacturers no less) of "You must measure heat load to accurately size a heat appliance".
The strength of your heat pump shouldn't be outside surface temperature, but underground aquifer temperature. Those two temperatures are related but not as directly as they seem. A good aquifer in certain cavernous regions of the US might stay about 55 degF year round, regardless of outside surface temperature. 55 degF is still below what a lot of people want their home to be year round so a heat pump still has to supplement heat somehow in winters (or radiators or what have you), but a "free" boost to 55 degF is still a better starting place than 20 or 40 degF outside temperature.
I don't think latitude is a factor in how efficient a heat pump you can find, I think the type geography under you feet is (probably where "interior" regions probably have more luck than coastal regions), combined with how well regulated or unregulated your area's aquifer generally is (things like nearby wells and industrial water dumping will effect aquifer levels and temperatures). (Maybe not enough heat pump proponents realize that you only have good, cheap heat pumps if you have a powerful EPA and other Water protection groups fighting the good fight in your region.)
30K would be on the higher end for air source. My install this year was 25k CDN including a lot of duct work.
40K is also on the low end for geothermal. I'm guessing you were able to trench instead of drill?
If you can afford ground source it's by far the best option in cold climates. Steady ground heat means you get the same efficiency all year round. The install can be eye-watering though.
Yes horizontal loop, 200 metre trench ~2m deep with 6 pipes at the bottom. Took 3 days for a 20 ton excavator to dig and fill in the trench. Maybe I got lucky with the installer but it wasn't eyewatering. Vertical loops do cost a lot more. Repairing the lawn with turf or professional landscaping would have cost more than the install, so I did it myself with a tractor, some spare topsoil, and a few bags of Costco grass seed.
We live in a temperate climate and installed a heat pump / mini-split system to replace our central AC and furnace and get rid of all the ductwork.
It's awesome in many respects and I don't regret it, but it's also MUCH more expensive in the winter vs our gas furnace. Electricity is just so much more expensive than the gas equivalent for heating. Overall this is costing us a lot more money per year.
But the upside is that it maintains the temperature in each room much more effectively, and it's a LOT quieter, both inside from the air handlers and outside from the ... loud outside fan thing (compressor?).
Right as COVID lockdowns were starting in early 2020, our gas furnace reached the state of nearly broken and would have been unfixable if it finally broke. We called local HVAC for a quote and they convinced that instead of simply replacing the furnace, we should get full-house air conditioning with electric heat pump with gas furnace backup. We agreed and what was amazing was that they wanted to install it the NEXT DAY. Unprecedented speed. This was because it was COVID and everyone was stopping construction projects etc. Their technicians were ready to go and needed all the work. Next day wasn't good so we installed it the next next day. 4 burly guys, all masked and gloved, did it all in just a few hours. Our friends trying to do the same couple of years ago had to wait months for installation. We've been enjoying AC since then, a lot.
I think it cost about $13k for heat pump and furnace and labor, maybe a bit more with tax, and I got ~1.7k rebate/refund of some sorts? Or 1.3k? I don't fully recall why but it must have been government sponsored.
My ongoing energy costs are about the same, but the mix completely switched from gas to electricity. I cook with gas so there is just a bit every month, but virtually no heating with it, the gas hardly ever starts except in the height of winter. If I only had solar to feed it with sun, but the house location with shade, hill and trees isn't suited for it. Instead I pay a little extra to energy company to presumably source my electricity from solar. Works.
i bought a mitsubishi minisplit, as well as a lineset, and installation tools (vaccuum pump, valve core removal tool, flaring tool, micron guage, nitrogen, pressure regulator, manifold) and installed it myself after watching several hours of ac service tech youtube videos. it was a little stressful but i saved 8,000 usd and i honestly feel pride every time i turn it on. its worked absolutely flawlessly. i recommend this route if you have the time!
One thing I haven't been able to figure - I have a flat in Spain with a combined aircon heat system costing ~$3k which functions from the physics point of view as a heat pump but was not marketed as a "heat pump" which I think are supposed to be more expensive. Is there any difference between heat/cool aircon and heat pumps?
A heat pump is a reversable air conditioner so every heat / cool air conditioner is a heat pump regardless of name. Interesting that they cost more over yonder though if you use the name. We can get a heat pump here in the US for about 700$.
I installed one in the basement 2 years ago and it has been a gamechanger.
I live in a community in the Pacific Northwest that was built in 2018 and (almost) every home (22/23) has (Carrier) heat pumps; for some unknown reason, the other has heated floors.
Many of us are proponents of heat pumps thanks to reduced costs and emissions *but* we've not had a generally good experience possibly (!) as a result of bad installation and definitely due to limited numbers of indoor heads (if I close my main bedroom door, the rest of my upper floor has no heating/cooling).
There's always someone in the community frustrated that their house is too cold/hot, that the condensation drains are blocked and water is running down an interior wall, that an indoor head or the condenser is having problems, or that there's unexplained coolant leak.
People moving into the community are inheriting issues with at least 2 homes having to augment/replace the system. To save breaking into the walls, this often necessitates putting the power, coolant and drainage lines on the outside of the house and then boxing the result.
We're saving money on monthly bills (probably; we don't have a comp) but many of us have spent quite some $$$ on maintenance and replacement equipment.
I've spent 1.5 years in a brand-new building with Mitsubishi heat pumps. It had some initial trouble with a faulty electronic component, but afterwards it worked quite fine, needing little if any attention.
The real question is what the total cost of ownership and what is the payback period? Also there are regional climate differences that have to deal with very large temperature swings as well as very old poorly insulated houses. investing hundreds of thousands to re-insulate one's house, replace all the windows, excavate the heat sink and dispose of a furnace that is already working, so that one can buy a heat pump at greater costs than a furnace to achieve efficiency improvements that barely pay for themselves over thirty years when the same amount of money can be spent elsewhere. if it were such a great idea it would have already been done.
When I replaced my furnace a couple years back I asked for a heat pump - a previous house had it and it worked great. Turns out my contractor didn't ask the right questions and so mine only works to 25F - it still outputs heat below that, but not enough to keep my house warm and so I use the backup furnace a lot more than I want to.
A previous house the heat pump was sized to work to 14F. They make them that will work down to -25F, but since it gets to -30f where I live (about once every 10 years, but that is enough) we need a backup system so is probably isn't worth getting a system sized to as cold as possible.
Ground source heat pumps are a common option in rural areas - they cost a lot to install ($50k - and this is the cheapest version that needs a lot of land thus rural areas). They are likely to pay off if you live in the same house for 50 years, but the initial upfront costs are high (you do get a house worth $10k more than other heat option). Worth looking into if you are young and have reason to think you will live in the same house for 50 years.
It's really amazing how often I hear that same story: poor choices by the installer left the home owner in a bind with a poorly functioning system. The industry (certainly the residential side) really does need better educated installers/planners.
Even as a homeowner who's a bit of an energy geek, it's entirely too challenging to understand the entire space and what options fit one's needs. LLM's help a lot here (if you can trust them!), but it's a funny situation where there's silos of knowledge that are hard to connect.
I'm amazed at these prices, I replaced a propane tank + furnace with horizontal loop ground source for $40k Canadian (+ tax, but government rebate matched that). It's almost paid for itself in about 6 years, I gave more detailed numbers in another reply.
Your setup sounds great, but depending on location in Canada, gas can be much cheaper than propane. I just priced running a gas line for my BBQ, and I'd break even on a $500 install cost after about 40 20lb propane tank fills.
Maybe? Conservative (i.e. any number assumptions here are all biased against the space heaters) napkin math: My gas furnace uses something like to 300 kWh per day to keep the house 30 degrees (C) above the outdoor temp. If I only need the space heaters to supplement an extra 5 degrees, that's actually pretty close to 2000 continuous watts.
Most UK housing stock is poor quality, old and draughty. Pre-req of switching is fixing that. Then, when you've got a nice hermetically sealed house, you need to solve fresh air, which is another cost. Labour is extremely expensive in the UK and tradespeople are poor quality and swindlers (sorry, it's true 95% of the time).
And most people don't have £10k+ to drop on upgrades
We're not used to needing aircon, so the whole concept is a bit foreign
Electricity is expensive (0.31 EUR/kWh)
Plus, we've been burned by governments pushing "green" things:
- They scammed us with cavity wall insulation, which has caused some serious structural and expensive issues. It was inappropriate for many houses and a ton of conmen popped-up to take government money with no fucks given
- Diesel was sold as 'green'
- They had a scheme pushing loft insulation but the installers often just threw rolls of insulation into the loft and ran way (not even kidding)
Basically, multiple governments have created just about the /worst/ possible history and conditions to get people on board with heat pumps
I have a very small, draughty house and spend ~800 EUR a year on gas (heating + hot water + hob). Not ideal but I'm still running on the gas boiler that came with the house 10 years ago that's only had ~300 EUR of maintenance spent on it. The house gets hot, I can have boiling hot showers whenever I want. If anything goes, wrong, I can all any of 30 people to come fix it
They're not skeptical, it's just that no one wants to pay $10k to have a $2k unit installed, and new entrants who want to offer anything other than what the entrenched services have to offer have to be abused and hazed for 4 years near minimum wage changing out $5 capacitors for $1000 (to their company, not them) before they can get a trade license, and after that they have to go through an onerous contracting paperwork to open up a business. So we don't get new businesses popping up offering mini split installation.
End result is most of the units that get installed in the US are probably DIYing off-paper and then shutting the fuck up. I live in a place with no inspections for owner-builder and that was the only way I was able to get away with it, and even then I had to pass an EPA 608 license to handle the refrigerants since I did not want to get fined a bazillion dollars if someone found out.
> what it’s going to take, from the human side of the equation, to make heat pumps the obvious, accessible, and default choice for millions of American homes.
Well, this has already happened; living in a third-world American country, I've been heating my houses in winter with heat pumps every winter for many years (even though they iced up occasionally) and most air conditioners here are already heat pumps. Frio/calor, they're called.
But, installations strictly for heating are probably never going to happen en masse. In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45698730 I analyze the costs. It turns out that heat pumps cost around 39¢ per peak watt they save, while low-cost solar panels cost 6.5¢ per peak watt they produce, so it's almost always cheaper to install enough solar panels to heat your house resistively. And that gap is going to continue widening for the foreseeable future.
Our heat pump, a cheap-shit Electrolux mini split assembled in Tierra del Fuego, broke down last winter; somehow the refrigerant escaped. The repairman did a pressure test with nitrogen but couldn't find a link. He pre-emptively soldered shut a pipe that had been crimped shut at the factory, and pointed out that, probably, if we hadn't been using it as a heat pump, it would have been fine. Certainly it would have had many fewer hours of operation. We ended up spending about US$100 on the repair, which is the price of 1500 peak watts of solar panels. I think that brings us to about US$500 total spent on the thing—insignificant to people in the US, but a significant chunk of change in most of the rest of America.
Heat pumps are an energy-crisis-era efficiency measure to conserve energy. But energy is no longer scarce. After 50 years, the energy crisis is, if not ended, at least ending. If your house's solar panels are producing more energy than you can use or sell back to the grid at a decent price, the energy to run a resistive heater is free.
> But, installations strictly for heating are probably never going to happen en masse. In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45698730 I analyze the costs. It turns out that heat pumps cost around 39¢ per peak watt they save, while low-cost solar panels cost 6.5¢ per peak watt they produce, so it's almost always cheaper to install enough solar panels to heat your house resistively. And that gap is going to continue widening for the foreseeable future.
My counter-scenario: My utility provider wants ~$40k to upgrade my home service to 200 amp, so the up-front cost of electric resistive heat would include that.
Remember: The season that you need heat is the season with the least sunshine. Solar is only cheap as you claim due to net metering; without pairing it with batteries or some other form of storage, you're pushing your heating cost on others by flooding the grid with electricity when it isn't needed.
Now, I will gladly point out that I have a roof of solar panels, and benefit from subsidies: It's important to understand that solar currently is unsustainable economically and will only be sustainable with more R&D on storage.
No, I'm not talking about net metering, which has nothing to do with the cost per peak watt.
You're right that you do need energy storage, though. Even sensible-heat thermal energy storage is completely adequate for this purpose, and it's very cheap, on the order of US$2–3/kWh. See the sand-battery outline I wrote yesterday in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45690085. Electric night storage heaters are widely available off the shelf in many countries already, though not in the US.
For some other kinds of energy storage, it's debatable whether utility-scale storage or household-scale storage is more efficient; you're trading off economies of scale against transmission and distribution losses and transaction costs. But low-grade thermal energy storage is clearly better at household or neighborhood scale; my design outline linked above comes to a price per kWh that's 3% of the price of the batteries needed for BESS, and maybe 15% of the optimistic cost estimates for sodium-ion. You have to reduce the energy to low-grade heat up front to store it so cheaply, but that makes it hard to redistribute later—to redistribute low-grade stored heat from a central energy storage facility, you need something like New York's steam district heating systems. It's far cheaper to store the thermal energy at the point of use.
This is not a new idea. It's the idea behind adobe walls, Russian stoves, rocket mass heaters, electric night storage heaters, dol beds, kachelofens, kangs, earth-bermed walls, Trombe walls, and ondols. People have been doing this for 7000 years, without an electrical grid or, for that matter, electrical power at all. It definitely doesn't rely on net metering!
I love heat pumps. Had one in my house in the southern US and am about to put one in my house in the EU. I also recently bought a heat pump dryer, also great. Very gentle on clothes, doesn’t need a vent, or the high power plug - just a drain like a washer.
Hm, these are just called AC in Europe. To my knowledge, AC has always worked both ways here.
In Europe we call heap pumps when they heat the water. So they are are Air-Water (the outdoor unit looks like a bigger AC outdoor unit) or Water-Water (the outdoor unit is a long underground water pipe loop).
The warm water is used for underfloor heating or for shower, kitchen, etc.
I live in a heat pump only house and the only thing I don't really love are mid summer electric bills, but I think that'd basically be the same with a dedicated AC. In my climate heat is more nice than complete necessity and usually only spikes bills if there are true hard freezes.
I will say, they seem to have gotten more expensive. It took about $10k to replace ours (it was over 20 years old and replacing coolant+fixing was quoted at nearly half that). Even though research suggested it could be more like a $6.5 to $7.5k cost, it was hard to even get people quoting in a timely manner, let alone getting any kind of a deal.
Installed a Minisplit to heat/cool a 1,000 sqft large work area. My average monthly electricity cost is maybe $30 to heat or cool. The tech in these are amazing.
I’ll just say that most of the core issues with heat pumps seems to resolved with monoblock designs. Specifically, by moving the refrigerant cycle outdoors, install can be cheaper, and capacity can be more variable than when you are relying on sizing to the phase change occurring in each indoor unit.
Nearly 2 years ago, we had a small tornado come through, taking out our electricity for a week. During that time, it was snowy and the outdoor temperature was well below freezing (it reached about -10°C (12°F) at night).
Keeping my family warm was a real struggle that week. The next spring, I went to Costco and bought a big tri-power generator and wired up a generator interlock on the electric panel. Now if we lose power, we can run the natural gas furnace & blower with no problems. I can also power the generator from my home's natural gas supply instead of making frequent trips for gasoline.
So I'd say heck no to swapping the natural gas furnace for a heat pump. I'd much rather use natural gas to power both the generator and the furnace/blower than risk needing more electricity to keep my family warm than my setup can handle.
The math on natural gas generators gets weird in places with cheap gas and expensive electricity, to the point where it can sometimes be cheaper to generate your own electricity from natural gas than to purchase from the grid.
Don't you still need a generator to run the blower and the logic on the furnace? I mean, obviously a much lower power load, but wouldn't a generator still be necessary?
My mini-split was installed sometime between fall 2017 or spring 2018 when my house was built. It failed when it was 6 years old, and the lineset had to be replaced because there was too much acid in the insulation and it corroded the copper.
The problem was that the lineset was in my walls, so replacing it would require ugly lineset in a highly-visible place on my house. All the quotes to fix / replace it were absurdly expensive.
Because the mini-split was for a room that I use occasionally, I just use a portable air conditioner and a space heater.
Quality control by the contractor is soooo important. Formicary corrosion like you described can happen if a contractor doesn't pull a proper vacuum on the system to evacuate moisture before releasing refrigerant. I saw an anecdote where Bill Spohn, who literally owns an HVAC tools company, had this happen with the contractor installing a system in his own house! (https://www.heatpumped.org/p/are-heat-pumps-a-commodity)
I suspect it's especially bad with new builds, as new builds are a race to the bottom and every subcontractor is fighting to get the lowest bid. The best way to make it cheaper is skip steps, and that hurts in the long run. Sorry you ended up in that situation, crummy experiences like this set the industry back. For what it's worth, the same corrosion could happen with a traditional AC system too (it's not just heat pumps). But the difference is, often those refrigerant lines don't get as hidden on interior walls as the ones for ductless mini-splits do.
pretty sure the white insulation on the lineset, when exposed to moisture and UV, can create an acid that eats the copper. thats probably what happened
One other challenge is for existing homes a water heater may only have a gas line running to it. Want a heat pump hot water heater? Hiring the electrician alone, not to mention potentially ripping up walls will ruin any economic advantage.
This was a major barrier for me. I had to replace an existing natural, tanked gas water heater. Ultimately I just bought a $750 replacement because I could easily swap it out myself. Installing a heat pump would have involved an electrician to install a new circuit, and possibly other changes. While there were some 120v models available locally, they all had pretty bad reviews. So I would have paid a couple thousand dollars more. Maybe I could break even over 10 years paying less for gas but that seemed like a poor use of funds.
> every single natural gas water heater is connected to 120V power for the ignition circuit
Mine isn't. During a long power outage, I still had hot water.
I was a bit surprised the water heater was working since I was pretty sure it had an electronic control system. So I went and looked, and sure enough, it was electronic, and somehow the LED was flashing blue like normal!
It turns out the electronics are powered by a thermopile which is heated by the pilot light.
Keep in mind that there's going to be a CoP associated with a heat-pump water heater. Depending on (a bunch of factors) that 1500W HPWH could approach the performance of a 6kW standard EWH.
AFAIK there are actually no 1500w HPWHs currently, the normal hybrid 220v models have a small 500 watt compressor thats very efficient and keeps the airflow requirements low which helps with installation placement and ducting if needed, then still have the electric elements if needed to boost.
The 120v model HPWH's I have seen do not have electric resistive elements and instead have around a 1000W compressor, so they recover faster purely on heat pump and can run off a standard 15 amp circuit while staying well under the NEC 80% rule which would be 12 amps, they are closer to 10 amps.
They do require more airflow and are generally noisier due to larger fans and compressor.
Then you have dedicated split system HPWH's like SANCO that use an outdoor unit like a minisplit and pull around 1800 watts putting well over 6kw into the water, these are probably the future or whole house heat pump systems that heat both water and air(and cool) as combined unit.
6.6 kW, for... COP 4, T₁-T₀ = 30 [K] (lower value for warm climate), allowable 30 minute heating time, 50 gallon capacity. A cold climate could double that power requirement, or alternatively double the heating time.
a 1500W heat pump water heater with a COP around 3 will put 5500 watts of heat into the water.
My Rheem hybrid 220v heat pump water heater only has a 500w compressor but puts 1500-2000 watts of heat into the water pulling it from the hot garage.
I have the choice to run it in high demand mode which will run both the heat pump and electric 4500w element for around 6kw of heat into the water if I need fast recovery.
Interesting to view this from the POV of the fossil fuel usage rampdown needed because to mitigate the climate catastrophe.
It seems that the fact that a lot of people have utility gas over there, and low price of gas due to regulation (no externalities taxed in) is the big one.
