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0 pointsRobotbeat5y ago0 comments

I think you’ve stumbled on the REAL reason there’s hesitation with heat pumps.

There’s a massive difference in capability and efficiency and usability of heat pumps. The crappy ones don’t even work below freezing. The good ones can operate even down to -20F efficiently, even air source. And ground source ones don’t have a hard limit at all (although they face a similar wide difference in capability).

Low effort cheap heat pumps are gonna do more harm than good in that they’ll convince people that heat pumps suck.

It’s like the difference between a Tesla and a lead acid golf cart. Both are “electric” “cars”, but there’s vastly different capability.

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luxuryballs5y ago

Yeah my parents are an hour south of the Canadian border in New England and they still heat the house with a wood stove during winter for that very reason. But tell ya what that wood stove sure is amazing, keeps it very warm and it’s not a small house.

mdip5y ago

I have a buddy who put in a fireplace insert and pellet stove. Besides the fact that he picked up very modern implementations of these two devices, he lives on a 10 acre property that's mostly Cherry Trees, so an electric log splitter was purchased along-side the fireplace insert.

He put them in after discovering that heating his house on LP (the only fuel source outside of electric available where he lives) cost about $650/mo to keep his home as warm as he wanted it. IIRC, he was basically keeping his house at 85 on those two devices, alone. He added geothermal a few years later.

His home is in the middle of the windiest parts of the thumb -- very, very cold in the winter with a lot of snow.

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luxuryballs5y ago

mdip5y ago

His home is in the middle of the windiest parts of the thumb -- very, very cold in the winter with a lot of snow.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse