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.
In the US, they are struggling to break out of the eco-luxury product niche (where they have been stuck for a long time).
I got HVAC drop-in replacement quotes ranging from $7k to $14k for what upon some quick research was about $3k in hardware.
regardless, this is incredibly cheap
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.
Any chance you can you take on solar next because if we could get a solar system for half the price we'd sign right up. All we hear about is how cheap solar is now, but the labor costs have risen more than any hardware price decreases.
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
C$4,500 electricity (heating + cooling + misc)
C$500 propane (hot water)
C$5,000 total.
C$2,000 electricity (heating + cooling + misc)
C$500 propane (hot water)
C$2,500 total.
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.
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.
Though, the returns are (edit: "not great") if the figures above INCLUDE net metering revenues.
Heatpump = Negative IRR until y8
Solar = Negative IRR until y16
Heatpump + Solar = 0 NPV through y25 | 8% discount rate$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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Does a split system indeed take so much work? What is so effort-intensive?
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
Quite the racket here in the US. They’re still a luxury product.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Here in Bay Area my gas furnace is generally off late March through late october and while gas costs have gone up over the years, electricity easily goes up 10% year over year. We are currently in $0.43 per kwh territory OFF-PEAK. This is nearly 3 times the average rate in the United States.
I wont be investing $$$ in heatpumps until i spend $$$$ on solar panels and that wont happen till i replace my roof in a few years.
PS. this is why buying a hybrid a few years ago instead of buying an electric was a good call. Our gas prices stayed pretty much the same, while our electricity is up 30% since that time.
Solar + heat pump will take me 10+ years to come out financially ahead (if not longer) but if you're invested for the long term it does come out ahead (even factoring in opportunity cost). The comfort level is also dramatically better in my house due to more even temperature, so I would argue in many situations it can be worth a premium. I thought for sure I was going to need ductless per room to get this level of comfort but it turned out to not be true. If you didn't have ac before, it's also nice to have the option to use it on hot days.
Edit: (or so you mean mini splits?)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
(It is more expensive to operate than the natural-gas furnace was, though).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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...
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...
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.)
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.
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.
(disclosure/transparency I'm the founder of Quilt, a ductless heat pump manufacturer)
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 :)
In this case, contractor should have advised the heat pump would not keep up and recommended a different solution.
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.
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.
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.)
“It’s a feature, not a bug. Just put on a hoodie and get under the blanket!”
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".
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.)
These are entirely disjoint concepts.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
For this specific problem, I'm always inclined to just keep a 1800W space heater or two in the closet.
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?).
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.
Make them easy to buy and install leading to lower costs, and more getting into homes.
common man please just write the text yourself
It takes as given that the tech is here, and it's economically feasible, but it's not giving any arguments. Just blames the people.
It's also not exactly defining the problem space. Is it talking about air-air AC with heating? Those are common and very cheap. Is it talking about large HVAC systems that include hot water? Those are indeed a hellof a lot more expensive, but also a hellof a lot more complex. And no matter what the author is saying, technology isn't to the point of giving us hot water from heat pumps. The math just isn't mathing - to take cold water and heat it up to "hot" by cooling off freezing air, you'd simply have to cool huge amounts of air. Yeah, probably, if you put a room-sized HVAC system and spend a ton on electricity - but that's where it stops being competitive.
Is it talking about geothermal heat exchangers? Because those are indeed a lot more efficient - but also more expensive for obvious reasons. You need to drill.
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 :)
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.
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.
And for the record, every single natural gas water heater is connected to 120V power for the ignition circuit.
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.
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.
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.
I installed one in the basement 2 years ago and it has been a gamechanger.
I did the math this past year with excel and chat GPT. Go to the side of your heat pump, look at the model number, go to the manufacturer website and pull the COP specs at every given temperature. Where I live in Chattanooga, TN, it can get down to 5-10 degrees for weeks at a time during December and January.
If you look up the cost of gas per therm, convert it to BTUs, and then the cost of electricity per kilowatt hour, and then compare the cost of running a heat pump vs the cost of gas at any given temperature based on the coefficient of performance of the heat pump, you will very quickly realize that depending on your local utility, there is no break even point. As in, for me, even if it was 68 degrees outside it is cheaper for me to run my gas furnace than it would be to run my heat pump, even if the COP was 4.
I did the math for Seattle (I don’t live there, I just looked at the local utility prices and went on their website and pulled some numbers) and based on current natural gas prices and electric prices in Seattle, it’s cheaper to use gas below 24 degrees Fahrenheit. Above that temperature, based on the gradually increasing COP with temperature, then the heat pump is cheaper. But only cheaper by about 10 dollars per month. The 30-40 bucks a year you save running your heat pump during the winter months you will NEVER make back if you are shelling out an extra 10k for an install versus a gas furnace. And that gas furnace produces hot toasty air instead of lukewarm air.
The price of electricity weighs heavily on if a heat pump is CHEAPER (cheaper, not EFFICIENT) to run than gas. For all but the most advanced heat pumps, if you run the numbers, in most areas of the United States, with the exception of some parts of California, under an average temperature of 15-20 degrees Fahrenheit it is cheaper to use gas to heat. And in many, many parts of the east coast, Midwest, and south, gas is always cheaper to use to heat no matter what temperature, even if you have the most ridiculously advanced heat pumps with a high COP, and even if it’s damn near 70 degrees outside. Gas is that cheap, and packs in that energy.
I want everyone to note how this article only notes that heat pumps are more EFFICIENT. Not CHEAPER. Just because something is efficient doesn’t mean it’s CHEAPER. I want to stress that point.
I also want to note that as someone who has a heat pump, I would pay an extra 10-20 dollars a month for some warm dry heat, instead of lukewarm air. And I would pay that very willingly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
There's so much evil being demonstrated today, in real time, that we can't dismiss this any more, it must be seriously considered.
Anyways, if you feel like running the AC, then go outside. It is much hotter in Mexico, think about that.
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.
A heat pump specifically is an AC system that can run in reverse: moving heat from outside to inside.
They now make really efficient refrigerators for your kitchen that you get to throw out every 2-5 years.
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 ?
Maybe? Or maybe the tech is not superior enough (considering the overhead) so nobody cares.