Cool to see a Heat Pump article near the top of HN! I'm the founder/CEO of Quilt (https://www.quilt.com/), which is mentioned in the article, and a decade+ daily reader of this fine site. At Quilt we've run the Nest playbook for ductless heat pumps as our first product. The plan is to do what Tesla did for automotive to the built environment infrastructure category (HVAC, plumbing, etc) and create the first major American manufacturer in a ~century.
The article has bullet #1 in problems to solve as "Contractors who default to what they know." This was one of my founding hypotheses to and it turns out I was wrong, this was the hardest won learning yet at Quilt. We originally were fully vertically integrated and had our own installation force because of this reason – we wanted to solve all the big problems, thought contractors were one of them, and so had to become a contractor. But we quickly saw we were getting in the way of our own mission to accelerate the energy transition (because we had far far more demand than we could scale operations to reach it). So in March we (initially cautiously) switched partnering with existing contractors and I have been delighted by the industry reception. There are so so many existing contractors who want modern tech and see working with us as a breath of fresh air. I definitely sold them short and in retrospect it was naive and even a little elitist.
Hey Paul! Good to see ya on here. I'm in a Facebook group of small HVAC contractors, and recently there was a conversation about who is installing heat pumps vs traditional ACs and furnaces. I was thrilled to see that most were saying that they are moving a lot of their business toward heat pumps. Of course, there were a few that were stuck in their ways and were "gas or die" type people, but it's exciting to see the ship slowly starting to turn. There are more and more heat pump forward contractors coming online every day, and it's great that we can team up with folks like you pushing the hardware forward. There is so much work to deploy these systems, and winning is going to look like all of us working together!
I’ve had a heat pump with backup gas in Seattle area since 2016. Great to have AC and heat; the gas comes on when house needs to be warmed quickly. I like constant air circulation and have it set so fan runs even when it doesn’t need to heat or cool so it works really well for me; no complaints at all.
I recently installed a mini split heat pump in a detached accessory building. The installer upsold me on a more expensive unit because I’d get federal refunds due to its higher SEER rating. Ok, sure: higher efficiency, same price.
In fact, efficiency was the main reason I wanted a mini split in the first place. It just bugged me to _not_ pump the heat entirely outside the structure. And I paid a bit more for that versus just using a window unit or “portable” AC. All we’re talking here is the location of the condenser coil: inside versus outside. It just makes sense to put it outside, with just a small penetration in the building.
Well, during electrical inspection apparently I paid too much. After paying more than a certain threshold for converting an unconditioned space to a conditioned space, I now need to insulate the accessory structure to a certain degree in order to pass code.
The kicker is, the only way I can insulate the space to meet code is to insulate with polyiso (aka styrofoam) because the structure is so small. So, I guess in an effort to be “green” according to local government, I need to rip out the mineral wool insulation, dump it and replace it with styrofoam. Or put the mini split in the dump and buy a cheaper less efficient unit like a window unit.
I’d save approximately $0.30 a year on energy costs to insulate to code versus what I have now with the mini split.
This whole industry is stupid and that’s because it’s regulated by idiots.
All this push to electrify everything makes me nervous, as it effectively centralizes a lever that someone evil enough could use to coerce the general public in unsavory ways.
I'm doubly suspicious of areas that combine mass-electrification with reducing availability of the most reliable alternate source of electricity (i.e. generators). California in particular is pushing to make generators increasingly hard to obtain.
What makes you believe the same doesn't already apply to natural gas, or petrol?
Besides, coercing the general public like that generally doesn't end well: people tend to get annoyed when their basic needs of survival aren't being met - especially if it is a deliberate choice. The people in power will be gone within days.
Modern coercion happens far more subtly and less overtly than it did in 20th century totalitarian regimes. The proletariat isn't the only group that learned lessons from that period of time.
Split system is a common term that covers both heat pumps and traditional AC systems. It has to do with the physical setup, not the theory of operation.
A heat pump specifically is an AC system that can run in reverse: moving heat from outside to inside.
Question: I have just bought house and deciding heatpump vs oil. We have an autistic person in the house hold that is very sensitive to high frequency noises and perpetual sounds in general. He is used to an oil furnace turning on and of.
I fear for sound pollution from a heat pump.
Will anyone share their experiences with this? Even just a shuttle humming would be a disaster for our spectrum case.
I don’t know whether you can get a completley silent unit, but I can say that our Mitsubishi heat pump does make a high pitched sound while running. Although I am used to it now, I found it annoying until I got used to it. It is very different than the intermittent low pitched rumble of my oil boiler.
I’m super psyched about heat pump washer/dryers. I live in puerto rico and humidity and electricity are issues that it seems to address. Plus I am going to try installing it in a closet where it wasn’t designed for it all. I think it could change the way houses here are made.
Missed opportunity to discuss GSHPs and instead pushes electric HPs because it's a business blog masquerading as a .org to push product.
And also, contractors and maintenance shops push products that minimize their costs and maximize their profits. It's also why private equity owns effectively every high voltage motor capacitor manufacturer in the US and why those capacitors have such short lives now. It's not about minimizing TCO, it's about maximizing customer dependency upon service and parts without seeming there is any other choice balanced with the stochastic equilibrium of potentially more reliable alternatives threatening this "cottage" industry.
PS: clean your coils, change your air filters (without excessive MERV flow restriction), surge protect ECMs, and check your caps.
Our local installers seem to be taking advantage of the moment quite a bit, install costs are have skyrocketed over the past decade... double what I paid when the market started heating up. But at least the techs seem more knowledgeable, when I first had my system installed it seemed like they had no clue how they even worked.
Trying to translate this terminology into normal Aussie speak here. :P So a “heat pump” is reverse cycle aircon, I’m guessing it’s usually a central unit ducted to each room? Am I right in thinking that “mini split” is what we’d call a “split system” (ie. wall unit inside, heat exchanger outside, refrigerant pipes running between)? Is there a power cutoff above which it’s no longer mini, or is anything non-ducted a mini split?
Well, they have electric boilers, gas boilers, and gas/heat pump hybrid boilers. but not restive/heat pump hybrids. (for houses heated with hot water) I suppose this is because the return temperature to the boiler is already 50 Celsius so the heat pump can’t help you at all
Edit: Oh actually, I was wrong.(and I guess it makes sense. It would suffer the same problems as an electric hybrid) There is no hybrid gas heat pump for hydronic heating. Basically my entire city is hydronic heating so heat pumps are not an option. However
a bunch of my neighbours have heat pumps and I suppose it’s just heating one room in their house and it’s not even connected to the thermostat of their hydronic heater in any way.. Seems pretty silly to me. At least you get an air conditioner out of the deal so that you can use more electricity in the summer.
There are air-to-water heat pumps that can run hydronic heating (even radiators, though underfloor is a better match due to the lower return temps).
You can then make your own hybrid with a resistive electric boiler or a gas boiler wired to second-stage or emergency heat.
My 1920s house with radiators and terrible insulation outside of Boston runs with return water temps in the low 90s in shoulder season and 120°F when it’s 12°F outside, using outdoor-reset/weather-compensation.
Those return temps are entirely compatible with air-to-water heat pumps. (And result in 22-24 hour run times per day, which makes for extremely comfortable heat, despite the generally lacking insulation.)
I don’t have one because HVAC contractors are living in the 1990s and want to do a 3-hour, 2-person combi boiler install for $10K in profit rather than think through how to do anything unusual.
Recently went with heat pump water heater and cloths dryer, very significant energy savings and they both work great using around 1/3 the energy.
Most of my energy is for HVAC cooling in the south and that is already a heat pump. The house is well insulated and also have solar so along with the water heater and dryer I am around net zero in mid summer and and now that temperature is more mild I am producing much more than using even with one EV as well.
It really nice to have an all electric house along with at least one car and a large solar backup system I am pretty self contained and don't really have to change anything if grid goes down.
That seems really weird, the only real difference is a reversing valve that costs a couple bucks. A heat pump is an AC, it just can be run backwards to produce heating as well. In cooling it's literally the same thing.
I'm no expert but the difference in the real world is more than that (though am doubtful about 3x the price) . The delta-T between heating and cooling is significantly greater in most places so you need a bigger system. You also need things like the ability to de-ice.
But you might also be comparing multi-stage variable load DC heat pumps with single stage air conditioners and not an actually equivalent air conditioner.
It’s very hard to say whether heat pumps are cheaper than NG for heating. I pay about $0.25 per 100k BTUs which is about 3kWh. 3kWh costs about 50 cents. As long as the COP is above 2, it’s cheaper to run the heat pump.
Once you factor in an electrician and pipefitter for installing a heat pump, plus the cost of the heat pump, refrigerant, and furnace coil, I’d imagine you lose money in the long run.
If you then additionally include the strain on the grid from all these new data centers without enough generation capacity, I’ll stick with natural gas for heating air and water.
Its not hard to say at all, the math can be done pretty easily based on your local electric and gas rates, and most people who go for a heat pump already need an air conditioner for summer.
The math actually works out in many places unless you have cheap gas and expensive electricity. Its also better then to burn the gas at a power plant at 60% efficiency then 300-400% efficiency at the heat pump than pipe and burn the NG at 80% efficiency in your furnace.
> Its not hard to say at all, the math can be done pretty easily based on your local electric and gas rates, and most people who go for a heat pump already need an air conditioner for summer.
I went on to do the math for operating costs for myself in the very next sentence. Excluding labor and material to replace a furnace with a heat pump, operating costs are lower as long as the heat pump has a COP of 2 or higher.
Predicting future electricity and gas prices is virtually impossible but it is possible to quantify how much it costs to convert a natural gas furnace to a heat pump system at present. I’m saying it’s difficult to know at the present time if the TCO of the heat pump beats out natural gas. Where I live in Minnesota, I’m skeptical you’d come out ahead. In a state like Arkansas or Tennessee, the heat pump is likely to come out ahead due to lower heating needs.
I'm thankful to live in the Bay Area. One time we took a trip in the dead of winter. We turned off our heat completely. We were gone for a week. The coldest it got inside the house was 55 degrees.
Maybe I have scar tissue from COVID prices but $20k to install a ductless heat pump vs. a $200 to throw a window A/C in or $700 for a portable heat pump. While I get that these heat pumps are better for the environment and much more efficient it's a last mile issue. The installers charge an arm and a leg and I'm not hurting enough to self install. I'm hoping the window heat pumps that just run off mains will be available to more markets soon, I could buy one of those for every room in my house for less than the install on a single mini split.
Where it did make sense was when I was getting solar. It was only a few thousand since I already had the trades out and reducing the load was important for the ROI on the panels.
We can cut HVAC install costs in half, and a lot of people are already working on it including Jetson (where the author works) and Electric Air, my company.
Average install is about $20K in California (varies by state). Here’s how that usually breaks down:
- Equipment: $3–5K for a basic swap (some go up to $10K for single system)
- Direct labor: $3–4K (about 15–20%)
- Materials: $2–3K
- Permits and testing: around $1K total
That leaves about a 45% margin to cover overhead:
- Indirect labor: $2.5K (installers when not installing, install managers, attending city inspector visits, call backs when installers make mistakes)
- Sales: $2K (around 10%)
- Project management: $500
- Trucks: $500
- Misc costs: $1.5K (insurance, software, payment processing, etc.)
Total overhead: $7K: Net margin: 10%
10% net margin at the end of the year isn't egregious.
That’s how a typical small-mid HVAC shop runs. The best HVAC shops can make these numbers be much more competitive. How do we make it better:
- Bulk order equipment
- Streamline direct labor
- Use virtual site visits instead of in-person sales calls
Do all that and you can bring a $20K install down close to half, while paying installers better and speeding up electrification.
For comparison, I just bought a house here in Japan. Installed 6 minisplit heat pumps across various rooms in the house. All together it cost me 750,000 yen ($5,000) for the hardware and 90,000 yen ($600) for the install.
In US the labor & markup is a huge component.
I got HVAC drop-in replacement quotes ranging from $7k to $14k for what upon some quick research was about $3k in hardware.
This is similar to just about everything mechanical (e.g. auto maintenance). The labor is always the biggest fraction of the cost, not the parts. You always have the option to DIY.
Can you do the installation yourself? In my country i have to make a HVAC technician come to check the installation and sign a paper before i can start mine (200€ for a 15 minutes job, but it's less than the 2-4k it would cost to not do it myself)
[edit] i say that because my hardware is 2.5k euros, so ~3k¯dollars, so we probably have the same high end stuff, and i guarantee you it's not hard to install, and it can be quite fast if you have help from your SO.
Newer units (not all) in the US come pre-charged up to a certain size of lineset. Manufacturers can sell you a whole unit with a charge. The rest is easy to source locally though I haven't tried to get nitrogen myself.
Of course you have exactly one chance with your install this way until you have to call someone.
nitrogen is available at any welding supply store. The container and pressure regulator is like $200 though.
Depends on where you live. Someone that has the tools can do it themselves and then shut the fuck up, which is how I suspect most of them in America get installed. Code/planning enforcement commonly surveils residences via satellite or air images but they're not noticing a mini split installed.
Central air system with indoor blower & outdoor condenser generally don't come with pre-charged lines so self-install without certification isn't really an option in US.
It's not just certification/permitting. The manufacturers often state that the unit must be verified to be installed by a qualified technian or the warranty is void.
Around here anyway, I was getting quotes of 20k for the install & equipment of a central air handler and the outdoor unit.
I'd be dead before the thing paid for itself in electricity cost savings. $20,000 ÷ (~90yrslife - 40yrsold) = $400 / year of neccesary savings to break-even as my casket is lowered into the ground.
Most don't have a payback if the cost of electricity is too high. Let's make them lower cost up front and lower running costs so it's a no brainer when replacement is due.
I got my EPA 608 universal for free after 2 night of cramming and an online proctored test. Skillcat, I think they charge like $50 if you want a printed card, worth it to me because I wanted to be able to walk into supply houses and buy refrigerant.
I always wondered how difficult it was to do this. I’m really glad to know it’s possible
Getting the 608 is mostly rote memorization and the only thing required at the federal level. On the state level if you want a trade license that generally takes 4 years, but where I live residential owner-builder doesn't need it.
608 lets you buy the refrigerant
Me too, except I got it in the SkillCat free trial. Did it while rocking my then baby over a few weeks. Super easy for anyone that is a “good” test taker and has high school level reading
Japan is where early air-source heat pumps first achieved market success, so it's unsurprising that they are much cheaper to install there, because of the relatively large number of installer options.
In the US, they are struggling to break out of the eco-luxury product niche (where they have been stuck for a long time).
Which is weird because they are quite ugly, both inside and outside.
Compared to a conventional A/C compressor (which they replace), heat pump compressors are much smaller, quieter, and less ugly.
As for the indoor units, they can either be the "ugly" ones (the indoor head units visible on the wall), recessed "cassettes", or they can use traditional A/C air handlers in a utility room to distribute conditioned air via existing duct-runs and registers.
There are also companies like Quilt that are making heat pump systems with much more attractive indoor wall units.
I was curious about sound for both the indoor and outdoor pieces. The outside condenser for my current AC is very loud. Are the heat pump units quieter, and if so, why?
Speaking as an apartment dweller, my new apartment's ductless setup is much quieter (inside) than my old apartment's blower. At the old place, the fan was either on or off and must have added another 10 or 20 db of noise forcing you to always keep the TV remote nearby in case the fan turned on or off. It's very convenient that I can control my ductless unit's fan speed with a remote.
Better variable frequency drives for both fans and compressor is a big part of it (see other comments about being less prone to short-cycling).
This isn't exactly new or unique to heat pumps (and some older heat pumps lack both), but as the technology has gotten cheaper and more reliable, coupled with the drive for better efficiency, it has become commonplace.
I cannot hear my outdoor unit from 4 feet away. It’s just an engineering choice. Use a $2 bearing or a 2 cent one?
Another person living in Japan. Sounds about right. A unit from a good brand (daikin, mitsubishi) costs ~$800? More or less depending on the room size. We had them installed when we built the house, installation price included. Two are enough to keep our house cool or warm in any season (it's a well insulated house). We have another in the guest room, use it only for when guests stay.
Our renovation company had rip-off pricing on years-old models, so we just asked a few electronics stores for quotes. First looked up the cheapest online options as baseline pricing, and then used the in-store sale deals to stay at the same total price but get the units in the bigger rooms upgraded to fancier/higher grade options.
Do you mean 6 A/C units ? I. e. 6 outdoor and indoor units
regardless, this is incredibly cheap
Mini-splits these days are available as multi-head (I think that’s the term) units, where a single outside unit can supply 2,4, or 6 units individually and independently.
They’re remarkable, and I would go for a mini-split system over a central unit 100 times out of 100.
> where a single outside unit can supply 2,4, or 6 units individually and independently
In my current home, I have two "heads" attached to a single outside unit, but they cannot operate independently beyond setting different fan speeds or closing the vent really. If one of the mini-splits is set to heat and the other switches to cooling, they will booth start cooling, or vice versa, the head units just blindly blow air over what ever is being pumped through the line and the last unit to send a command to switch mode "wins".
Maybe there are clever heat pumps that truly allow fully independent control of the head unit when connected to multiple heads, but given the flow of refrigerant has to reverse direction completely when switching between heating and cooling, I don't see how they can operate fully independently when they are sharing the same refrigerant lines.
There is only one reversing valve inside the outside unit for all the head units connected to one outside unit in my experience, but would love to see examples of systems that do permit this if they exist.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversing_valve
An extra clever system would include every temperature controlled appliance in the house. Heat could be exchanged between the hvac, water heater, refrigerator, and oven.
When the oven is done cooking it can dump heat into the water heater (and or furnace in the winter). The fridge and HVAC could dump heat into the water heater before pumping it outside in the summer.
It's units in 6 different rooms (3 bed, office, living, dining) so 6 sets of units.
After reading some other comments I realize one vital detail is that they were installed in a renovated house that already had suitable holes to the outside and power outlets where the units were going, so the install job was just mounting the units, pulling the tubing and gassing it, no cutting things up or doing electrical work.
The price would at least double if we needed all the holes cut open, and I have no idea what the electrical work would cost.
It’s very normal here in Portugal. If you looked carefully and weren’t picky about the brands, you could have 6 mini-splits installed for $3000 all-in.
Parent mentioned $600 for the install. I live in Portugal as well, paid around $500 for ~one~ mini split A/C install
I would expect that installing six is maybe twice as expensive as installing one. All the overhead of scheduling the technician, traveling to the location, getting the tools out, etc stay the same. Installing six is vastly more efficient and that should be reflected in the price
GP still got an amazing deal
Maybe I wasn't clear but when I commented, I meant to say you could buy and have installed 6 mini-splits for $3000 (machines included).
How much time did it take?
They arrived at 9 AM, was done by 2:30 PM
It's the opposite for me, much bigger ROI on the heatpump than solar. Rural property, 10 years old, ~3,500 sq ft + basement, in Canada where summer can be above 30C (86F) and winter below -30C (-20F). Electricity costs (Canadian) 7.6 ¢/kWh off-peak and 15.8 ¢/kWh on-peak here.
I spent C$40K (about US$30k) on a ground source aka 'geothermal' heat pump to replace furnace powered by propane tank. I kept propane for on-demand hot water and whole house generator. I have no options for utilities other than electricity.
A couple of years later I spent another C$40k for a 20kW rooftop solar system, with net metering and no battery. Net metering was critical for getting any return at all. A battery is next to useless here- I generate almost all of my solar electricity in May-Oct but use the majority of it in Nov-April. Net metering lets me 'store' excess from summer and use it in winter.
Annual costs:
Before:
With C$40k investment in geothermal heatpump: With heatpump and then C$40k investment in rooftop solar: So I'm seeing about C$8k/yr saving for C$80k investment. The heatpump saved me over $5k a year and the solar about $2,500 a year. The heatpump has pretty much paid for itself after 5 years, the solar will take at least 15 years (unless prices go way up) although should eventually see some return 15-20 years out.In reality it might have cost even more than that to heat with propane. On the propane furnace we barely heated in winter, burned a lot of firewood to make part of the house livable. I'm trying estimate how much it would cost to heat the house to a comfortable 20C (68F) although the thermostat now with the heatpump is set to 22C (72F) in winter so there's an improvement in comfort as well as the ROI.
