You can run the blower and electronics of a natural gas furnace or boiler off a little camping generator for a week or even better a natural gas whole house unit in perpetuity.
So you don't, you know, freeze to death.
Best of all, the total investment and maintenance actually decreases.
Likewise for a heat pump, right?
Does this "power out for days after a winter storm" thing actually happen very often? I am from Manitoba and my worst-ever experience was 10-11 hours when it was very, very cold out in 35+ years.
Assuming I run the generator for 12 hours a day at half load (powering my whole house, still firing my equipment up and working remotely…) and the furnace runs for three hours a day throughout that time… I can keep going for a couple of weeks. If I _can_ get gas to fuel the generator with that can be extended pretty substantially—the generator is really what’s using up all my propane.
So in the realm of the kind of power outages where you reasonably expect society to recover and continue… works pretty well for me.
But yeah, in the future I would love to move over to a heat pump and solar generation / local storage. That extends your potential runtime pretty near indefinitely. (We’re talking lifetime of batteries and solar panels at that point instead of “when the propane truck can come by next”.)
They clearly over-generalized. I didn't say they "overstated." They didn't say "in some parts of Seattle" they said "in Seattle."
I'm sure there have been edge cases in every state of the country where the power has been 10 days at someone's house because of unique circumstances. That doesn't meaningfully change the risk profile of a heat pump over gas furnaces.
Alright, that's so rare it's hardly a data point.
>I live in the middle of the Seattle metropolitan area, not out in the country.
Wait, so you aren't even talking about the city of Seattle? Never mind...
> that's so rare it's hardly a data point.
I never expected a 10 day power failure in the middle of a metropolitan city.
E.g. Seattle City Light has a better reputation for uptime than Puget Sound Energy.
Near Ottawa—in the past 12 months I’ve had an eight day outage, a four day outage, and a few day long outages.
We don’t need to survive the -40 or -50 of the prairies, but even with good insulation a -10 day in the spring makes the house pretty cold after a couple of days.
An average gas furnace blower motor draws around 7A at 120V.
A heat pump can require between 20A-40A at *240V* PLUS the air handler which is the same as above. A heat pump air handler is just a furnace without burners. If supplemental heat strips are needed they can be on a 50A breaker at 240V.
Source: I used a little gas generator many times to power the gas furnace when the electric grid was down.