I have a heat pump that used 200 kWh of electricity in a single day! Granted, it was the coldest day of the winter.
Is your house especially insulated to get that low?
Is your house especially insulated to get that low?
200 kwh is quite a lot ... but also in US it looks like that the houses are bigger.
I have a 7 kWh Vaillant Heat Pump in Denmark, and the highest consumption i saw last winter was just over 60 kWh per day, which was with -16C.
My total consumption for a year with heat and hot water was around 3600 kWh ( 2200 ft2, 4 people).
COP was around 3.7 on average for the entire year, so ~13,500 kWh of heat produced by the heat pump. For comparison, one m3 of natural gas is around 10.5 kWh of heat, so we produced the equivalent of 1,285 m3 of gas.
Still, i use way less energy than i did with natural gas. The original estimate from the installer was that the backup heater would consume around 100 kWh during normal year, and considering my estimated "heating needs" of 13,000 kWh per hear, that's just a tiny fragment of that. Resistive heat is (almost) a 1:1 conversion of energy from electricity to heat, and the heat pump delivers a COP value of between 3.5 and 4, meaning i spend around 3500 kWh on the rest.
For comparison, 1m3 of natural gas contains roughly 10.5 kWh of heat energy when burned in a gas boiler, so to deliver 13,000 kWh of heat, i would have to burn 1250m3 of gas.
Where i live, in Scandinavia, electricity is around $0.13/kWh and natural gas is around $2.2/m3 (both including taxes), so in total it works out to :
- Gas : 1,250* 2.2 = $2,750 / year
- Heat pump : 3,500 * 0.13 = $455 / year
Gas is about 6 times as expensive as a heat pump here.