> Net metering lets me 'store' excess from summer and use it in winter
FYI net metering is unsustainable for the grid and policies will probably change (reducing rates for energy, increasing rates for delivery fees to offset the "freebies") as soon as adoption reaches a critical mass.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘unsustainable’ nor ‘critical mass’ here. Of course not everyone can net meter- on a sunny but mild day with no-one using A/C nor heating and everyone contributing back to the grid it doesn’t work.
My local utility is well aware of that, applications for permits to net meter have to be made, and only a fraction (something like 15%) of properties in each area can net meter. Also the government is aware and there are no grants for net metering, only for battery systems.
I’m giving details about my personal system for one property in one location, not in any way making a statement about what works for anyone else.
"All" it needs to be sustainable is a massive investment in storage systems (BESS, and/or others).
I'm jealous of the learning and hobby project.
Though, the returns are (edit: "not great") if the figures above INCLUDE net metering revenues.
I'm jealous of your financial learnings. However, your model is not accurate as it doesn't factor in the 4 degree improvement in comfort and indoor pollution from propane furnaces: Propane furnaces can cause indoor pollution through the release of pollutants like carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen dioxide (\(NO_{2}\)), and benzene, which are byproducts of combustion.
It also doesn't include the negative externalities because of tragedy of commons. Sadly, these kind of flawed 'financial' calculations are widespread.
What is inspiring from the OPs comment is that this is doable in harsh Canadian winters with negligible solar and it breaks even. Most of the world is living in significantly more sunshine, so it should work out a lot better financially for >99% of the population.
I've lived most of my adult life in houses with forced air furnaces (albeit powered via natural gas, not propane), and what you are saying is inaccurate regarding indoor air pollution unless your furnace is in need of immediate replacement.
A modern furnace works via a heat exchanger, where the combustion produced pollutants never mix with the indoor air being pushed through. All pollutants are expelled outside via a property functioning chimney. This is one reason why you should have the furnace (and chimney function) inspected annually. Aging heat exchangers will show hotspots before there is a possibility of air being mixed, giving plenty of time to plan for a replacement. Of course there is a possibility of failure, which is why you should have a carbon monoxide detector.
I agree it's important to watch for these things.
For externalities or immediate health benefits, heatpumps are pretty defensible. However, solar isn't a saint. Rare earth/mineral mining is hazardous plus only a fraction of solar panels are getting recycled properly.
> this is doable in harsh Canadian winters with negligible solar and it breaks even
It's doable alright. OP got subsidies (See comment re: risk free loan and grants). Talk about externalities, this is definitely wealth transfer.
> However, solar isn't a saint. Rare earth/mineral mining is hazardous
Solar cells are made of silicon, not rare earths.
For solar, you need to mine ONCE for 25 - 50 years. Fossil fuels are burnt every second continuously. Perhaps you can do the math if its not obvious?
I hope we can agree that fossil fuel consumption is something to be avoided. Subsidies are an effective means of incentivizing people to avoid fossil fuels.
If you believe the externalities of solar are a problem, what do you propose to do instead? Should we subsidize some other alternative? Redirect resources from oil to nuclear? Other?
>avoided [entirely?]
You're making different/absolutist arguments. Even the most ardent electrification proponents agree that you can't replace downstream chemicals/materials.
As for subsidies, you're thinking too narrow if you feel it necessary to only spend limited government budget on energy to improve lives.
> As for subsidies, you're thinking too narrow if you feel it necessary to only spend limited government budget on energy to improve lives.
But, its perfectly okay for govt to spend on fossil fuel subsidies? You draw the line when the subsidies are for solar, heatpumps, etc?
Yes, lets talk about subsidies. Fossil fuels have had and continue to have the most subsidies. Fossil Fuel Subsidies Surged to Record $7 Trillion/year: https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/08/24/fossil-fuel...
The wealth transfer you are alluding to, it is from the poor (everyone) to the rich (fossil fuel billionaires), isn't it?
Please avoid unwarranted "whataboutism."
You brought up subsidies. I updated your understanding of subsidies. What is this whataboutism you are talking about?
This is not whataboutism though. It's comparing two alternatives on a relevant aspect.
LOL.
Can you please share your definition of "whataboutism?" And explain how bringing up a single alternative (plus flaw) is addressing the critique and NOT changing the subject?
"Whataboutism", like "dog whistle", is a name for an imaginary discussion pattern that doesn't occur in real life, but is super easy to point out in most conversations, allowing one to cry foul and "win" the argument (or whole discussion) through violence instead of reason.
This is pretty much the same as accusing a colleague of insulting you through PR they asked you to review, because there's an added line that says:
i.e. obviously they're calling you "assHOLE".- "But wait, it's no such thing; it's a Handle for OLE component instances - it's part of support for COM stuff in those legacy reports..."
- "AHA! See also here, dear readers:"
"Surely, you see how bad my coworker is! They badmouth our customers too, and even call them public harlots! Don't believe their lousy defense that this was a typo, either!"This is what pointing out "whataboutism" and "dog whistles" is. Artificial, cross-cutting pattern that match easily, but don't correspond to any real phenomena.
Weaponized pareidolia.
? [0]
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
Indoor propane furnaces exhaust outdoors in most cases. Space heaters that exhaust indoors are rare - more used for garrage heat than house. If you use them of course actount for it, but most are not.
Theoretically yes, in practice no. There is (according to my sensors) a fairly large CO2 increase inside a room when a modern furnace (with external exhaust) is running. I've confirmed this with several units (all made in the last 10 years), and it's not that the windows are closed - when the furnace turns off, the CO2 drops. And it's not that the exhaust is placed in a bad spot either.
> There is (according to my sensors) a fairly large CO2 increase inside a room when a modern furnace
If this is happening, then you shouldn't be using that furnace/room!
Something beyond the furnace is not configured right.
Yes, fossil fuels are the best to keep pollution away, just need to installed perfectly, configured and maintained regularly, monitored to make sure everything is running correctly, and have additional properties lying around vacant just in case there are leaks, misconfigurations, poor installation, etc. But we must use fossil fuels, there are no other options!
Could also just be the furnace. Incomplete combustion conditions can give rise to the symptoms mentioned here.
Looks pretty good to me over 25 years. Not many safe/guaranteed investments that will reliably return 8% these days. And as utility rates will no doubt rise over time, savings in future years will be greater.
Yes the people selling solar systems all factor in aggressive future electricity increases, it's best to also see how it looks with more conservative rate increases. By my calculation in a reply above with the interest free solar loan it's an 8% return over 14.3 years.
Residential electricity rates have risen fast across the US—more than 30 percent on average since 2020 and almost double the rate of inflation: https://www.wired.com/story/power-bills-in-the-us-are-soarin...
Very regional though - my rates have not gone up.
Electricity prices are going up nearly everywhere. Bitcoin and AI are a wealth transfer from everyone to the crypto/AI folks.
Wholesale electricity costs as much as 267% more than it did five years ago in areas near data centers. That's being passed on to customers: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-data-centers-elec...
It will be interesting to see if this will make natural gas a more attractive source of residential heating as the price has remained relatively stable over the past 20 years.
The push for electrification seems like it relies on us metaphorically drowning in excess cheap electricity and want somewhere for it to go but right now the opposite it happening.
>The price has remained relatively stable over the past 20 years
Not really, natural gas has immense exposure to geopolitics and the commodity markets: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/what-drives-natural-gas-pri...
There’s also the argument to be made (this has manifested in other countries) that as gas usage wanes and more homes electrify, nat gas costs will increase as the infrastructure costs are spread among fewer and fewer people
> There’s also the argument to be made (this has manifested in other countries) that as gas usage wanes and more homes electrify, nat gas costs will increase as the infrastructure costs are spread among fewer and fewer people
This has kinda wonky incentives though - if your fixed costs for gas are high but your marginal costs remain low and for whatever logistical reasons you can't cut the gas connection entirely, then your motivations are to move as much of your heating load over to gas as possible.
I skimmed the article (so forgive me if I'm off.) It appears to reference non-US markets and the parent was assuming US (my assumption).
AFAIK, the US has a mid-long outlook of gas oversupply. EU's market is broken and has 3x the price (c.f. Henry Hub v. TTF). I haven't seen any major forecasters predict reaching parity anytime soon. Hence, LNG export projects keep getting (over-)built to chase the arbitrage.
I got solar for my parents in 2021 and the price increases were pretty aggressive recently: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000072610
Which to me is funny, when the electricity prices will clearly not rise when there is solar energy production from said panels. But might in other times.
I think the argument is that on average people are buying heat pumps and EVs faster they are installing solar panels but it’s not completely convincing though, power stations can be added.
Further north where I am solar can only ever be a small component of total electricity generation due to the dark snowy cloudy winter months with close to zero solar generation for weeks on end.
Batteries for load shifting a few hours mitigate that quite a bit and are getting cheaper fast.
I have never had a prime time surcharge so I can’t do that trick. Think it’s because my baseload here is nuclear.
The issue for me with batteries is that in the summer I can produce in a day much more than I can use, and in winter I consume a lot and barely produce anything. This is where net metering steps in- I can ‘store’ all of my excess summer consumption in the grid in summer and get credit for it in winter.
A cheaper smaller system right sized for summer consumption with a battery would have my second best option, but for me never showed any potential payback due to the fixed costs of installation and the extra battery costs.
Net metering is of course nice for consumers but it’s not sustainable for the grid operators.
It is for a fraction of consumers- power companies and governments are well aware of that.
Yes the figures are my approximate bills so include net metering revenues.
You're right about the 8 year negative IRR for the heatpump, although I'm being very conservative about propane costs, it's likely much shorter. I was pretty conservative about the solar savings too, I generally go for the worst case in these estimates.
Your overall NPV calculation seems a bit off. It's ~21 years to zero NPV at 8% discount rate, spending $80 up front to save $8/year. Factoring in the 10 year interest free government solar loan makes it more like 14 years. My working:
The solar system is fun to tinker with and should pay off 'eventually', it's not a no brainer of a decision like the heatpump though.> Your overall NPV calculation seems a bit off.
Correct. It's 21y. I missed $500 from a reading error and was assuming $7.5k/y (not $8k/y).
edit: I see your mention of the grant, too. Combined, that's cutting the NPV=0 point in half from 21y to ~12y. Good job.
For me it helped with the ROI because I couldn't go any larger than a 6kw array due to roof shape/exposure. Only roof mounted solar is permitted in my community :/ So a ductless saved us energy in the summer months vs. window units, so I could bank more with net metering when the sun was shining.
Excellent data, thanks! Net metering does look necessary for economics. Have you factored in relative replacement/maintenance costs for the geo pump vs furnace? Also curious how much your investment was discounted thanks to tax subsidies.
There was a C$7k government grant at the time for the heatpump, which roughly matched the tax.
The current Ontario solar grant is weird- it only applies to battery systems without net-metering. They also offered a 10-year interest free loan though so I took that, improves the ROI a little. I think battery systems do make more sense for people who are further sound and using more electricity at the time of year that they are generating it. The solar sales people estimated a 10-year ROI but they had to include a pretty high annual energy cost increase in their calculations (I think 8%/year), I estimated more like 15 years.
I didn't really consider replacement, by all reports the WaterFurnace pump should last 25-30 years and the propane furnace was probably 5 years old so would have lasted about the same. I would think that the WaterFurnace costs a little more to replace, maybe a winter's worth of propane.
Several people told me that ground source heat pumps were too expensive, but years later it still feels like the best investment I've ever made, the gentle heating and cooling is more comfortable too. Anyone with enough space who has to have fuel delivered (propane, oil, etc.) should seriously consider it.
Err, be careful. You made these improvements sequentially, not independently. Each one halved your costs and might still have done exactly that if done in the opposite order.
Look closer. How could his 20kW rooftop solar electricity have halved his initial monthly costs, when >3/4 of those costs were for propane heating fuel? (Vs. <1/4 for electricity.)
Solar in northernly climates is still not practical. (I’m Canada adjacent.)
People told me that, but I did the calculations myself and the impact on my energy bills is real. Net metering is essential though, so not everyone can do it.
Compared to say SoCal I generate 2/3 as much per year, much less evenly- a lot more in summer than winter, whereas further south there's less variation year round. Cooler temperatures improve solar panel efficiency too. There are online solar potential calculators if you want to compare for yourself.
Right, but you have to compare it to the opportunity cost of the money. A solar panel is an annuity. There is a one time sunk cost for a relatively consistent, long-term payout.
If I put $100 into the stock market in approximately seven years I will have $200. If I put $100 into solar panels, in 10 or 15 years, I will have $100 worth of savings. Financially, it is not much better than just putting it under a mattress.
I get that the non-economic parts of solar are pretty much all upside. I’m not saying nobody should do it. Just that they should view it as a luxury, not an economic opportunity. But until the finances work out, it will not achieve widespread adoption, and the finances are a function of how much sun you have and your energy prices.
Those of us up north have little sun and lower energy prices. We would be a lot better off just putting your money in the stock market and paying for your electricity if you were only considering money. That is not true of the American southwest.
I have homes in both Phoenix and Cleveland and I have done the math on both. I actually can’t put solar in Phoenix, I wish I could, it would be a great investment. I could put solar in Cleveland, but I might as well throw my money down the drain. I can’t imagine the math is any better in Canada.
Most of Canada isn’t very far north, Toronto is on the same latitude as Marseille. It’s just very cold in the winter.
Most of Canada is quite north, but that most of Canadians are not far north ;-)
You can break even on solar panels in 10-15 years in Sweden where I live and we're pretty damn northerly.
Right, that’s a bad financial investment. If I put $100 in the stock market, in 10 to 15 years, I will have $200 to $300, on average. If I put $100 into solar panels, in 10 or 15 years, I will have break even.
In the US, most people don't live in one house that long.
That should be a wash with the value that a house gets sold for.
This is talking about cold-climate heat pumps. A $200 window AC isn't going to heat your house when it's way below freezing outside.
$20k USD is insane though. I live in Ontario and we paid $12k CAD (pre-government subsidy) for a modern heat pump with a backup high efficiency furnace for when temperatures dip down to -40 or lower.
True. We have natural gas and an existing steam radiator setup though, for the two months a year window heat pumps can't keep up. The upfront investment alone would heat my house for 10-20 years.
Honestly, just piling more insulation in the attic and doing an energy audit will probably put the ROI out another 10+ years...
I'm hoping the newer window units that are being rolled out to the NYC market will be good enough to put downward pressure on the outrageous prices in the installation market. Or maybe I'll just dedicate a weekend to DIYing :P
There’s another alternative: a mini-split. Larger than a window unit, with a refrigerant lines you run yourself but with the actual refrigerant pre-charged inside the unit, so you don’t need to handle it yourself (which usually requires a license).
Mini-splits tend to be much cheaper than full installations.
I looked into the precharged DIY option and the lengths just didn’t work out for what I needed in my space. I ended up paying a licensed installer C$12k to put in a three head system (two conventional, one ducted), and then a separate guy $5k to do the ducting for the bedroom level.
It would have been nice to do it as one, but the HVAC firm didn’t want to get their hands dirty with my wacky ducting plan, and the duct guy wasn’t licensed to charge the refrigerant lines.
The systems where you need to get a epa license are cheaper. The license is appearently easy to get.
The license is a trivial obstacle in the US. Study for an hour or two and take an unproctored online exam.
2k NZD to install minisplit vs 160KWh per winter month to heat my bedroom. Thats about $150 in power or 16 yrs to pay itself at COP 5. Or install 1 additional $130 solar panel to make about 650 KWh per year.
Makes sense for living room tho.
Oh you live in New Zealand! Where I live (Canada) if you don’t heat the entire house then the pipes freeze and burst and then the whole house floods.
I do heat house main (using hp) just for comfort (and because it’s cheap). And I come from further than saaskwatch so I know what freezing pipes mean haha.
My point tho is - hp’s are not panacea in my use case.
Heat pumps are not inherently expensive though. It depends on how competitive (or not) your HVAC industry is. Sounds like New Zealand has issues with this (probably due to being a small market).
High cost of labour is what screws us here in NZ. Tons of cheap heatpump from china sans tariffs and pretty much every house is required to have one.
I’d imagine similar in Canada. Either way whenever we discuss energy we should clarify where we post from since circumstances differ wildly.
Similar for me, also in Ontario. I got a three zone mini split this year that I’m hoping can cover most of the shoulder seasons and keep me from using the gas boiler, though it remains to be seen if that’ll actually pan out; so far the kids have complained that their rooms are a lot less evenly heated when it’s the heat pump running rather than the rads.
Actually its probably most efficient way because you have best control. That said having whole house ducted you also get benefit of fresh air via ERV (arguably more important than heating).
We just got quoted $20k for the minimum setup for our house. Meanwhile, I have two "free" window units which probably cost me an additional $300 in the summer. I really want heat pumps, but I just can't see how I can justify it for $20k.
That’s wild. Is it something that plugs into a central air so not the usual consumer heat pump? I just got a nice heat pump in Finland for two floors with two indoor units for about $3000 with install. It should handle 99% of our heating needs. The most expensive units on the market are about $3000-4000 and for install I got quoted $1k fixed without shopping around. That includes drilling through two brick outside walls. The units are all made in China and labor is cheaper in the US if anything. Where are these prices coming from ?
The materials they install are small copper pipes and insulation and a 16A capable electric cable and some plastic. Maybe $100-200. I feel like you guys are getting screwed.
It would be helpful to provide the rated thermal power of your heat pump. You might need a 3kW heat pump while they need a 16kW one.
7.5kW - around 105m2
Its most simply summed up as what I call the tradesman's protection racket.
On one side of the coin you have any moron, calling himself a repair man which can and does end in disastrous jobs which can be unsafe. This though has much lower pricing.
The flip side is, basically a protection racket where suppliers only sell to you if you have a 'loicense' and the hurdles required to become said VIP are so high, giving your body to a master tradesman to get a piece of paper over many years and be allowed to practice installing said systems results in a huge shortage of qualified people. Prices then skyrocket.
I wish I could live in a world somewhere in the middle, but as I've seen both ends of the spectrum, they both suck for different reasons.
You think HVAC is bad, plumbers and electricians have their protectionism written into law in many states. You must pay for their stamp. "Here is what I have and it is demonstrably within code" is not sufficient.
>"Here is what I have and it is demonstrably within code" is not sufficient.
It is if you do it yourself. You need the stamp to be able to sell your services.
> giving your body to a master tradesman to get a piece of paper over many years and be allowed to practice installing said systems results in a huge shortage of qualified people.
The job is physically difficult and does not provide steady hours. It involves driving long distances each day and working in hot and cold and rainy conditions, in cramped corners, in houses with varying levels of cleanliness.
People with options tend towards other careers, resulting in lower supply of qualified people, and hence higher prices to compensate for the drastically lower quality of life at work.
Have you considered that the second path you outlined, "giving your body to a master tradesman to get a piece of paper over many years" (in the figurative sense), is in general a necessary prerequisite to avoid the first path of any moron being allowed to "[call] himself a repair man which can and does end in disastrous jobs"?
> I wish I could live in a world somewhere in the middle […]
This world would just be a mixture of both, with many more semi-skilled tradesmen doing many more half-assed jobs, but not having to train as long.
I've done a lot of that type of work myself. It isn't hard to learn how to do it right from books - and I have passed inspection reports to prove it. I've also seen those professionals do a terrible job - to the point inspectors admitted to hurrying my job because they knew the next would be a mess.
