Heat pumps are efficient and eco-friendly. So why are they so rarely used?
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Unfortunately it is not as easy as just switching your gas heating with a heatpump. For one, heatpumps have a lower flow temperature, therefore a good insulation of the house is required. Also big radiators such as floor or wall are preferred.
Moving to heatpumps might start an entire house renovation which comes at a cost.
One of the best things is that is an air conditioner you run in reverse to get some heating.
Yeah this is a key issue that shouldn't be glossed over like this. We need more data about how much they have improved.
I like carbon pricing in theory as a market solution, but it really only works when the person paying the extra cost can make different choices about their usage. Those of us rich, old, or lucky enough to own homes can retrofit for efficiency as we see fit. Renters are stuck with whatever heat source, air sealing, and insulation they draw in the lottery, especially in the current housing crunch. If the renter is also paying the utilities the person with the carbon-pricing incentive to make improvements isn't allowed to and the landlord has no reason to change.
Heat pumps have "emergency" electrical resistance heaters for this. Source: owned homes with heat pumps for the past 20 years.
The definitely are not capable of handling any subfreezing temperatures. Natural gas is, overall, FAR more efficient for heating when the supposed efficiency of the heat pump gets slammed by the inefficiency of electric heat.
So that answers the OP's question of why we don't use them: They're fiddly, expensive to buy, and both don't work in, and are insanely expensive to operate in the cold.
The problem with wood fires is they require a ducted external air source, or the chimney will exhaust your expensive heated air.
And you are absolutely correct about venting heat. I have not to my knowledge seen a home here with an externally ducted air source. So the room is heated, and heat (warm air) is sucked out of the rest of the house.
Wood is cheap here, and so people often believe it is more efficient jot counting the inefficiencies of wood.
What the hell? Heat pumps are not little known. An air conditioner is a heat pump. It's hard to take the article seriously when they gloss over this basic fundamental point.
I can tell they're trying to advocate for something, perhaps using the heat wave as a push to install larger bidirectional heat pumps that will make Europe less dependent on natural gas come winter? Still the whole framing just comes across as odd... like "Local area man stays cool with this one simple trick" [install an air conditioner]
Either way the capital cost of a heat pump is high and people seem to have a psychological aversion to spending money on capital costs.
One of the best selling points of a heat pump is comfort: it switches continuously from heating to air conditioning. An eco-sensitive person in Upstate NY might not really think they need air conditioning. It's not like buying a Toyota Corolla to save the planet, it's more like buying a Cadillac Escalade to save the planet and the psychology doesn't really work for that.
See https://energysavingtrust.org.uk/air-source-heat-pumps-vs-gr...
But in places like Florida, if you have a 15+ year old A/C, replacing it with a conventional modern heat pump, it would probably pay for itself in a few years.
Plenty of places get or stay colder than -25C, but that is often short stretches or overnight. There are a lot of places that would do better with a little resistive heat backup compared to the huge installation costs for ground source.
New neighbourhoods in cold climates should be required to install community ground source heat pumps. Since all that dirt is moving anyway the cost of trenching is negligible and any drilling is amortized over many properties.
Heat pump capital costs are too high. They should be standardized or designed to be cheap and used everywhere…to recover waste heat from everywhere in the home.
Ground source is expensive, but that's due to drilling and/or trenching. The actual heat pump is a tiny fraction of the bill to install ground source heating.