Heat pump disappointment for climate-minded Massachusetts state senator

It's good to see a politician actually doing their own analysis rather than just following every fad. It's a characteristic that is sorely lacking from the US political class.

Anytime you have a technology that is marketed ubiquitously as if it's a silver bullet solution, you are going to have disappointed users and implementations that under deliver.

Of course it's extremely important to switch people to electrified heating systems, regardless of their efficiency. However it's a little disingenuous to pretend there is nothing but upside here. The upside is for humanity as a whole; for individuals there may be very little noticable changes or improvements, and the systems may be worse than what they are used to.

> I do not fault the particular pump that we bought or our installers who were careful and professional. Apparently, however, we lack good rules of thumb to predict how a pump will perform in a particular installation.

A 278% estimation turning out as 150% real world performance, certainly was not done very carefully.

This is why I couple my heat pump operation to solar output from my panels. Any time I can fully self power it is a 100% win. During the darkest and coldest months however, the existing gas boiler takes the lead.

My heat pump is 5 years old and has never leaked refrigerant. I also collect the condensate for the gardens.

It seems ridiculous that refrigerator leaks are not "an uncommon occurrence". Does anyone have any insight into why this would be?

I have a 12,000 sqft building in the northwest corner of Massachusetts. Really well insulated and heated entirely with heat pumps. I have a large solar array to offset the costs. I ending up paying around $1.50 this year for all the electricity. If I factor in my SRECs sales it drops to around $.75. Last august the Governor signed new legislation that increased the the price utilities pay for the KWhs I produce so I expect another reduction in cost. The biggest problem I have is that 5 years ago all the HVAC installers claimed one couldn't use a heat pump in our area. Now we need many more installers than are available. Our local vocational school just added an HVAC heat pump program for the build back better funds.

If I were building new in the north, ground-loop heat pumps make more sense, less maintenance, less trying to eek out a temperature difference. You will likely already have the equipment on-site for grading and foundation work. No need to remove material permanently for it…

OP fails to mention total cost of producing the new heat pump and opportunity cost of disposal of the old heat unit.

Brownberger seems to miss the key fact that you can't run a gas heating system on renewable energy.

Just as in switching to an EV isn't going to make things significantly better, switching your heating to heat pump isn't either:

Some basic tips from a fellow Bay Stater:

1. Any new or replacement mechanicals should be use heat pumps (water heater too)

2. Make sure your house is well-insulated to get the best bang for the buck

3. The grid has the ability to use greener energy as time goes on, and you can also opt in to renewable suppliers (in MA, at least)

4. Add a solar array and with net metering it becomes a no brainer.

I wonder if we will ever see them switch to R-1234YF refrigerant. "While R-134a has a Global Warming Potential of 1300, R-1234yf’s GWP is less than 1." The only issue is the higher pressures and the fact that it's somewhat flammable might be why.

I will say, my heat pump dryer, while it has removed some buttons from shirts, has exceeded my expectations on energy usage. It's night and day compared to my toaster I had before.

And possibly this senator got a bad heat pump setup. Sample size of one although the leaking being common is not good.

I think too many do not understand one point of the Green New Deal, perhaps because that point is NOT advertised: convergence toward electricity it's not different than convergence toward IP, it means choosing a tech we need anyway while not the cheapest and use it for almost anything cutting much costs.

For instance a heat pump have much less raw materials and need far less high costs alloys than a gas heating system, essentially is cheaper to be produced, and if we can stay on electricity only we can spare the maintenance and expansion costs of gas/oil/* distribution networks.

Try to compare classical mechanical clocks vs modern electronic ones: the mechanical one it's far more costly per single unit, the electronic one cost next to nothing per single unit. For EVs it's not different: they have much less parts, less special alloys, less precision needed to produce them.

Heat pumps and EVs have both evolution margins, while classic ICEs and gas heating systems have already reached a sort of evolution plateau.

Those are the reasons of the Green New Deal: ecology is advertised as the only reason, in reality is a MARGINAL reason, the main reason is reduce much the demand of raw materials (once the transition will be done, of course) and lower much overall production costs. I imaging such reasons are not advertised because most of the benefit will go to those how steer the transition, not to those who pay it. But that's is and understand it and it's need means also steer the actual transition in a way more interesting to the people than a very small cohort of cleptocrats.

> I do not fault the particular pump that we bought or our installers who were careful and professional.

I feel like the author may be letting the installers off too easily here. It seems like there are two main possibilities: either no one understands how heat pumps actually work in the real world and none of them meet their claimed efficiencies (possible, but in my estimation not that likely) or the heat pumps he has installed are unsuited for their purpose (or badly installed). I'm inclined to suspect that he was sold the wrong heat pumps.

Confirming this suspicion, in an earlier post (https://willbrownsberger.com/our-heat-pump-experience/#comme...) he gives the specs for his heat pumps. I don't know this particular model, but a commenter after him claims they are not the sort of "Cold Climate Heat Pumps" that would be appropriate for Massachusetts. Since this matches the symptoms (adequate heat production but low efficiency) I'm guessing this is the real issue here.

I think heat pumps are a great technology, but worry there is going to be a backlash against them unless we can rein in the hype. And something is has gone really wrong if local installers can't be trusted to install a heat pump that is appropriate for the climate they are being installed in. Maybe the best thing he can do as a Massachusetts state senator is to enact more stringent laws preventing the installation of non-cold-climate heat pumps in Massachusetts so others don't suffer the disappointment that he did!

I intuited this as well, which is why I stayed with gas heat.

These days I'm even wondering if wood heat with a high efficiency furnace makes sense. There are so many dead trees around me. The carbon is going to go back either way. In the case of decomposition, there may be other negative effects of leaving it on the ground compared to burning it.

I haven't given much thought to a way to capture the heat in a way that can be used later. Ideally I can build some giant container of sand with some cinderblock, run some copper through the sand, and heat both using the wood being burned. Then, I could pump water through the copper which is being passively heated from the sand into my existing hot water baseboard, but it's unlikely to be hot enough - oh well.

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I actually looked at some old quotes I found for mini split installs before and after the tax credits Massachusetts introduced and *big shock*, the price of the installs increased about 90% of the tax credit.

The author does not mention if their system is air-sourced or ground-sourced (aka geothermal) - ground sourced systems typically use 25-50% less energy and are especially well-suited to places with colder temp extremes where an air-sourced system becomes quite inefficient. Downside is more expensive to install (need to bury a bunch of tubes in your yard)

[1] http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph240/holmvik1/docs/d...

Just wanted to shout out that this is my state senator, and he does take feedback seriously (and responds to emails quite quickly!). I doubt he will check this thread out but if you email him he will get back to you.

I was wondering what the overall efficiency would be if you still used gas, but had that gas power a combustion engine to drive the heat pump compressor, while also reclaiming the heat from the engine and exhaust? Would that be more efficient than burning gas at a peaker plant to convert to electricity to run the heat pump?