I believe you. But not everyone is an autodidact. Most people, for whom becoming an electrician or plumber is the best option among all viable careers, do not have the discipline, aptitude, and intelligence to learn the theoretical and practical knowledge of a trade completely on their own. And vice versa, people who would be able to pull this of, typically have options that are better-paying, higher-status, or less physically demanding.
Northeast US here.
My 30 year old central air which covers 1 floor of my home went out recently so I got a bunch of replacement quotes, most vendors I asked for both a traditional central air & a heat pump central air quote.
The quotes were generally 50% more expensive for the heat pump option.
Vendor A: $12.5k AC, $17.7K Heat Pump + extra electrical work for the heat strips.
Vendor B: $8K AC, $11K Heat Pump + they don't think the existing ductwork is sufficient for comfortable heating and would recommend redoing some of it.
And I wouldn't qualify for any tax credits because it doesn't cover full home (there are upper floors without ducts that already are on mini splits & baseboard heat).
Also worth noting the range of HVAC quotes for the same spec cooling in the same home are insane. Every quote I got seemed to widen the range.
I recall the extra cost for heat pumps being criticized for being artificial by Technology Connections. The installers are to blame.
How are installers able to discourage competitors from driving down prices?
This. The quotes I got for a single 2 ton heat pump with a oil backup ranged from $15K to $45K.
It's insane and really made me look into the DIY installs. Even if I broke 2 of those it would still be cheaper than one professional one.
Solar install is another scam. All those companies want to steer you into a PPA rather than let you buy panels.
Yup, got similar quotes. I'm really not going to pay that for a day's work (2 people). The price difference over installing A/C is staggering and don't know where it comes from.
That is insane. I paid 1000EUR for an install on two floors (two indoor units) plus a few hundred for extra copper pipe not included in the quote. Took two guys about 7h. At least an hour of that was figuring out how to get power to the unit with a big enough fuse (my bad)
My house came with ghastly inefficient heating (ceiling cable) and no AC. Mini splits were worth every penny.
Of the $20k, let's assume $5k is the hardware. Now $15k is the work. Let's consider the installation a highly skilled job, commanding $100/hour. This is 150 hours, or a tad more than 6 business days for a team of 3, working with full load 8 hours a day.
Does a split system indeed take so much work? What is so effort-intensive?
2-3 hours planning, parts list, client management,
4-6 hrs to run electrical,
2-4 hrs to mount condenser,
4-8 hrs for medium line set,
4-8 hrs air handler, duct, platform integration,
1-2 hrs with thermostat and condensate protection,
1-2 hours nitrogen testing and pull vacuum,
1 hr documenting photos for incentive programs,
1 hr spending time educating customer about the system.
Messing up a parts order and figuring out a solution 4 hrs too often.
Total: 28 hrs, or 2-3 days of 2 people depending on the travel from their shop to customers home. I agree. Let's get that down to 12-16 hrs or single day and the best shops and installers can do that.
CA Labor law allow about 6-7 hrs of work on site as installers often have to start at their shop.
$3-4k of labor cost for small-mid size. Best might be be 2-3K labor cost. Minor equipment 1-2K, permit and testing required $1K. Then 50% gross margin is the target, net costs $2.5K indirect labor, $2K sales cost, project management, trucks, insurance, software, 10-20% net margin.
Just added the details in a comment above. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45705876
That’s just how US HVaC places price. It’s a racket. I got 45k quotes for 5k of hardware for an 8 hour max job. Good reason to learn DIY
Absolutely not. A basic ductless heat pump takes three or four hours to install by a couple of workers.
COVID prices just aren't a good comparison. I needed to replace a tankless water heater and was quoted $4k. I laughed, paid $1100 for a top of the line one and had my neighbor help me who used to be a plumber. Took 30 minutes and a bottle of a tequila for my neighbor.
Why not pick up a few mini splits from Home Depot and slap them in yourself?
I think the better question here is "why can't I pay a fair price for an expert to do this for me?". What has happened to the market?
One question I would have is how distorted is your area, economically?
I live in the Appalachian mountains, so one would think it should be reasonable labor rates for an area with a middle-low cost of living.
Except that we have a lake the next town over which is entirely covered in millionaire lake houses, so anyone working a trade here can and will charge obscene rates to local, normal people because they can command that rate from a rich transplant that is price insensitive.
You can occasionally find a good, reasonable guy or company still, but you’ll be calling around for days to find them.
Having previously spent a decade in a hot-market (Charleston, SC) you’ll find similar stories, there are plenty of workers in the area, but they’re almost always expecting to charge rates to wealthy price-insensitive transplants.
If they’re really charging $10-20k then just fly someone in from a cheaper area with a reasonable hourly rate lol. It’s about 3-6h of not very intense labor
You've kind of exposed me, I'm not in the US, my question was in the first person but it was more that I'm curious as to the causes of what the commenters report. You may be right about the area just being HCoL, though.
It's a good idea. I'll do that in the Spring. Any recommendations on makes / series that do well in the cold and support some form of home assistant offline control (no cloud integration, zigbee or matter or similar)?
Edit: it seems that the market has decided that every manufacturer will ship the same cloud garbage and that the community has decided it actually isn't that hard to bypass and replace their wifi modules with ESPHome devices.
Agreed. They feel massively overpriced. Covid and government rebates had everyone using them as cash cows.
I installed a 24k btu one for my recording studio myself. Took me 3 hours. It’s a cheap Mr Cool one, but seems good enough for me and has been problem free. $1300 from Costco.
The quotes I got were $10-30k for one to five head units around my house. Nope!
If I’m going to spend that much I’m going to be looking into geothermal for heating
I've got to throw out an obvious explanation.
A third of the country rents. Renters pay the utility bills. Landlords pay for appliance upgrades.
Why would the landlord put any effort into upgrading appliances when the cost of not upgrading them is borne by the renters?
I've never rented at a place where they didn't want to fix broken equipment with the cheapest possible replacement. And no renter would ever consider purchasing a major appliance like this since they'll end up priced out before they recover the cost in utility bills.
They're a nice technology, but our incentives are all wrong for a lot of housing stock.
In some locations you can't rent out places without minimum energy efficiency ratings, which then leads to insulation and heat pumps getting installed.
Where is that?
This is referred to as "Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards (MEES)" and seems to have been pioneered in the UK and adopted by Netherlands and France and then the EU generally.
IME the people estimating energy efficiency in the UK do not recognise heat pumps and often misclassify them as less efficient systems.
I believe the EPC is being updated to fix that and googling suggests it has gone into effect a few months ago.
That doesn't square with the fact that new rentals are built with granite countertops and stainless-steel appliances. Tenants do shop around on the basis of amenities.
The combination with air conditioning and dehumidifying is genuinely compelling for the simplicity. Especially in new construction.
But these things trickle down to renters last. And if the landlord installs it, you bet your ass the rent is going up more than your savings on electricity.
Lose lose lose, if it gets installed then the current residents probably get priced out anyway. It eventually trickles down but we could do so much better.
Sure, but those amenities are highly visible. Lots of units have a stainless dishwasher exterior, but most will still be the landlord-special plastic tub inside. Who is shopping around based on whether or not there’s a heat pump? I would consider myself relatively well-educated on this and still the heat/cooling source is an afterthought.
Honestly the ductless mini split system in my new apartment was a big factor for me. But it was the first time I'd seen one over here in the mid-atlantic.
Then why aren’t they in 2/3 of houses
I listed a reason that impacts a third of houses. I didn't write an essay because the article lists plenty of others. It was just weird that they never mentioned the misaligned incentives.
They are efficient but do not have as high of an energy output as a smaller and cheaper gas furnaice. Apart from that, the water temperature is lower, so you need much larger radiators. Due to the lower energy output, you also need better insulation or a relatively massive heat pump. And the tech was not around 20 years ago (for reasons unknown to me).
The water temperature which you deliver to radiators are not defined by capacity of the heatpump, but how hot the radiators can be for safety/comfort reasons. If the radiators are too hot people could burn by touching them or stuff like platsic chairs would melt. Also the piping in the walls and floors cannot support too hot temperatures.
The temp for water used in radiators 60-70C is easily achievable by an air-top-water heat pump. It does not depend on the energy source, gas/oil/electricity.
The heat pump runs with much better efficiency at <50 degrees.
Condensing gas boilers similarly run more efficiently at lower temps.
If the water returning to the boiler isn't below 54C then there will be no condensing at all, and the advertised 90%+ efficiency won't happen till the return value is more like 46C.
That translates roughly to max winter temp of 65C leaving the boiler and lower when lesss heating is required.
This can be tweaked by the end user and save 10-20% on heating bills.
Is there a reason to use radiators and not just go straight to air to air pumps, which also have aircon?
From context I can't tell if they mean the heated coils in a heat pump head, or somehow connecting to a traditional radiator.
In older homes there isn't necessarily HVAC at all and instead there are actual radiators. I've lived in two like that, there is just no forced air to rooms.
Electricity is much more expensive than gas per J. You have to be ~3x more efficient to just break even.
> we’re waiting on people
Right on. I have a heat pump water heater and a heat pump heating system in my HVAC. Getting those installed felt like swimming upstream. Most contractors would try to dissuade me from them.
Luckily, I found a contractor who was skilled and knowledgeable about heat pumps and rebates (back when govt thought climate change was real). Very happy with my heat pump tech.
I’m in California, I have two heat pumps installed. I can sum up the problems as follows:
1. They are EXPENSIVE. The equipment itself isn’t that expensive tbh but installation is pretty expensive. The government subsidies have made sure that the contractors jack up their own prices by as much.
2. I end up paying more in utilities because electricity is very expensive and heat pumps aren’t nearly as good at heating in the winters as old fashioned gas furnaces when it comes to the cost.
I made the massive investment because I could and I eventually want my house to run completely on rooftop solar as a way to reduce my carbon footprint. But the cost is nowhere near mass market adoption price range.
I was shocked when I saw the price of heat pump installation in the US, even with an existing ducted system. There’s no reason a reversible heat pump system should be significantly more expensive than a cooling only one.
It’s bonkers. I bought a pre-charged ductless mini split to DIY. Took my dad and I about four hours to do the install. So call it 8 hours of semi-skilled labor.
The unit was $1350, I added a line set cover, pad and feet for another $200, and needed about $200 in electrical equipment - it was a long wire run and code requires installing a disconnect box. The only special tool was a hole saw bit for running the coolant lines.
So maybe $1850 all-in, plus 8 hours labor. I’m sure a pro could do it in half the time. But the low end for a pro install is $5k.
I get that they have insurance and warranty or whatever, but that’s a damn juicy margin.
It's not that different for other contractors either. That's part of the reason housing prices are so high. As unbelievable as it is, someone must be willing to pay the high prices. Economic inequality is the basic reason for the housing shortage.
I did the same thing and spent slightly less than you did because I did not need the extra linesets, etc. I was also able to install this in a location that few professionals would have tolerated (interior wall). My thinking was that even if the unit died, I would have saved so much on installation that it wouldn’t even matter. It’s a great unit too. Installation costs are kind of a racket.
In New Zealand a pretty basic 3.5kW (the internet told me that’s about a “ton”) mini split will cost about NZ$2000 including basic installation - that’s with the units on the same wall, ground floor, including the line set cover and running a new circuit if you need one. A 9.7kW model is only $3500. Again New Zealand dollars so halve that for US. Also that includes a 10 year warranty.
I know our labour costs are going to be lower, but not that much lower. Glassdoor indicates that salary for a US HVAC installer is about US$60k, and in NZ a local equivalent says NZ$60k, so I’d expect the numbers to be the same.
Oh and that price includes all taxes and excludes rebates (which most of us don’t qualify for anyway)
I’ve heard similar prices for Europe and elsewhere in the world. The US pricing seems to be uniquely out of step with everywhere else.
Now that you've got some experience, maybe you should start a heat pump installation company :-)
Lol it's protected by the licensing mafia. You'll have to change $5 capacitors for $1000 a pop for 4 years first while being paid peanuts to do it.
Hardly anyone wants to do that so we're stuck with the status quo. You're basically stuck either paying through the nose or finding a family/friend with the equipment and expertise or doing it yourself.
My time is still worth more slinging bits. But if that well runs dry, I’d consider it.
Umm, I encourage you to do that math a little closer. A contractor would have to;
Come to your house to quote, and only land 1/4 quotes maybe.
Schedule the workers
Order the equipment.
Get an electrical permit.
Pay for the truck and all the tools.
Insurance for the company and trucks.
Advertising costs
Warranty and callbacks
I can assure you that this is not the get rich quick scheme you may think it is.
Look up private equity buying up HVAC firms.
It is in fact a get rich scheme.
I don't know why you're being downvoted (it shows as slightly greyed out). This is true. I had a roommate who is a HVAC salesman. Very smooth talked. The 'HVAC' company offers free HVAC maintenance. They techs go in, do some stuff and they point out some problems. Sales guy goes in, smooth talks his way to 5K - 70K bill to most people. Of course, when something goes out and people don't have a choice (like in peak summer or winter), they make out like bandits.
Most of the local firms (Dick's local $town hvac/plumbing/electrical) are owned by massive PE firms (Saudi + other billionaires) which pretty much own the entire businesses all over US. They keep the local name to make people believe they are giving business to a local guy.
Another roommate of mine was a plumber.
The guys who do the actual work get paid close to nothing ($20 - $22/hour) and live on day to day basis.
Plumbing company quoted me $3000 to replace a broken water heater in the middle of peak winter. I paid my guy $300 for labor (heaters are $500 - $1000 from lowes depending on how long of warranty you want) and he was super happy for making a lot of money.
The good local contractors have all the work they can handle on commercial accounts. Residential is an annoyance. That leaves the very small fish (if you can find them) and the PE-owned scam companies.
The equipment is actually a lot cheaper if you’re a pro - the DIY pre-charged line-set adds about $500 over an equivalent unit. Pulling a vacuum and adding coolant is not hard, just requires specialized tools that still aren’t that expensive.
I mentioned warranty and insurance.
You don’t need to “schedule workers” if you are owner operating. Maybe you want a (non-skilled) helper to speed up the install, but you absolutely could install solo. That said, you will need a licensed electrician to run the circuit.
In my metro, hvac contractors can get ten-packs of permits for mini-split installs, and at most one out of ten is inspected. It’s a rubber stamp if you’re a pro, and the individual permit is maybe $50.
And that $5k I mentioned is the low bid, which you’ll only see if you know how to find contractors who aren’t private equity fronts. These guys are not advertising, but they stay busy by having the best price. There are shops that will happily charge you double for the same work.
I never said it’s a get rich quick scheme. It is just highly compensated for owners without requiring the level of expertise of something like a plumber or electrician. I’m curious what is happening in the market to support these margins.
Devils advocate here, it cost me ~$1500 in equipment to buy the vacuum pump, vacuum gauge, nitrogen air tank to flush the lines and pressure test, pressure manifold set and gauge, air lines, good flaring tool, copper bending tool, schrader valve pulling tools, various air tools, and a book on mini split installations.
Then it took me 2 days between pouring concrete pad for the heat pump, installing the heat pump and bolting it in, running the copper lines, drilling the exit hole, running the drain piping, learning how to use all the tools, running the electric and control cables and installing a new breaker and 220 subpanel, pressure testing, vacuum testing, flaring, releasing vacuum and all the stuff you have to do. I also had to spend several nights watching youtube and get a EPA 608 certification for handling refrigant which took another day.
Wouldn't have been worth it for a single unit, but was worth it for installing 3, and now I can do additional units for basically $0 overhead and of course no one would even have to know if I installed it and now I can order unlimited amount of refrigerants to my doorstep.
Having plumbed my entire house, and done my entire house electrical system, I would say the level of expertise to install a mini split is higher than either alone. You have to do electrical, plumbing, refrigerant handling, pressurized equipment handling, be liable for massive federal/EPA fines if you do something wrong, and on top of that I had to do masonry work.
There is a 0.00000% chance of getting into EPA trouble installing one minisplit. You got crews dumping 5 a day into a bucket of water all over and no one will answer a report
It's going to vary by installer, of course, but when I looked into getting a heat pump it was about $1500 more than just replacing the A/C condenser and evaporator with a like-for-like unit. Keeping the existing natural gas furnace as backup. This was in the PNW, about three years ago. $4500 for A/C, $6000 to replace it with a heat pump instead.
Re #2.
Tuning a heat pump vs resistive heat is a much tougher game than it should be. In a moderate climate, I use my ecobee to ensure aux heat doesn't come on until it's below freezing, and it should only come on if something has gone wrong at that point too. Unfortunately, many thermostats by default will use resistive heat in relatively normal scenarios, of worse, when you've programmed home and away times intended for efficiency but disparate enough to activate resistive heat.
In a moderate climate you should have no need for resistive heat. Why isn’t running the heat pump alone enough?
They are saying that badly configured controls often run the resistive heat when it isn't needed.
I wrote an op-ed in the SF Chronicle a few months ago about electricity costs in California holding back electrification, it's a real challenge: https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/heat-p...
That said, I've found that in most cases (assuming you're on the right electric rate plan, that's a whole other conversation, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42763695), most homeowners in california actually see operating cost parity or a slight decrease, even with super expensive electricity. Silicon Valley Clean Energy recently did a study substantiating this: https://svcleanenergy.org/wp-content/uploads/Bill-Impacts-of...
Electricity prices in San Francisco are so bad that it makes gasoline a reasonable alternative to an electric car.
> most homeowners in california actually see operating cost parity or a slight decrease, even with super expensive electricity
But you’re missing my first point though, installing a heat pump system comes with a price tag of tens of thousands of dollars. I’m not doing that if my operating cost is at parity or a slight decrease. It’s the same reason people are no longer incentivized to install solar. And to add to that, installing heat pumps also come with additional costs that can range anywhere from a few thousand dollars to replace the main electrical panel to tens of thousands of dollars for a full electrical upgrade if your house is on knob and tube wiring to reduce fire risks.
I feel like home solar makes no sense without subsidies, even now with economies of scale. Commercial solar may be a different story.
If you DIY everything and go with server rack batteries you can keep the costs low enough for a reasonable break even point. Any middleman is going to gouge.
That is awesome and I wish I had these skills. But it also rules out the vast majority of homeowners.
Home solar makes perfect sense in Australia - a market with similar Labour costs to California - because they do it for 1/3rd of the cost. It makes no sense in California when the subsidies alone are higher than the total costs for utility scale solar.
I just got 10 new 585w panels and inverter for under $5k. A battery is gonna cost me $1500 but at $350 month for electricity, not sure how you can claim it not worth it.
home solar makes sense when you live out in the boonies and there's an unreliable grid that goes down in storms
> installing a heat pump system comes with a price tag of tens of thousands of dollars.
Mine cost US$250 for the machine, refrigerant included, and another US$80 for the installation. We've had to have it fixed twice due to factory defects. Its heat output is 3400W, nominally consuming 941 watts of electrical power. It's not a great machine, but you're smoking crack.
In Southern California it costs $120 just for a guy to come out and look at your HVAC. Not fix anything--not install anything--just to look at it and give you an estimate for how much the repair is going to take. I went to the website for a local installer and they give a ballpark of $13,000-$25,000 for a heat pump installation.
I don't know why it's so expensive here. It shouldn't be, it makes no sense. But it is.
I presume you're not in the US - the numbers you quoted here align with the costs I observed for heat pumps in India (https://www.heatpumped.org/p/you-can-have-it-in-any-color-as...)
Skilled labor in the US is expensive! Most of the install costs come from labor, not equipment. Tens of thousands of dollars is pretty typical for a heat pump installation.
(For what it's worth, the person you're quoting is referencing a whole home system, either ducted or multi-zone ductless. I think you're referencing a single-zone ductless. Those are cheaper, but still are typically $5-10k installed from a licensed contractor in the states)
Yes, it's just a mini split. Two guys (skilled, but AFAIK not licensed) installed it in about 6 hours. I'm in Argentina, but I don't think US$1000 an hour is a common labor rate even in the US? Maybe for a famous lawyer or surgeon?
