Great, now if someone can crack the engineering challenge of installing a name-brand heat pump for less than $18,000 (CAD) that'd be great.
- the Canada premium: these sorts of things are just more expensive here. The base price was just higher than I could find in the US, but obviously importing is too expensive. I think the reason for this is there's almost no stock.
- adapting my house: the house I live in was built to have central air added to it, but even so the pipes going from the furnace room to the outside had to be insulated both directions instead of only one for an AC. Ripping up our basement ceiling to do this added a lot to the cost. An unfinished basement would help a lot here.
- HVAC company confusion: I had to go through like five HVAC companies before I found one that would believe me that I really wanted it. The one I got is a commercial outfit, so their prices were just higher. Even they were skeptical but they were willing to work with us, and by the end they talked about doing more installs so that was nice.
I think the cost for the install and unit itself was $12k for a top of line carrier unit capable of working down to pretty low temperatures. But we already had a compatible carrier furnace and exchanger. Was another couple thousand for ripping up the basement, which we had other contractors do.
This was also literally during the heat dome last year. They had to ship the unit across the country.
Labor is expensive right now. :(
I set mine up with T's, electric dampers and some simple logic.
It's a bad system. Split systems make sense, and I know they exist, but they seem weirdly rare.
Some data on this topic: https://www.energyvanguard.com/blog/will-a-heat-pump-water-h...
I have the stats from my own Rheem to know I’m coming out ahead financially during winter and also haven’t seen a meaningful swing in the basement climate.
I’m a regular participant in that linked blog, too. :)
You can definitely do it for cheaper. There are $1000-$3000 single-head units available online for self-install, and you could hire an HVAC person to come out and do the high pressure line part of it (or all of it) for a similar range. It just gets expensive with the name-brand ones. For some reason that $2k-6k turns into 10k-20k when you switch to a name brand (e.g. mitsubishi). They're only available through specific installers, and using a non-authorized installer means your warranty is void.
Of course, a multi-room install would probably get expensive quickly here too.
[1]: https://kaiteki.no/