Ha. It's not straight labor. So much other overhead to consider - workman's comp insurance, back office staff, technician utilization, vehicle repair and maintenance, etc... There are lots of other costs that get baked in when you're looking at a licensed company compared to a guy in a truck
Okay but US$5k for half a day of work? It would have been faster if the guy had had his own ladder instead of us moving my desk so he could stand on it to work. (He's bought one since then.)
A half day of work, a half day of office rent, a half day of truck use, a half day to pay for loan servicing, a half day to pay overhead costs, a half day to add to reserves for the half day you don't work, and so forth.
Homes in the US are much bigger and more than just installing a mini split. You need to factor that in.
The first point is very valid too. There was an energy commission study a few years ago, and up front cost is pretty consistently one of the biggest barriers to heat pump adoption.
I think there's some nuance to that, though. Even replacing a furnace + AC in California amounts to tens of thousands of dollars! It's not that heat pumps are expensive, it's that construction work in general is expensive.
When you frame it in terms of percentage of home cost, it actually feels a lot more reasonable. Robert Bean is a pretty respected voice in HVAC, and shared this article a few years ago (https://web.archive.org/web/20150210053806/http://www.health...). The gist is (and this is focused a bit on new construction, so not entirely apples to apples) that you should budget 3-5% of the home's cost for a bare minimum code compliant HVAC installation. When you look at it in that lens, $20k to replace the most complicated mechanical system in a $3M home is less than 1%.
I recently read a piece about the "Cost disease in services" that was really enlightening (https://growthecon.com/feed/2017/05/15/What-You-Spend.html).
"Productivity growth in the goods sector raises the wage in that sector, but also raises the output of that sector. So the ratio of wage to output - a measure of the cost of a unit of output - stays constant over time. Higher wages in the goods sector put pressure on wages in the service sector, so wages rise over time there. But (taking the exteme position) productivity is not growing in services, and so output is not growing. The ratio of wages to output in services - a measure of costs - is thus rising over time. This is the “cost disease of services”."
While I don't think that's all of it, it is a helpful framing of the economics around these dynamics.
There are some companies out there that are truly price gouging. But many are just pricing around the true cost of labor and to run a construction business. I've done a little writing around this topic too: https://www.heatpumped.org/p/pricing-transparency-peeking-be...
Ultimately, I would love to see upfront prices & operating costs for heat pumps both fall. But there are a lot of tough realities baked into the cost of these systems. They are still a very logical choice for most homeowners at the time of failure. Especially with rebate & incentive stacks in many places, a heat pump actually works out cheaper than a new furnace + traditional AC for many homeowners.
Good article, but I must point out that in no way will private equity reduce prices. It will be the exact opposite
. . . and how many people do you assume own $3M homes? Good grief.
The median home in the SF Bay Area is $2M, so given that this thread is focused on California I think it’s a reasonable number to anchor on… https://www.sfgate.com/realestate/article/bay-area-metro-are...
Even if we changed the number to $1M, the overall point remains the same
I got a heat pump with a backup gas furnace this year. A heat pump just felt like a no-brainer of I was going to get an AC anyway. But gas in PA tends to be cheaper, so the system will use gas at a certain point. The problem is I couldn't have picked a whose installer if I was throwing darts at the wall, but that's another story.
I ended up self-installing my HP-WH. Professionals either tried to talk me out of it like you described, or charged a premium for the upgrade. My county has a rebate that allows for self-installs. It was rather straight forward and ended up being ~$700 in the end. The old unit I tore out took an extra $350/year in electricity, so I've already broken even.
I had a similar problem too. Was unable to find anyone who was willing to quote me on a heatpump when I was installing my air conditioner. I assume it will be better in 5-10 years when I have to replace them.
Unlikely. Private equity is swooping in, especially in places like New York that have taken bizarre regulatory stances against gas.
In my area, about 75% of the HVAC companies have been swept up. Prices are up 75-150%. I got my gas furnace replaced to to beat the ban, and had a fireman who works a side gig do the job for $15k. The bids from the companies ranged from $25-85k
I guess I lucked out; our house had a (very old) whole-home (that is, ducted) heat pump system for heating and cooling when we moved in. When it was time to replace, our local contractor knew exactly what we needed. They even do mini-splits, had we wanted one.
Do newer ones somehow not need ducts?
Edit: (or so you mean mini splits?)
No, no ductless magic without mini splits. I feel like a lot of people refer to heat pump systems interchangeably with ductless mini splits, so I wanted to clarify that. Maybe that's just an issue with the people I speak with, though.
You are right. Most do heat pumps with mini splits for each zone. However, ducted houses can certainly use heat pumps with an air handler. Typically this translates to heat pump replaced outdoor condenser (ac unit)and the air handler replaces the indoor furnace.
> the air handler replaces the indoor furnace
If the furnace is a serviceable natural gas unit, keep it. It makes a better backup than strip heat.
What's the difference? They all work on the exact same closed loop evaporation cycle no?
Yes, the actual refrigeration and heating cycles are always based on compressing and decompressing a gas. But the gasses used differ based on temperature range, and further you can have air to air, air to water, or water to water for the heat transfer. The overall costs are the system can be very different based on whether you have a split unit that requires a single wall penetration, a central unit in the basement with ducting, or a geothermal system that requires digging deep trenches or wells. It makes for difficult conversation when some people are talking only about air to air minisplits when others are including all of these and more.
I'm just much more used to seeing air handler style, particularly for situations that aren't additions.
Honestly yeah. Even a certified heat pump engineer would try to persuade me to "just get a gas boiler" when asked for quotes.
We have the same setup , we love it.
Regarding the crazy prices - it’s structural.
In Asia, manufacturers sell direct or through highly competitive retail channels and the installers really only have to know minisplits.
Minisplits in the US get sold by the brand -> distributor -> dealer (contractor) -> homeowner with each step being a 20% market up. Sometimes there is even a master distributor in there AND usually there is a “rep group” taking points too.
That is fundamentally what drives up costs. That and the fact that the US housing marketing is very heterogeneous so contractors have to know boilers, ducted heatpumps, furnaces, packaged units, ductless, etc.
I recently got a Mr. Cool DIY minisplit at Costco for $1600. I called an independent electrician to run the wiring for $200 and he helped me install the thing for another $200. So I got a fully installed minisplit for $2k and it works great.
Did the same thing except saved the $400 and did it in an afternoon.
Electricity costs are a big factor in this, imo.
Rates for my northeast town increased by ~25% in 2024 and are going up by another ~10% this year. It's a hard sell to spend a large amount of up-front money (even after rebates, which decreased this year) to convert to a system that will cost you more than you pay today, and may not work as well in cold weather (every heat pump company I talked to suggested keeping my existing gas heating in place and automatically switching to it when it gets cold enough).
I was also told that the electrical grid in my area is having difficulty keeping up with the push towards heat pumps, which increase load exactly on the coldest nights of the year, when you need heating most.
>Rates for my northeast town increased by ~25% in 2024 and are going up by another ~10% this year.
Don't forget that those costs are going up in large part because heat pump subsidies are being rolled into electricity prices.
Imagine being a ~$100k HHI household and paying $300+/mo for electricity so that $200+k HHI doctor/lawyer/HN households can have subsidized heat pumps and our sleazy contractors, and the dealers, and everyone else upstream) can over-charge us for the privilege (thereby getting their cut of the subsidy).
It's a miracle we haven't all caught hot lead yet.
Costs are a big thing, sure, but for me it's electrical reliability. For better or worse our heating oil and natural gas supply are both more reliable than our electricity supply. I don't need the heat going out in the dead of winter when some wind storm drops a bunch of branches on power lines.
I'm aware that both my boiler and a natural gas furnace have electric blower motors. It's a lot easier to power them from a generator than it is to have a generator than can power a house worth of heat pumps.
You can have both, though. A person doesn't have to make a binary decision of heatpump OR natural gas.
Please remember that traditional aircon is also literally a heat pump. It's perfectly acceptable to have a ducted heat pump and a ducted natural gas furnace both sharing the same ductwork.
In this use, the heat pump and the furnace are just installed series with eachother, with one singular blower motor that is used for both roles. This arrangement is very similar (identical, really) to the layout that combined (heat+aircon) systems have used for many decades.
Power out, or simply very cold outside? Your house still has a natural gas furnace (which can be made work with a fairly small generator), and your rig doesn't require expensive-to-use heat strips for the coldest days either.
My personal anecdote? Don't.
I have a house where the first floor is served by a gas/ac combo unit, and the second floor with a heat pump.
I literally see no advantage to the heat pump and wish I didn't have it. It takes forever to heat and cool, comparitively, and likes to ice over when it gets too cold in the winter while running 24/7 doing nothing. The emergency heat eventually kicks in and fixes it, so I'm considering just running emergency heat all winter.
The fact that your heat pump setup is also taking longer to cool suggests there's something fundamentally different between the setup on your different floors, not that there is something bad with heat pumps in general.
A heat pump in cooling mode works exactly like an AC unit, because that's exactly what it is. So if your AC unit on the first floor cools more quickly than you AC unit (i.e. heat pump) on your second floor, it's because A) your floors are different sizes or insulated differently or something else is different about their construction, B) your units are sized differently, or C) your heat pump has some mechanical problem. But the fact that it's a heat pump should make no difference to its cooling performance.
Sounds like you have one of two problems: 1) you are changing the temperature too often. Set it and forget it. 2) you have a refrigerant leak
Our heat pump for HVAC is awesome.
Until it gets under 30. Then you can watch the power meter crank when auxiliary heat kicks on. And we only keep it 65 in the house in the winter.
Luckily I live in the upper Midwest, so it's only that cold for like 4 months. . . Pretty cool. P.r.e.t.t.y. cool
Some heat pumps are rated for much lower temps.
They can work at lower temperatures, but they do need the auxiliary heat to deice the outside coils.
It's my understanding that nowadays most heat pumps have a defrost cycle where they automatically run in reverse for a bit with some or all fans off
When it’s running in reverse then it’s acting as an air conditioner blowing cold air into the house. So usually the heat strips are used then to reheat the air and prevent it from blowing cold air in the middle of winter. Not strictly necessary but most people demand it.
I think that may be how it works, yeah.
the aux heat comes in because their output is a multiplier. At 30F, perhaps they produce 4x the heat as the electricity put in. At 0F, perhaps they produce 1.8x the heat. This means the output declines with temperature, until eventually they don't produce enough heat to hold temperature. Enter aux heat.
Cold weather heat pumps help because they stay above 1x for longer, but you also wind up needing to oversize a bit.
Thank you for explaining!
auxiliary heat is a separate heat source for the indoors.
Most cold climate heat pumps run a defrost cycle to melt ice off the outdoor unit. that's different from auxiliary heat.
I see!
Heat pumps are just air conditioners in reverse. They use the same amount of electricity whether heating or cooling. While many people have air conditioners, and grids seem to be able to handle them in the summer, an assertion that the grid can’t handle them in the winter is doubtful. Plus there are fewer people using them in the winter (just because fewer are installed). Most people in the NE heat with oil, gas, or wood, so that would reduce the electric load (compared to summer) even further.
There would be an increase only if people were supplementing the heat pump with electric heat, which to be fair is a possibility.
There’s a lot of misinformation about heat pumps, especially by HVAC people who don’t have a lot of experience with them, so they tend to recommend what they’re more familiar with.
But yes, understanding the electricity cost is essential when considering one.
I would be curious to know the difference. In summer you might find 30c outside and inside 20c so a difference of 10c. In winter it can reach -30c and inside is 20c. This is 5x more!
I have a heat pump, along with hvac. It only produces heat. Is it possible to get it to produce cooling too or is that an entirely different system?
> They use the same amount of electricity whether heating or cooling
This is completely wrong. The amount of power depends on the temperature delta. When cooling, you are typically not cooling your home to 30 degrees Celsius below the outdoor temperature. However, when heating, you are typically heating your home to around 20 degrees above outdoor temperature. Heating consumes more power than cooling.
It is approximately correct as long as the temperature deltas are approximately the same for heating vs cooling.
(And as long as we're dispelling generalizations: Those deltas do vary wildly based on local climate, such that they're impossible to generalize and typify.
For instance: The city of Saint Paul, Minnesota [USA] has a very different climate compared to the city of São Paulo in Brazil, with accordingly-different heating/cooling deltas.
https://weatherspark.com/h/y/10422/2025/Historical-Weather-d...
https://weatherspark.com/h/y/30268/2024/Historical-Weather-d... )
Well, in that case, you don’t need a heat pump. You need a sweater and an AC.
The real advantage of heat pumps is in displacing high cost fuels.
A heat pump just makes no sense whatsoever for me in my northeast town. The electric bill alone would outpace the old propane bill, not to mention installation.
And it won't even work during some of the coldest winter weeks when you _really_ need it to work.
Maybe I would consider it if I was in, like, Nevada or somewhere.
The notion that heat pumps don’t work at low temperatures hasn’t been true for years. I think you may be surprised to find that just about any heat pump you look at has good efficiency down to very low temperatures.
That’s true, but still doesn’t always make heat pumps the most cost effective choice to operate. For example, last winter I paid an average of $0.24/kWh for electricity vs $0.05/kWh for natural gas. Even if a heat pump had a perfect 4.0 COP all winter, gas would be ~15% cheaper. Electricity prices really need to come down before it will be viable for everyone.
Does your 0.05/kWh include the distribution costs? The thing to do once you go to heating with gas is to just switch completely to electricity and turn off gas. In my experience (admittedly not in the US, but several other countries) distribution cost often more than double the $/kWh for natural gas (especially if you only heat part of the year).
Yeah. Sadly the trend does not seem to be heading that direction what with the current admin’s … policies and the whole … AI … thing.
Not to mention, lots of places have time of use electricity pricing which makes it even worse. This is the problem with running my heatpump when its cold, some of the coldest times (right before dawn) coincide with peak time-of-use prices
where do you live that the highest electricity prices are before dawn?
This varies quite a bit based on location for instance here in Florida natural gas is $0.13/kWh while electricity is about $0.12/kWh, also where I live there is no piped NG so it would be propane delivered to a storage tank which is even more expensive.
Also the winters are mild here so basically everyone has either a heat pump or the further south you go it's just heat strips because heat is rarely used so not worth the cost.
So any kind of blanket statement about heat pumps vs gas heat would be folly, but due to improvements in cold weather heat pumps and solar power are allowing them to make much more sense in more places.
There are many advantages to decoupling fuel combustion from its energy use, burning NG at a power plant relatively efficiently with much better emission controls, then distributing on electric grid for use more than just heating, while allowing the home to heat from many different energy sources and allow for grid down backup as well.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/ng_pri_sum_a_EPG0_PRS_DMcf_m.htm
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
Get solar.
I’ve tried. For it to be at all viable on my property, I’d need to cut down a bunch of trees. I’d rather keep the trees and pay someone else with solar panels.
That makes sense. Is that legal?
They have good heat output down to very low temperatures, but not good efficiency.
The CoP is often around 2.0 at those very low temps, though (and of course the heat energy demanded is higher).
Define low temperatures.
Mine struggles if it gets below 30, and might as well not exist below 10. They're not great at low temps.
> Mine struggles if it gets below 30, and might as well not exist below 10. They're not great at low temps.
What percentage of the (US) population gets temperatures like that? That's generally mostly IECC Zone 7 (though cold snaps in Zone 6) can happen:
* https://basc.pnnl.gov/images/iecc-climate-zone-map
ASHRAE—an HVAC organization—has data on the coldest and hottest days for areas so that you can design things for the coldest or hottest 1% of the year (4 hottest/coldest days):
* https://ashrae-meteo.info/v2.0/
I think that if you have an older, leaky/ier, less-insulated house you may need to 'brute force' heating your (probably older) domicile. But if you have a <4 ACH@50 air tightness, and reasonable insulation levels, a good portion of the US population could make do with a heat pump.
Mitsubishi publishes data were they have 100% heating capacity at -15C, which some models being 100% at -20C and -23C:
* https://www.mitsubishielectric.ca/en/hvac/home-owners/zuba
At -25C they have 80% capacity:
* https://www.mitsair.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/MEM-20240...
> What percentage of the (US) population gets temperatures like that? That's generally mostly IECC Zone 7 (though cold snaps in Zone 6) can happen:
A lot? e.g. Chicago gets it every year
>>> Mine struggles if it gets below 30, and might as well not exist below 10. They're not great at low temps.
>> > What percentage of the (US) population gets temperatures like that? That's generally mostly IECC Zone 7 (though cold snaps in Zone 6) can happen:
> A lot? e.g. Chicago gets it every year
[citation needed]
Per historical weather data:
https://ashrae-meteo.info/v2.0/index.php?lat=41.960&lng=-87....
It is warmer than -16C/3F at Chicago (O'Hare) for 99% of the time (i.e., except for 4 days a year), and warmer than -18.7C/-2F for 99.6% of the time (2 days).
ASHRAE are the folks that publish the heating/cooling standards that are used in building codes for estimate heating/cooling equipment capacities (Manual J) and selecting the right equipment (Manual S).
Here's a PDF with a lot of locations in the US and CA (and other countries further down), and if you look under the "Heating DB" column, you'll find very few US locations that have -30F under the 99% (or even 99.6%) sub-columns:
* https://www.captiveaire.com/catalogcontent/fans/sup_mpu/doc/...
So unless you're in AK, MN, or ND, long runs of temperatures colder than -20F/-30C don't happen too often. Of course if you have a leaky house with little insulation, you're throwing money out the window/door, so the first consideration for a good ROI is better air sealing and insulation.
I think the comment was saying below 30F and below 10F. Much warmer than you're saying.
Also..
> It is warmer than -16C/3F at Chicago (O'Hare) for 99% of the time (i.e., except for 4 days a year), and warmer than -18.7C/-2F for 99.6% of the time (2 days).
If my heat doesn't work for those days, I'm kind of boned. Four days per year without a working heat pump? That's a mess.
So gas hash higher reliability and is cheap for the times you need heat the most, whereas heat pumps might not work and are not cheap at the times you need them the most?
I’ve had a gas furnace keep me and the water heated multiple times in a cold weather power outage.
How did you run the fans on your gas furnace without electric power?
If you have a backup generator, is it too small for your AC in the summer?
Gas generator. I think it would be too small for my air conditioner in the summer (5 ton).
I would never use the generator in the summer though, doesn’t get that hot in the Pacific Northwest.
That's one of the older style units. Starting in 2007 when Mitsubishi introduced their "Hyper-Heating Inverter" heat pumps, and continuing with Fujitsu and Daikin following with similar technology in the 2010-12 timeframe, and others a few years later, heat pumps got way better in the cold.
Mitsubishi's maintain 200%+ efficiency down to -4℉ (-20℃) and 150% down to -22℉ (-30℃) [1]. Only a few towns in the continental US get below that, and even those aren't going to get cold enough long enough to make it worth it an an all electric home to switch to your emergency electrical resistance heating.
Their capacity doesn't start dropping until you get down to 23℉ (-5℃), dropping to 76% at -13℉ (-25℃).
[1] https://www.coolingpost.com/world-news/study-proves-heat-pum...
I've got one about 8 years old, and it does just fine down to 0°F (it hasn't gotten colder than that here). It doesn't even have any kind of auxiliary heat.
It's fine. The only difference when it's super-cold is that the air coming out of it isn't as warm, so the heating cycle stays on for a longer proportion of the time. But it keeps it 70°F inside no problem at all.
I’m not sure what yours is but it doesn’t sound appropriate to your application.
Mitsubishi hyper heat is indicative of a contemporary inverter design - 100% efficiency to -5f: https://www.mitsubishicomfort.com/articles/mythbusters-heat-...
100% efficiency is terrible for a heat pump. Electric resistance heat is 100% efficient.
I should have said 100% performance. COP is typically 3-4:1 with mitsu
Typical seasonal average? Sure.
At -5°F? Hell no!
At +5°F, they rate their own equipment to have a 2.0 CoP.
https://mylinkdrive.com/viewPdf?srcUrl=http://s3.amazonaws.c...
Here's a Trane/Mitsubishi unit that has a COP of (at least) 3 at -13F/-25C:
* https://ashp.neep.org/#!/product/156605/7/25000/95/7500/0///...
An LG unit with 2.4 at -4F/-20C:
* https://ashp.neep.org/#!/product/29688/7/25000/95/7500/0///0
Searchable database of cold climate air source heat pumps (ccASHPs):
* https://ashp.neep.org/#!/product_list/
Correct (and thanks for the link to that unit).
Though it’s worth noting that that first 2 ton rated unit is putting out 0.5 tons (6k BTU/hr) at that temp and rating.
That’s not going to be particularly helpful for a structure that needed 24k BTU/hr during warmer temps, meaning the owner of the unit is likely mixing in a lot of 1.0 BTUs to meet the heat loss at -13°F.
> Though it’s worth noting that that first 2 ton rated unit is putting out 0.5 tons (6k BTU/hr) at that temp and rating.
I just did a quick search for "all" units and sorted the result list/table by COP@5F. If one was actually shopping/designing a solution then a more nuanced search criteria would be used.
Further, you'd probably want to do a (US ACCA) Manual J calculation to first determine how much energy is needed (j = joules)
* https://www.youtube.com/@HomePerformance/search?query=manual...
Then the (US ACCA) Manual S (select) to figure out your equipment:
* https://www.youtube.com/@HomePerformance/search?query=manual...
One can lookup the 1% (or 0.4%) of coldest/hottest days for your area, which would help determine what one actually has to typically worry about:
* https://ashrae-meteo.info/v2.0/
* https://www.airequipmentcompany.com/2021/what-does-design-da...
My heat pump, in Colorado, kept the house warm at -18°F last winter. Without firing up the backup resistance heating strip. I think it works.
(It is more expensive to operate than the natural-gas furnace was, though).
Insulation matters as well and I’m guessing your Colorado house is far newer and better sealed than most New England homes.
I don't know what sort of heat pump systems are common in the US, but Sweden (and AFAIK Norway and Finland as well), are probably >%80 heat pump for single family homes (most apartments are community heating at least in the larger cities). So it's absolutely now problem to run a heat pump even if it is very cold outside, but if you want to improve efficiency in areas that are super cold you can drill into the ground for a heat sink (those are called Bergvärme in Sweden).
Regarding cost, in most of the countries I've lived in a large fraction of the cost in the gas bill was the distribution cost. So once you switch to a heat pump, you also switch to electric cooking and even if heating with electricity would be significantly more expensive you would still win. Is that different in the US?
It varies significantly by locale. I've seen people post online about how it made little sense to keep just one gas appliance because of significant savings. I'm in Iowa, which typically heats on natural gas in urban areas. I have a natural gas central furnace and water heater. My clothes dryer is electric, and I have a 3 head heat pump which I use for comfort in a couple rooms. The house is an early 2000's standard builder-grade home.
For September, $12.31 of my $27.01 gas bill was variable based on my consumption.
In December, $84.82 out of my $99.65 total was consumption driven.
I've run numbers on whether it'd make financial sense to go electric for heating, and the break even point is in the 30-40 degree vicinity. With temperatures 20 and under a healthy chunk of the year, unfortunately the added expense doesn't make financial sense.
It works just fine during winters if you do it properly and couple them with ducts that are a couple of hundred meters deep.
We had a heat pump installed last year. It’s advertised as a cold-climate heat pump and it’s “good enough” for us, but it’ll never again be toasty on a cold night, just relatively warm. When under heavy load, it also has some kind of loud vibration issue, I think in the lines that run from inside out to the condenser. The system is an Ecoer, which is a Chinese company that pretends to be a U.S. company. And it has a really suspicious 4G cellular IoT modem that, of course, feeds all the data to their cloud, with no end-user access.
I will say, it keeps the temperature very stable, which is nice. And it saves money, paying for itself within 10 years. But there’s actually quite a bit that can go wrong during installation and it’s not easy to get them to fix everything, maybe because U.S. installers aren’t used to all of the nuances of heat pumps yet. Our aux heat strips still aren’t working properly, after multiple service visits.
If I could do it over again, I would still get a heat pump. But I would go with a Mitsubishi system and a more experienced installer. The extra cost is worth it.
Sounds like it wasn’t sized well?
Everybody seems to agree that installation costs way too much.
There's a few parts to this. Everything has to be carefully sized - power, pipe sizes, unit locations. You need to put a house's thermal profile (how much heat loss, how much air leak, how much thermal mass) along with the regional thermal profile into an engineering calculation which computes what you need.
Thermographic inspections are a thing.[1] Usual price is around $400. They're not very standardized. You get IR images of a house, which is good for finding leaks but not quantitative enough to size a heating and cooling plant.
This would be a great drone application. Fly over and around the house. Build a 3D model of the house and paint heat loss on top of it. Crunch on data to get the engineering info needed to correctly size HVAC. Also discover big heat leak points. Turn this from experienced guessing into measurement.
Then submit that data sheet to multiple sites that offer heat pumps.
Startup opportunity here.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/thermographic-inspections
I would argue that accurate sizing is not that important as labor constitutes the bulk of the cost. My total bill was about $20K and going for 30% less capacity would net about $19K so its easier just to go for the maximum. Calling in an IR imaging drone would certainly cost more than the potential savings from accurate sizing.
Unlike gas furnaces which basically can only do ON or OFF, heat pumps can regulate the heat with much higher granularity.
What certainly calls for innovation is managing the labor costs. In my case installation involved way too many people and way too many visits.
Reducing labor costs is hard.
For commercial applications, modular/off-site builds are a way to reduce labor costs. Yet, homes design are so fragmented that it's hard to build something plug-n-play.
Isn’t it important to right-size non-heat-pump installs anyway? Too large a system causes short cycling, humidity problems, temperature swings. I have read installers habitually guesstimate over size to over charge (rather than do the proper calculations).
The reality is that this is all solving a problem that people don’t have.
Forced air is a terrible way to heat a building yet thats how most homes are heated, and it is good enough for most people.
If you perfectly size a furnace for the coldest days of the year, it is now oversized for the other 90% of days.
The cheapest way is to install a multi stage heating/cooling system that works on first stage most of the time, and second when it needs to, like having 2 small furnaces. This passes the ‘good enough’ test for the vast majority of homeowners.
Are you just referring to a two-stage AC/furnace?
They oversize because customers who have an oversized system generally don’t complain but customers who have an undersized system definitely will complain when it can’t get to and hold their desired temperature.
This wouldn't work, unfortunately. A lot of insulation has a reflective layer yielding invalid readings from thermal imaging.
There are several other factors like air tightness which requires a blower door to measure and even the number of elbows in the duct system could have an effect. It's a surprisingly complex field. You wouldn't gain anything over a traditional home energy auditor.
The real opportunity is to scrap everything and rethink the system from scratch.
>There's a few parts to this. Everything has to be carefully sized - power, pipe sizes, unit locations.
No. Not even in the slightest. A two bit could make conservative guesses or work off a conservatively spec'd sizing table and then deal with the resulting excess capacity with controls/distribution.
Whether it's a sewer line or a hvac system or retaining wall it's the same stupid situation. The only reason that we do calculated minimum-ish sizing for all this stuff is because if you're being screwed by law into paying to make work for a credentialed professional you might as well make them save you money on the rest of it so that you're only getting screwed out of $0.95 on the dollar instead of $1 on the dollar instead.
or you could, you know, wing-it, like they do overseas, and I tell you, the world does not end.
You're better off guesstimating yourself than trusting contractors. The contractors are incentivized to severely oversize any AC units they install or else people leave bad reviews on their pages/listings when the installed unit can't keep up the one day every two years that the temperature gets abnormally hot.
I did this myself and insisted on a unit half the capacity that the contractors wanted. Several flat-out refused. But it works perfectly! Approximately one day ever two years it can't keep up. Which means that all the other time it doesn't short-cycle. Perfect.
I had to replace my home HVAC system this year and went with a variable speed system. It was eye-wateringly expensive, but it works much much much better than the system that was in here before, and completely obviated my concerns about sizing (the old system was an oversized single-stage unit, and the house always stayed cooled, but something or other was regularly breaking, probably due to the short-cycling).
With the new system, electricity consumption on a hot summer day is about a third of the prior system, it’s virtually silent and the comfort of the house (due to more granular temperature control and near-constant dehumidification) is substantially better.
People are reluctant to install them because they don't work as well as the good old boilers we'd be replacing. I'm not saying they can't, and I'm not saying that there are zero models out there that work. But in practice, a lot of us that have interacted with heat pumps have the specific experience that they get anemic as the temperature goes down and eventually become unable to do much of anything.
I live in the mid-Atlantic (US) climate zone, where it's certainly not as cold as the north but definitely goes well below freezing regularly for several months of the year. The place I've lived for 15 years had a heat pump and a (oil) boiler with radiators, and when it was below 40°F (~5°C) I had to switch to the radiators. It's because it's old, everybody told me, modern heat pumps are better! So last year when both systems needed repairs at the same time, I not-entirely-willingly switched to a brand-new 2024-model heat pump. It absolutely could not keep up when the temperature was freezing until they came back and installed resistive heat strips for low temperature---these seem to be a fancy version of the heating elements in a space heater or a toaster. They do not seem to be particularly efficient. And to the extent that my "heat pump system" does now more or less keep the house adequately warm, if not as comfortable as the radiators always could, it's not solely due to the heat pump, but the other stuff they had to put in because the heat pump couldn't keep up.
My experience is far from unique. Maybe it's that they only install the good ones in farther-north locations! Maybe it's that the good ones are just way more expensive! I'm perfectly prepared to believe the factual statements about the physics and the tech. But if we're talking about perception and "why aren't more people looking to install heat pumps", it's because lots of people have experiences like the above, and that is what the industry needs to work on.
This is such a weird tale to hear. I heat my 2 story 147m2 house in Sweden with a single heat pump and it's downright cosy down to -10C. I have noticed that my office, which is located at the furthest possible place from the heatpump, tends to get a bit chilly when outdoors temperatures fall below -10°c. usually a blanket is enough to keep me toasty, but on the rare occasion that it gets real cold (below about -15°c), I have a fireplace to save the day. That fireplace actually gets used more for the cozyness of a fire than it does for actual need of heating, but it does help on the worst days of Scandinavian winter.
All this to say: if your pump can't handle +5°c, I wonder if you got scammed or if there are other factors at play? Is your house insulated at all? Do you keep your windows open throughout winter? Your experience is so different from mine it's hard to believe we're even talking about the same technology!
It's the insulation. While it depends on the location and geography, I'd wager that American homes are probably less well insulated than Swedish homes because they didn't have to be.
That contrasts quite a bit with Swedish home standards, which have long been built more air-tight and with considerably better insulated even if they're of comparable age. This has been true for decades, became even more stark in the 1980s, and likely remains very different on the balance: https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings/1984/data/papers/SS8...
Responding to this and more generally to everyone mentioning insulation: I'm not saying that insulation is irrelevant, but when I say it fades out at low temps, I mean that if I put my hand over the forced-air duct it feels at best maybe a tiny bit warmer than the ambient air. (Which together with the forced-air circulation makes the room feel even colder, even if the temp is technically going up, but that's more a complaint about forced air, not heat pumps.) Insulation problems would mean I'm running it more and I'm paying more to heat the place than I might with better insulation. But insulation problems aren't what's causing the emitted air to feel cold.
Also, as noted, I'm sure part of it is that they gave me a heat pump that's rated to 5°C or whatever instead of -15. Probably because they expect that everyone around here has a backup heating system, and it doesn't get Sweden-cold (or Chicago-cold, for that matter) in this area. Cool cool, but that just reinforces the message that heat pumps can't hack it and if you're buying a heat pump system you really need to also buy a second system—which may not be entirely true but there's other people on this very thread with a kind of dismissive "everyone knows" attitude regarding backup heating that fundamentally undermines the original message (which was my whole point).
it isn't insulation.
It depends primarily on your electricity and methane prices. In Ontario, Canada, electricity is cheap enough that heat pumps are cheaper than methane on all but the very coldest days, even if your home insulation is older than 1980 standards.
Some heat pumps bottom out at 35F, some at -15F. It seems to be down to the breed of heat pump, and there isn't much in between.
> The place I've lived for 15 years had a heat pump and a (oil) boiler with radiators, and when it was below 40°F (~5°C) I had to switch to the radiators.
When was the heat pump manufactured? Mitsubishi, for one, publishes data were they have 100% heating capacity at -15C, which some models being 100% at -20C and -23C:
* https://www.mitsubishielectric.ca/en/hvac/home-owners/zuba
There's a website for cold climate air-source heat pumps (ccASHPs), that has performance data down to (at least) 5F/-15C:
* https://neep.org/heating-electrification/ccashp-specificatio...
* https://ashp.neep.org/#!/
OEMs can optionally have publish data on "Lowest Cataloged Temperature" if it's below 5F/-15C.
Also: how (air) leaky is your house? how much insulation? For a lot of folks dealing with those two things would be more cost effective than anything.
As it stands, even if you are heating with "cheap" methane (née 'natural') gas, propane, or oil, you're throwing money out the window by letting the heat out in winter. (And the heat in / cold out in the summer.)
I have to agree. I've spent about 2/3s my life in houses with heat pumps and the last 5 years with a gas furnace (the rest being wood heat as a child). Mostly in Western NC and Eastern TN near the mountains, so chilly but not extreme cold.
Heat pumps work, but they aren't nearly as _pleasant_. You can write essays about the efficiency of heat pumps, how lukewarm air works just fine to warm the house, how heat pumps are great _most of the time_ and you can supplement with space heaters or whatever when they fall short... But as long as furnaces are accessible and affordable, an awful lot of people are going to choose to have nice warm heat that is always going to be nice and warm regardless of the outside temperature.
I have never had a heat pump, so I wasn't aware of this shortcoming. Could you please explain a bit more how different it is with heat pump compared to furnace?
The heat pump will always produce air that is warmer than the temp in the house, but as the temp outside drops the temp of the air coming out of the vents also drops. So on a very cold day when the house temp is say 70F, the system might only be putting out air that's 75-80F. The air coming out of the vents doesn't really _feel_ warm and it may take an hour or two to raise the temperature in the house when you wake up or get home in the evening.
In my experience at least with relatively modern heat pumps (roughly 2000 and newer) it doesn't matter that much when outside temps are above freezing. But it quickly starts to become noticeable as temps drop into the 20s.
I see. Thanks for the explanation. So the system is slow to come up to the set temperature. Is it good at keeping the temperature though? After the house temp gets to 70, does it consistently stay at 70, or are there shortcomings in this aspect too?
That depends on the insulation and how much you open and close the doors and windows.
Resistive heat strips are what all electric furnaces use. It's just a bunch of coils of nichrome heating wire. The efficiency of a resistive heater is basically 100%. One Watt of electricity in gives you one watt of heat out.
The mistake people make is assuming a heat pump can do everything by itself anywhere in any climate. If you have cold winters, you need a dedicated furnace to supplement the heat pump.
I say supplement because while an electric furnace is near 100% efficient at turning electricity into heat, a heat pump can be far more than 100% efficient. And that's the crucial detail: a heat pump can give you more heat per Watt than a resistive heater when outside temperatures are warm enough.
What brand and was it sized for winter load?
Im in NY, 6 heads across 3 floors with 2 heads per outdoor unit. 2500sf covered.
Mitsubishi h2i (i think im on my phone). Get plenty warm in the winter as my sole heat source. I could have gotten smaller outdoor units and had resistive backup but I didn’t want that.
Yes this is actually the worst – when open minded people get a heat pump for "the right reasons" and then have buyer's remorse. Completely backfires the transition. Do you have a ducted or ductless heat pump? Sounds like ducted, and if so that might be part of it too. The air cools down in the ductwork and if that's not accounted for - i.e. you reuse ductwork that was meant for a furnace – you run into issues like this. And you also need a cold climate heat pump.
(disclosure/transparency I'm the founder of Quilt, a ductless heat pump manufacturer)
Hi Paul - I'm a big fan of Quilt from Vancouver Island.
It seems to me that you're helping to close the loop on some of the quality concerns that the parent commenter has. Inappropriate sizing/installation and poor product selection seem like common issues from HVAC installers that aren't particularly well versed on heat pumps.
Wishing you continued success, and that hopefully it'll be available in Canada at some point! And also I remember you from the Scala meetup in Vancouver :)
Thank you! Yes, that is the hope. And what a blast from the past :) Hope you are well
We account for duct losses at Electric Air when sizing. It’s baked into industry standard Manual J sizing calculators and other methods. ManJ isn’t perfect find for this purpose.
In this case, contractor should have advised the heat pump would not keep up and recommended a different solution.
When we had our ducted heat pump installed, we also had the ducts in the attic covered with extra insulation, as well as spray foam at the top of the foundation to seal that completely. This all really helped.
Cool!
How is the insulation in the house? Poor insulation and an undersized system will be a bad experience regardless of the heat source.
It wasn't a bad experience before, but now it is, because of: new heat pump
Well what capacity does each system have?
That they came back and added resistive heating suggests your contractor may not have been too worried about sizing the system correctly in the first place.
The radiators might make you feel warmer despite not actually making the air in the room warmer: the black body radiation from the big warm radiators affects your perception of warmth in a not insignificant way.
Basically the idea behind infrared (and far infrared) heaters. I'm really curious about them, but there's no good way to trial them without buying and installing.
Seems to me that making people feel warmer is the objective, and making the air warmer is not.
I have a gas furnace and infrared heating panels (glassheat). The panels make you feel warm when you're standing in their path but they are no where near as comfortable as furnace heated air.
Yep.
I just wrote a big thread yesterday responding to someone with similar concerns to yours (https://bsky.app/profile/shreyassudhakar.com/post/3m3w3nra2h...). Copying it here if it's helpful to other folks. FWIW, the challenges you are facing seem to be grounded in bad design and application, which happens more than it should and really sucks. We need to move the bar much higher for the contractors installing heat pumps. Here's what I wrote on that thread:
This is why contractor & homeowner education are so so so important to get this energy transition right! I always hate to see reviews like this from folks that have installed a heat pump.
It’s almost always a combo of poorly communicated expectations & installer issues.
A few thoughts…
1) “Air doesn’t come out hot” is a common complaint. It’s by design! You don’t need scalding hot air to have a comfortable space. If you’re targeting a 70 degree setpoint, even 80 degree air will get you there eventually. Heat pumps work best when you let them run - they soak the space with heat.
Your furniture, walls, floors all equalize in temp and radiate heat. A totally different form of comfort than standing in front of a vent that blows hot air at you for 5 minutes and then shuts off!
2) AC doesn’t reduce humidity as well. Unfortunately, this is a classic problem with oversized heat pumps. The key to dehumidification is runtime. A well sized system will run for longer, which will pull the humidity out of the space. If the system is too big, it’ll cycle on and off & not dehumidify.
Your contractor should be do load sizing calculations to determine the size of your heat pump, not using rules of thumb or matching the size of the existing equipment! The very best contractors use performance based load calcs, where they look at your past energy bills to size your new system.
3) Supplemental heat runs a lot - this SUCKS. Electric resistance heat is really expensive to run. It really should be something that comes on for emergencies, if ever. Definitely not regularly.
Many contractors set the temperature where the supplemental heat kicks on way too high. You could be running the heat pump (which is way more efficient) to a much lower temperature, but it’ll switch to expensive aux heat instead. Fortunately, the fix to this is simple - just a thermostat setting.
In other cases, they’ll install a cheaper mild climate heat pump in a truly cold climate. This might save money up front, but it’ll kill you in operating costs when you’re paying 4x as much as you could be in the middle of winter to heat your home. The lowest bid could cost you in the long run!
PS - this homeowner later chimed in that swapping the thermostat helped reduce their electricity bill roughly $30/month! A lot of heat pump issues actually boil down to a poorly configured system. Choosing the right contractor is probably the single most important decision you'll make when you get a heat pump installed.
> 2) AC doesn’t reduce humidity as well. Unfortunately, this is a classic problem with oversized heat pumps. The key to dehumidification is runtime. A well sized system will run for longer, which will pull the humidity out of the space. If the system is too big, it’ll cycle on and off & not dehumidify.
What if I want more humidity?
(The traditional way with a furnace would be with a bypass humidifier, where ultimately, the energy to vaporize the water comes from whatever the heat source of the furnace is.)
This. I had 12 contractors come out for an estimate. I insisted to each that I would only consider estimates accompanied by a Manual J (aka show your work). I got 4 estimates with a manual J, and one of them the vendor said ‘despite that the math says you need a 4 ton outdoor unit, I’m giving you two,’ and refused to budge on that.
I went with a vendor who did the math and sized accordingly and my system works great - great comfort year round and very low energy usage.
If we’re trying to bring down cost the this is the issue with so many contractors coming out. The cost of sales is about 10-15% of the installation in the US. So thats $2-3k in California per heat pump
Try to get an install for $600 like in Japan when you have to pay $2k to find the customer.
Let’s have a lower cost sales process. Review 12 companies online, pick top 3, ask them to come out.
Yeah in case it wasn’t clear - I wasn’t asking a million vendors to price the job, I was asking them to do a manual J so they could price the job. It took 12 to get 4 to do the manual J. The other 8 came on-site and then refused to do the calcs even though I told them before coming out that it was a prerequisite for me to consider their quote.
I got a variety of explanations for why they weren’t going to do it, most of them along the lines of ‘I’ve been doing this forever - I know what I’m doing,’ but a few disappointingly ‘I don’t know what a manual J is.’ Again, this was AFTER my telling them over the phone that I wouldn’t consider a quote that wasn’t based on the calcs.
I've had a similarly frustrating experience trying to get contractors to redo my gutters.
They seem fine with the gutter part, but once I explain my rain collection system and my requirements around specific downspout sizing and simultaneous overflow, they just seem to have no interest in doing the bit of work required to make it all fit together.
Yep, the cost is in the trip is a big factor but sounds like it was their choice to try to sell you. You did the right thing by asking them do the calcs before they came out. Millions of questions are time consuming and costly but better than someone rushing into and pausing mid project with in-decision.
We (I'm cofounder of Electric Air, HVAC contract) have had people pause on day one of install, and that ends up costing the company $10-20K due to delays. Mostly because there isn't something for the team to do for that day or two while we scramble to line up the next customer.
Wild that you put it on the customer to reduce the sales cost.
I can see it being reasonable to explain during the initial contact that you want the standardized estimate, once that happens it's not really on the customer if the contractor goes out to chase the business even if they know they aren't going to do it.
You are right! I was unfair. The customer was clear they wanted ManJ calcs.
It's not the customer's problem to reduce cost. The high cost is the customer's problem through even if they are not to blame. And given I have a first hand experience in the cost stack of HVAC company, I would happy to share how a HVAC contractor thinks.
> “Air doesn’t come out hot” is a common complaint. It’s by design! You don’t need scalding hot air to have a comfortable space.
“It’s a feature, not a bug. Just put on a hoodie and get under the blanket!”
Heat pumps can make the room 90 degrees if I want. But the point is that you can make the room 72 degrees with 80 degree air running constantly rather than 20 minutes of 100 degree air per hour.
I'm in Northwest Montana. My ground source heat pump doesn't struggle until the highs outside are -20F (actual, not wind-chill). I have the backup heat strip, but the breaker is off. I don't know when it would turn on, I just wanted to know it wouldn't without me knowing it.
Ground source is often the only choice here. While air source can technically work well down to these temperatures, much of the available equipment doesn't suit some homes.
Ground source is largely going to maintain capacity independent of the outside temps, so the resistive would turn on when the heat pump isn't keeping up with the heat loss.
I'm in Canada at a similar latitude with ground source, resistance heating normally kicks in at about -25C (-13F) or so, just a few hours on the coldest nights, doesn't cost much. I could probably leave the breaker off too, I wouldn't mind it a degree or two colder.
Spot on.
Where in the system did they install the resistive wires? Is that a defroster on the evaporator (outside) or is it inline with the condenser?
Well
Mitsubishi sells heat pumps that produce 14kw of heat output all the way down to 5f at a COP of 2.3.
Resistive heat has a COP of 1, by definition.
Do you know the size of your oil burner? It's likely over 20kw output.
It's not that pumping heat cannot work sufficiently at cold temperatures, it's that you are expecting the electric car rated 100 horsepower to go as fast as the gas car rated at 300 horsepower.
An oil burner sized to the same output as the heat pump also would not keep up.
If you installed two of those Mitsubishi heat pumps (which would require two independent 240v circuits), you would be at 28kw output and would not need resistive heat strips. These units also claim 75% rated capacity at -13f so that would be about 21kw of heat output even when very very cold.
If your resistive heat strips activate at any point other than extreme weather events or emergencies, your "system" is not sized properly. They are a massive waste of power and money.
A big part of the problem is that the contractors who are essentially the point of sale for these systems are just obscenely dumb about them. They will sell you utterly undersized units or sell units that aren't rated for cold, as well as just install things so poorly that they drain condensate into your walls and cause mold issues. They had similar problems with Oil burners, but at least those they tended to upsell bigger systems so their ignorance didn't matter. They seem very bad at doing the planning or design required to actually spec out a system, so you have to be your own engineer.
>and that is what the industry needs to work on.
I don't know how the industry is supposed to force contractors to read their very very clear documentation, or follow the very clear instructions (of boiler manufacturers no less) of "You must measure heat load to accurately size a heat appliance".
The strength of your heat pump shouldn't be outside surface temperature, but underground aquifer temperature. Those two temperatures are related but not as directly as they seem. A good aquifer in certain cavernous regions of the US might stay about 55 degF year round, regardless of outside surface temperature. 55 degF is still below what a lot of people want their home to be year round so a heat pump still has to supplement heat somehow in winters (or radiators or what have you), but a "free" boost to 55 degF is still a better starting place than 20 or 40 degF outside temperature.
I don't think latitude is a factor in how efficient a heat pump you can find, I think the type geography under you feet is (probably where "interior" regions probably have more luck than coastal regions), combined with how well regulated or unregulated your area's aquifer generally is (things like nearby wells and industrial water dumping will effect aquifer levels and temperatures). (Maybe not enough heat pump proponents realize that you only have good, cheap heat pumps if you have a powerful EPA and other Water protection groups fighting the good fight in your region.)
You're talking about geothermal heat pumps which are far less common than air-to-air heat pumps because they are far more expensive.
These are entirely disjoint concepts.
The prices when I looked weren't that different- it was about C$30k Canadian for air source and C$40k for ground source (which I went with).
30K would be on the higher end for air source. My install this year was 25k CDN including a lot of duct work.
40K is also on the low end for geothermal. I'm guessing you were able to trench instead of drill?
If you can afford ground source it's by far the best option in cold climates. Steady ground heat means you get the same efficiency all year round. The install can be eye-watering though.
Yes horizontal loop, 200 metre trench ~2m deep with 6 pipes at the bottom. Took 3 days for a 20 ton excavator to dig and fill in the trench. Maybe I got lucky with the installer but it wasn't eyewatering. Vertical loops do cost a lot more. Repairing the lawn with turf or professional landscaping would have cost more than the install, so I did it myself with a tractor, some spare topsoil, and a few bags of Costco grass seed.
Nit: disjoint product classes, but clearly related concepts.
We live in a temperate climate and installed a heat pump / mini-split system to replace our central AC and furnace and get rid of all the ductwork.
It's awesome in many respects and I don't regret it, but it's also MUCH more expensive in the winter vs our gas furnace. Electricity is just so much more expensive than the gas equivalent for heating. Overall this is costing us a lot more money per year.
But the upside is that it maintains the temperature in each room much more effectively, and it's a LOT quieter, both inside from the air handlers and outside from the ... loud outside fan thing (compressor?).
Right as COVID lockdowns were starting in early 2020, our gas furnace reached the state of nearly broken and would have been unfixable if it finally broke. We called local HVAC for a quote and they convinced that instead of simply replacing the furnace, we should get full-house air conditioning with electric heat pump with gas furnace backup. We agreed and what was amazing was that they wanted to install it the NEXT DAY. Unprecedented speed. This was because it was COVID and everyone was stopping construction projects etc. Their technicians were ready to go and needed all the work. Next day wasn't good so we installed it the next next day. 4 burly guys, all masked and gloved, did it all in just a few hours. Our friends trying to do the same couple of years ago had to wait months for installation. We've been enjoying AC since then, a lot.
I think it cost about $13k for heat pump and furnace and labor, maybe a bit more with tax, and I got ~1.7k rebate/refund of some sorts? Or 1.3k? I don't fully recall why but it must have been government sponsored.
My ongoing energy costs are about the same, but the mix completely switched from gas to electricity. I cook with gas so there is just a bit every month, but virtually no heating with it, the gas hardly ever starts except in the height of winter. If I only had solar to feed it with sun, but the house location with shade, hill and trees isn't suited for it. Instead I pay a little extra to energy company to presumably source my electricity from solar. Works.
i bought a mitsubishi minisplit, as well as a lineset, and installation tools (vaccuum pump, valve core removal tool, flaring tool, micron guage, nitrogen, pressure regulator, manifold) and installed it myself after watching several hours of ac service tech youtube videos. it was a little stressful but i saved 8,000 usd and i honestly feel pride every time i turn it on. its worked absolutely flawlessly. i recommend this route if you have the time!
One thing I haven't been able to figure - I have a flat in Spain with a combined aircon heat system costing ~$3k which functions from the physics point of view as a heat pump but was not marketed as a "heat pump" which I think are supposed to be more expensive. Is there any difference between heat/cool aircon and heat pumps?
A heat pump is a reversable air conditioner so every heat / cool air conditioner is a heat pump regardless of name. Interesting that they cost more over yonder though if you use the name. We can get a heat pump here in the US for about 700$.
I installed one in the basement 2 years ago and it has been a gamechanger.
I live in a community in the Pacific Northwest that was built in 2018 and (almost) every home (22/23) has (Carrier) heat pumps; for some unknown reason, the other has heated floors.
Many of us are proponents of heat pumps thanks to reduced costs and emissions *but* we've not had a generally good experience possibly (!) as a result of bad installation and definitely due to limited numbers of indoor heads (if I close my main bedroom door, the rest of my upper floor has no heating/cooling).
There's always someone in the community frustrated that their house is too cold/hot, that the condensation drains are blocked and water is running down an interior wall, that an indoor head or the condenser is having problems, or that there's unexplained coolant leak.
People moving into the community are inheriting issues with at least 2 homes having to augment/replace the system. To save breaking into the walls, this often necessitates putting the power, coolant and drainage lines on the outside of the house and then boxing the result.
We're saving money on monthly bills (probably; we don't have a comp) but many of us have spent quite some $$$ on maintenance and replacement equipment.
Looks like poor installation.
I've spent 1.5 years in a brand-new building with Mitsubishi heat pumps. It had some initial trouble with a faulty electronic component, but afterwards it worked quite fine, needing little if any attention.
The real question is what the total cost of ownership and what is the payback period? Also there are regional climate differences that have to deal with very large temperature swings as well as very old poorly insulated houses. investing hundreds of thousands to re-insulate one's house, replace all the windows, excavate the heat sink and dispose of a furnace that is already working, so that one can buy a heat pump at greater costs than a furnace to achieve efficiency improvements that barely pay for themselves over thirty years when the same amount of money can be spent elsewhere. if it were such a great idea it would have already been done.
When I replaced my furnace a couple years back I asked for a heat pump - a previous house had it and it worked great. Turns out my contractor didn't ask the right questions and so mine only works to 25F - it still outputs heat below that, but not enough to keep my house warm and so I use the backup furnace a lot more than I want to.
A previous house the heat pump was sized to work to 14F. They make them that will work down to -25F, but since it gets to -30f where I live (about once every 10 years, but that is enough) we need a backup system so is probably isn't worth getting a system sized to as cold as possible.
Ground source heat pumps are a common option in rural areas - they cost a lot to install ($50k - and this is the cheapest version that needs a lot of land thus rural areas). They are likely to pay off if you live in the same house for 50 years, but the initial upfront costs are high (you do get a house worth $10k more than other heat option). Worth looking into if you are young and have reason to think you will live in the same house for 50 years.
It's really amazing how often I hear that same story: poor choices by the installer left the home owner in a bind with a poorly functioning system. The industry (certainly the residential side) really does need better educated installers/planners.
Even as a homeowner who's a bit of an energy geek, it's entirely too challenging to understand the entire space and what options fit one's needs. LLM's help a lot here (if you can trust them!), but it's a funny situation where there's silos of knowledge that are hard to connect.
The system works well - just not how I want it. I was expecting to need the gas heat 1-2 weeks per year not 2-3 months.
I'm amazed at these prices, I replaced a propane tank + furnace with horizontal loop ground source for $40k Canadian (+ tax, but government rebate matched that). It's almost paid for itself in about 6 years, I gave more detailed numbers in another reply.
Your setup sounds great, but depending on location in Canada, gas can be much cheaper than propane. I just priced running a gas line for my BBQ, and I'd break even on a $500 install cost after about 40 20lb propane tank fills.
gets to -30f where I live (about once every 10 years)
For this specific problem, I'm always inclined to just keep a 1800W space heater or two in the closet.
It takes a lot more watts than that to keep the house warm.
Maybe? Conservative (i.e. any number assumptions here are all biased against the space heaters) napkin math: My gas furnace uses something like to 300 kWh per day to keep the house 30 degrees (C) above the outdoor temp. If I only need the space heaters to supplement an extra 5 degrees, that's actually pretty close to 2000 continuous watts.
> This piece isn’t about reinventing the wheel. It’s about understanding why we’re not using the wheel we already have—
common man please just write the text yourself
Heat pumps are so _ordinary_ here (Central Europe), im always a bit surprised how skeptical folks in the US and UK seem to be about them
Most UK housing stock is poor quality, old and draughty. Pre-req of switching is fixing that. Then, when you've got a nice hermetically sealed house, you need to solve fresh air, which is another cost. Labour is extremely expensive in the UK and tradespeople are poor quality and swindlers (sorry, it's true 95% of the time).
And most people don't have £10k+ to drop on upgrades
We're not used to needing aircon, so the whole concept is a bit foreign
Electricity is expensive (0.31 EUR/kWh)
Plus, we've been burned by governments pushing "green" things:
- They scammed us with cavity wall insulation, which has caused some serious structural and expensive issues. It was inappropriate for many houses and a ton of conmen popped-up to take government money with no fucks given
- Diesel was sold as 'green'
- They had a scheme pushing loft insulation but the installers often just threw rolls of insulation into the loft and ran way (not even kidding)
Basically, multiple governments have created just about the /worst/ possible history and conditions to get people on board with heat pumps
I have a very small, draughty house and spend ~800 EUR a year on gas (heating + hot water + hob). Not ideal but I'm still running on the gas boiler that came with the house 10 years ago that's only had ~300 EUR of maintenance spent on it. The house gets hot, I can have boiling hot showers whenever I want. If anything goes, wrong, I can all any of 30 people to come fix it
They're not skeptical, it's just that no one wants to pay $10k to have a $2k unit installed, and new entrants who want to offer anything other than what the entrenched services have to offer have to be abused and hazed for 4 years near minimum wage changing out $5 capacitors for $1000 (to their company, not them) before they can get a trade license, and after that they have to go through an onerous contracting paperwork to open up a business. So we don't get new businesses popping up offering mini split installation.
End result is most of the units that get installed in the US are probably DIYing off-paper and then shutting the fuck up. I live in a place with no inspections for owner-builder and that was the only way I was able to get away with it, and even then I had to pass an EPA 608 license to handle the refrigerants since I did not want to get fined a bazillion dollars if someone found out.
> what it’s going to take, from the human side of the equation, to make heat pumps the obvious, accessible, and default choice for millions of American homes.
Well, this has already happened; living in a third-world American country, I've been heating my houses in winter with heat pumps every winter for many years (even though they iced up occasionally) and most air conditioners here are already heat pumps. Frio/calor, they're called.
But, installations strictly for heating are probably never going to happen en masse. In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45698730 I analyze the costs. It turns out that heat pumps cost around 39¢ per peak watt they save, while low-cost solar panels cost 6.5¢ per peak watt they produce, so it's almost always cheaper to install enough solar panels to heat your house resistively. And that gap is going to continue widening for the foreseeable future.
Our heat pump, a cheap-shit Electrolux mini split assembled in Tierra del Fuego, broke down last winter; somehow the refrigerant escaped. The repairman did a pressure test with nitrogen but couldn't find a link. He pre-emptively soldered shut a pipe that had been crimped shut at the factory, and pointed out that, probably, if we hadn't been using it as a heat pump, it would have been fine. Certainly it would have had many fewer hours of operation. We ended up spending about US$100 on the repair, which is the price of 1500 peak watts of solar panels. I think that brings us to about US$500 total spent on the thing—insignificant to people in the US, but a significant chunk of change in most of the rest of America.
Heat pumps are an energy-crisis-era efficiency measure to conserve energy. But energy is no longer scarce. After 50 years, the energy crisis is, if not ended, at least ending. If your house's solar panels are producing more energy than you can use or sell back to the grid at a decent price, the energy to run a resistive heater is free.
> But, installations strictly for heating are probably never going to happen en masse. In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45698730 I analyze the costs. It turns out that heat pumps cost around 39¢ per peak watt they save, while low-cost solar panels cost 6.5¢ per peak watt they produce, so it's almost always cheaper to install enough solar panels to heat your house resistively. And that gap is going to continue widening for the foreseeable future.
My counter-scenario: My utility provider wants ~$40k to upgrade my home service to 200 amp, so the up-front cost of electric resistive heat would include that.
Remember: The season that you need heat is the season with the least sunshine. Solar is only cheap as you claim due to net metering; without pairing it with batteries or some other form of storage, you're pushing your heating cost on others by flooding the grid with electricity when it isn't needed.
Now, I will gladly point out that I have a roof of solar panels, and benefit from subsidies: It's important to understand that solar currently is unsustainable economically and will only be sustainable with more R&D on storage.
No, I'm not talking about net metering, which has nothing to do with the cost per peak watt.
You're right that you do need energy storage, though. Even sensible-heat thermal energy storage is completely adequate for this purpose, and it's very cheap, on the order of US$2–3/kWh. See the sand-battery outline I wrote yesterday in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45690085. Electric night storage heaters are widely available off the shelf in many countries already, though not in the US.
For some other kinds of energy storage, it's debatable whether utility-scale storage or household-scale storage is more efficient; you're trading off economies of scale against transmission and distribution losses and transaction costs. But low-grade thermal energy storage is clearly better at household or neighborhood scale; my design outline linked above comes to a price per kWh that's 3% of the price of the batteries needed for BESS, and maybe 15% of the optimistic cost estimates for sodium-ion. You have to reduce the energy to low-grade heat up front to store it so cheaply, but that makes it hard to redistribute later—to redistribute low-grade stored heat from a central energy storage facility, you need something like New York's steam district heating systems. It's far cheaper to store the thermal energy at the point of use.
This is not a new idea. It's the idea behind adobe walls, Russian stoves, rocket mass heaters, electric night storage heaters, dol beds, kachelofens, kangs, earth-bermed walls, Trombe walls, and ondols. People have been doing this for 7000 years, without an electrical grid or, for that matter, electrical power at all. It definitely doesn't rely on net metering!
I love heat pumps. Had one in my house in the southern US and am about to put one in my house in the EU. I also recently bought a heat pump dryer, also great. Very gentle on clothes, doesn’t need a vent, or the high power plug - just a drain like a washer.
I'm planning on getting a heat pump dryer, but 3x the price (in Canada) means a long break-even.
Hm, these are just called AC in Europe. To my knowledge, AC has always worked both ways here. In Europe we call heap pumps when they heat the water. So they are are Air-Water (the outdoor unit looks like a bigger AC outdoor unit) or Water-Water (the outdoor unit is a long underground water pipe loop). The warm water is used for underfloor heating or for shower, kitchen, etc.
I live in a heat pump only house and the only thing I don't really love are mid summer electric bills, but I think that'd basically be the same with a dedicated AC. In my climate heat is more nice than complete necessity and usually only spikes bills if there are true hard freezes.
I will say, they seem to have gotten more expensive. It took about $10k to replace ours (it was over 20 years old and replacing coolant+fixing was quoted at nearly half that). Even though research suggested it could be more like a $6.5 to $7.5k cost, it was hard to even get people quoting in a timely manner, let alone getting any kind of a deal.
Installed a Minisplit to heat/cool a 1,000 sqft large work area. My average monthly electricity cost is maybe $30 to heat or cool. The tech in these are amazing.
I’ll just say that most of the core issues with heat pumps seems to resolved with monoblock designs. Specifically, by moving the refrigerant cycle outdoors, install can be cheaper, and capacity can be more variable than when you are relying on sizing to the phase change occurring in each indoor unit.
with mr drill baby drill in the gold house this all seems obsolete
Nearly 2 years ago, we had a small tornado come through, taking out our electricity for a week. During that time, it was snowy and the outdoor temperature was well below freezing (it reached about -10°C (12°F) at night).
Keeping my family warm was a real struggle that week. The next spring, I went to Costco and bought a big tri-power generator and wired up a generator interlock on the electric panel. Now if we lose power, we can run the natural gas furnace & blower with no problems. I can also power the generator from my home's natural gas supply instead of making frequent trips for gasoline.
So I'd say heck no to swapping the natural gas furnace for a heat pump. I'd much rather use natural gas to power both the generator and the furnace/blower than risk needing more electricity to keep my family warm than my setup can handle.
The math on natural gas generators gets weird in places with cheap gas and expensive electricity, to the point where it can sometimes be cheaper to generate your own electricity from natural gas than to purchase from the grid.
Don't you still need a generator to run the blower and the logic on the furnace? I mean, obviously a much lower power load, but wouldn't a generator still be necessary?
Of course. My point was that unlike my natural gas furnace + blower, a heat pump would be more than what my portable generator could handle.
Where do I put the wood-burning stove/heater?
My mini-split was installed sometime between fall 2017 or spring 2018 when my house was built. It failed when it was 6 years old, and the lineset had to be replaced because there was too much acid in the insulation and it corroded the copper.
The problem was that the lineset was in my walls, so replacing it would require ugly lineset in a highly-visible place on my house. All the quotes to fix / replace it were absurdly expensive.
Because the mini-split was for a room that I use occasionally, I just use a portable air conditioner and a space heater.
Quality control by the contractor is soooo important. Formicary corrosion like you described can happen if a contractor doesn't pull a proper vacuum on the system to evacuate moisture before releasing refrigerant. I saw an anecdote where Bill Spohn, who literally owns an HVAC tools company, had this happen with the contractor installing a system in his own house! (https://www.heatpumped.org/p/are-heat-pumps-a-commodity)
I suspect it's especially bad with new builds, as new builds are a race to the bottom and every subcontractor is fighting to get the lowest bid. The best way to make it cheaper is skip steps, and that hurts in the long run. Sorry you ended up in that situation, crummy experiences like this set the industry back. For what it's worth, the same corrosion could happen with a traditional AC system too (it's not just heat pumps). But the difference is, often those refrigerant lines don't get as hidden on interior walls as the ones for ductless mini-splits do.
pretty sure the white insulation on the lineset, when exposed to moisture and UV, can create an acid that eats the copper. thats probably what happened
One other challenge is for existing homes a water heater may only have a gas line running to it. Want a heat pump hot water heater? Hiring the electrician alone, not to mention potentially ripping up walls will ruin any economic advantage.
This was a major barrier for me. I had to replace an existing natural, tanked gas water heater. Ultimately I just bought a $750 replacement because I could easily swap it out myself. Installing a heat pump would have involved an electrician to install a new circuit, and possibly other changes. While there were some 120v models available locally, they all had pretty bad reviews. So I would have paid a couple thousand dollars more. Maybe I could break even over 10 years paying less for gas but that seemed like a poor use of funds.
A possible challenge, yes, but there exist 1500w, standard outlet hpwh, and it's a lot less common to not have any power near a water heater.
A 1500W electric water heater would be painful to use in a home. A typical 30-60 gallon EWH is 6kW.
And for the record, every single natural gas water heater is connected to 120V power for the ignition circuit.
> every single natural gas water heater is connected to 120V power for the ignition circuit
Mine isn't. During a long power outage, I still had hot water.
I was a bit surprised the water heater was working since I was pretty sure it had an electronic control system. So I went and looked, and sure enough, it was electronic, and somehow the LED was flashing blue like normal!
It turns out the electronics are powered by a thermopile which is heated by the pilot light.
> And for the record, every single natural gas water heater is connected to 120V power for the ignition circuit.
This is incorrect. Multiple homes I've lived in had no electric to the water heater, including my current.
With a standing pilot a thermopile is used to generate the tiny bit of electric required for the control.
Keep in mind that there's going to be a CoP associated with a heat-pump water heater. Depending on (a bunch of factors) that 1500W HPWH could approach the performance of a 6kW standard EWH.
Yeah, I neglected to compare my hypothetical 6kW EWH against a 1500W HPWH, and did it against a 1500W EWH.
Heat pumps have no problem operating at a COP of 3-4, so the 120V 12A (1440kW) HPWH would be equivalent to a 240V 25A EWH (6kW)
AFAIK there are actually no 1500w HPWHs currently, the normal hybrid 220v models have a small 500 watt compressor thats very efficient and keeps the airflow requirements low which helps with installation placement and ducting if needed, then still have the electric elements if needed to boost.
The 120v model HPWH's I have seen do not have electric resistive elements and instead have around a 1000W compressor, so they recover faster purely on heat pump and can run off a standard 15 amp circuit while staying well under the NEC 80% rule which would be 12 amps, they are closer to 10 amps.
They do require more airflow and are generally noisier due to larger fans and compressor.
Then you have dedicated split system HPWH's like SANCO that use an outdoor unit like a minisplit and pull around 1800 watts putting well over 6kw into the water, these are probably the future or whole house heat pump systems that heat both water and air(and cool) as combined unit.
It's not uncommon for a gas heater to have an always on pilot.
I completely forgot about thermopiles. And also that heat pump water heaters exist :facepalm:
Thanks for catching that :)
I think this is right...
kwatts_effective [kJ/s] * heating_time_minutes [min] * 60 [s/min] * COP = 4.184 [kJ/kg/K] * (T₁-T₀) [K] * gallon_capacity [gal] * 3.785 [L/gal] * 1 [kg/L]
6.6 kW, for... COP 4, T₁-T₀ = 30 [K] (lower value for warm climate), allowable 30 minute heating time, 50 gallon capacity. A cold climate could double that power requirement, or alternatively double the heating time.
a 1500W heat pump water heater with a COP around 3 will put 5500 watts of heat into the water.
My Rheem hybrid 220v heat pump water heater only has a 500w compressor but puts 1500-2000 watts of heat into the water pulling it from the hot garage.
I have the choice to run it in high demand mode which will run both the heat pump and electric 4500w element for around 6kw of heat into the water if I need fast recovery.
Interesting to view this from the POV of the fossil fuel usage rampdown needed because to mitigate the climate catastrophe.
It seems that the fact that a lot of people have utility gas over there, and low price of gas due to regulation (no externalities taxed in) is the big one.
Cool to see a Heat Pump article near the top of HN! I'm the founder/CEO of Quilt (https://www.quilt.com/), which is mentioned in the article, and a decade+ daily reader of this fine site. At Quilt we've run the Nest playbook for ductless heat pumps as our first product. The plan is to do what Tesla did for automotive to the built environment infrastructure category (HVAC, plumbing, etc) and create the first major American manufacturer in a ~century.
The article has bullet #1 in problems to solve as "Contractors who default to what they know." This was one of my founding hypotheses to and it turns out I was wrong, this was the hardest won learning yet at Quilt. We originally were fully vertically integrated and had our own installation force because of this reason – we wanted to solve all the big problems, thought contractors were one of them, and so had to become a contractor. But we quickly saw we were getting in the way of our own mission to accelerate the energy transition (because we had far far more demand than we could scale operations to reach it). So in March we (initially cautiously) switched partnering with existing contractors and I have been delighted by the industry reception. There are so so many existing contractors who want modern tech and see working with us as a breath of fresh air. I definitely sold them short and in retrospect it was naive and even a little elitist.
Happy to answer anything more. Also I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that we're growing super fast and just posted an Embedded Software Engineer role: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/quilt/jobs/4952684007 :)
Hey Paul! Good to see ya on here. I'm in a Facebook group of small HVAC contractors, and recently there was a conversation about who is installing heat pumps vs traditional ACs and furnaces. I was thrilled to see that most were saying that they are moving a lot of their business toward heat pumps. Of course, there were a few that were stuck in their ways and were "gas or die" type people, but it's exciting to see the ship slowly starting to turn. There are more and more heat pump forward contractors coming online every day, and it's great that we can team up with folks like you pushing the hardware forward. There is so much work to deploy these systems, and winning is going to look like all of us working together!
I’ve had a heat pump with backup gas in Seattle area since 2016. Great to have AC and heat; the gas comes on when house needs to be warmed quickly. I like constant air circulation and have it set so fan runs even when it doesn’t need to heat or cool so it works really well for me; no complaints at all.
I installed diy ductless heat pumps for around 3k at my parents. They love it and burn less wood now.
I recently installed a mini split heat pump in a detached accessory building. The installer upsold me on a more expensive unit because I’d get federal refunds due to its higher SEER rating. Ok, sure: higher efficiency, same price.
In fact, efficiency was the main reason I wanted a mini split in the first place. It just bugged me to _not_ pump the heat entirely outside the structure. And I paid a bit more for that versus just using a window unit or “portable” AC. All we’re talking here is the location of the condenser coil: inside versus outside. It just makes sense to put it outside, with just a small penetration in the building.
Well, during electrical inspection apparently I paid too much. After paying more than a certain threshold for converting an unconditioned space to a conditioned space, I now need to insulate the accessory structure to a certain degree in order to pass code.
The kicker is, the only way I can insulate the space to meet code is to insulate with polyiso (aka styrofoam) because the structure is so small. So, I guess in an effort to be “green” according to local government, I need to rip out the mineral wool insulation, dump it and replace it with styrofoam. Or put the mini split in the dump and buy a cheaper less efficient unit like a window unit.
I’d save approximately $0.30 a year on energy costs to insulate to code versus what I have now with the mini split.
This whole industry is stupid and that’s because it’s regulated by idiots.
Name and shame: this is Chapel Hill, NC.
All this push to electrify everything makes me nervous, as it effectively centralizes a lever that someone evil enough could use to coerce the general public in unsavory ways.
I'm doubly suspicious of areas that combine mass-electrification with reducing availability of the most reliable alternate source of electricity (i.e. generators). California in particular is pushing to make generators increasingly hard to obtain.
>> someone evil enough
There's so much evil being demonstrated today, in real time, that we can't dismiss this any more, it must be seriously considered.
What makes you believe the same doesn't already apply to natural gas, or petrol?
Besides, coercing the general public like that generally doesn't end well: people tend to get annoyed when their basic needs of survival aren't being met - especially if it is a deliberate choice. The people in power will be gone within days.
Modern coercion happens far more subtly and less overtly than it did in 20th century totalitarian regimes. The proletariat isn't the only group that learned lessons from that period of time.
I don’t believe they last as long as a natural gas boiler, so the total cost of ownership needs to take that into account.
They now make really efficient refrigerators for your kitchen that you get to throw out every 2-5 years.
Is Heat Pump the same as what Australian's would call a Split System?
Split system is a common term that covers both heat pumps and traditional AC systems. It has to do with the physical setup, not the theory of operation.
A heat pump specifically is an AC system that can run in reverse: moving heat from outside to inside.
Yes! Also often referred to as "Reverse Cycle Air Conditioning" in Australia
:)
Question: I have just bought house and deciding heatpump vs oil. We have an autistic person in the house hold that is very sensitive to high frequency noises and perpetual sounds in general. He is used to an oil furnace turning on and of.
I fear for sound pollution from a heat pump.
Will anyone share their experiences with this? Even just a shuttle humming would be a disaster for our spectrum case.
Can we get a completely silent setup ?
I don’t know whether you can get a completley silent unit, but I can say that our Mitsubishi heat pump does make a high pitched sound while running. Although I am used to it now, I found it annoying until I got used to it. It is very different than the intermittent low pitched rumble of my oil boiler.
I’m super psyched about heat pump washer/dryers. I live in puerto rico and humidity and electricity are issues that it seems to address. Plus I am going to try installing it in a closet where it wasn’t designed for it all. I think it could change the way houses here are made.
Missed opportunity to discuss GSHPs and instead pushes electric HPs because it's a business blog masquerading as a .org to push product.
And also, contractors and maintenance shops push products that minimize their costs and maximize their profits. It's also why private equity owns effectively every high voltage motor capacitor manufacturer in the US and why those capacitors have such short lives now. It's not about minimizing TCO, it's about maximizing customer dependency upon service and parts without seeming there is any other choice balanced with the stochastic equilibrium of potentially more reliable alternatives threatening this "cottage" industry.
PS: clean your coils, change your air filters (without excessive MERV flow restriction), surge protect ECMs, and check your caps.
Our local installers seem to be taking advantage of the moment quite a bit, install costs are have skyrocketed over the past decade... double what I paid when the market started heating up. But at least the techs seem more knowledgeable, when I first had my system installed it seemed like they had no clue how they even worked.
Trying to translate this terminology into normal Aussie speak here. :P So a “heat pump” is reverse cycle aircon, I’m guessing it’s usually a central unit ducted to each room? Am I right in thinking that “mini split” is what we’d call a “split system” (ie. wall unit inside, heat exchanger outside, refrigerant pipes running between)? Is there a power cutoff above which it’s no longer mini, or is anything non-ducted a mini split?
I moved from gas boiler to electric years ago and would like to move to an electric heat pump hybrid, but it doesn’t exist. Moment lost.
What do you mean when you say “heat pump hybrid?”
Well, they have electric boilers, gas boilers, and gas/heat pump hybrid boilers. but not restive/heat pump hybrids. (for houses heated with hot water) I suppose this is because the return temperature to the boiler is already 50 Celsius so the heat pump can’t help you at all
Edit: Oh actually, I was wrong.(and I guess it makes sense. It would suffer the same problems as an electric hybrid) There is no hybrid gas heat pump for hydronic heating. Basically my entire city is hydronic heating so heat pumps are not an option. However
a bunch of my neighbours have heat pumps and I suppose it’s just heating one room in their house and it’s not even connected to the thermostat of their hydronic heater in any way.. Seems pretty silly to me. At least you get an air conditioner out of the deal so that you can use more electricity in the summer.
There are air-to-water heat pumps that can run hydronic heating (even radiators, though underfloor is a better match due to the lower return temps).
You can then make your own hybrid with a resistive electric boiler or a gas boiler wired to second-stage or emergency heat.
My 1920s house with radiators and terrible insulation outside of Boston runs with return water temps in the low 90s in shoulder season and 120°F when it’s 12°F outside, using outdoor-reset/weather-compensation.
Those return temps are entirely compatible with air-to-water heat pumps. (And result in 22-24 hour run times per day, which makes for extremely comfortable heat, despite the generally lacking insulation.)
I don’t have one because HVAC contractors are living in the 1990s and want to do a 3-hour, 2-person combi boiler install for $10K in profit rather than think through how to do anything unusual.
Recently went with heat pump water heater and cloths dryer, very significant energy savings and they both work great using around 1/3 the energy.
Most of my energy is for HVAC cooling in the south and that is already a heat pump. The house is well insulated and also have solar so along with the water heater and dryer I am around net zero in mid summer and and now that temperature is more mild I am producing much more than using even with one EV as well.
It really nice to have an all electric house along with at least one car and a large solar backup system I am pretty self contained and don't really have to change anything if grid goes down.
When I needed a new air conditioner I looked into heat pumps. 3x the price.
That seems really weird, the only real difference is a reversing valve that costs a couple bucks. A heat pump is an AC, it just can be run backwards to produce heating as well. In cooling it's literally the same thing.
I'm no expert but the difference in the real world is more than that (though am doubtful about 3x the price) . The delta-T between heating and cooling is significantly greater in most places so you need a bigger system. You also need things like the ability to de-ice.
I know, but I don't make the price lists.
That's crazy. It's a reversing valve.
But you might also be comparing multi-stage variable load DC heat pumps with single stage air conditioners and not an actually equivalent air conditioner.
or local sellers are incentivized profitably to push old technology air conditioners?
That's the upfront price. What about the total cost of ownership (TCO)?
TCO vs size of check wife is comfortable writing.
For me it was more like 1.1× the price.
We should add more tax credits because one Elon Musk is not enough.
It’s very hard to say whether heat pumps are cheaper than NG for heating. I pay about $0.25 per 100k BTUs which is about 3kWh. 3kWh costs about 50 cents. As long as the COP is above 2, it’s cheaper to run the heat pump.
Once you factor in an electrician and pipefitter for installing a heat pump, plus the cost of the heat pump, refrigerant, and furnace coil, I’d imagine you lose money in the long run.
If you then additionally include the strain on the grid from all these new data centers without enough generation capacity, I’ll stick with natural gas for heating air and water.
Its not hard to say at all, the math can be done pretty easily based on your local electric and gas rates, and most people who go for a heat pump already need an air conditioner for summer.
The math actually works out in many places unless you have cheap gas and expensive electricity. Its also better then to burn the gas at a power plant at 60% efficiency then 300-400% efficiency at the heat pump than pipe and burn the NG at 80% efficiency in your furnace.
> Its not hard to say at all, the math can be done pretty easily based on your local electric and gas rates, and most people who go for a heat pump already need an air conditioner for summer.
I went on to do the math for operating costs for myself in the very next sentence. Excluding labor and material to replace a furnace with a heat pump, operating costs are lower as long as the heat pump has a COP of 2 or higher.
Predicting future electricity and gas prices is virtually impossible but it is possible to quantify how much it costs to convert a natural gas furnace to a heat pump system at present. I’m saying it’s difficult to know at the present time if the TCO of the heat pump beats out natural gas. Where I live in Minnesota, I’m skeptical you’d come out ahead. In a state like Arkansas or Tennessee, the heat pump is likely to come out ahead due to lower heating needs.
> The barrier isn’t the tech. It’s people.
Maybe? Or maybe the tech is not superior enough (considering the overhead) so nobody cares.
Did ChatGPT write this?
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Only if you write a haiku about the site guidelines first.
I'm thankful to live in the Bay Area. One time we took a trip in the dead of winter. We turned off our heat completely. We were gone for a week. The coldest it got inside the house was 55 degrees.
Congratulations?