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Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

"much cheaper"

I can believe it has a lower price, but I'm sure the cost is higher.

I mathed it a bit. Assuming that there's no reclamation built in to current pricing, pricing in 100% reclamation would increase the cost of natural gas by ~40%. Still not more expensive than electricity if the article is to be taken at face value.

Not in the least. With baseboard heating, the cost to heat my 1 bedroom apartment was on par with heating a 4 bedroom house (with gas). With a heat pump, at best it will be comparable.

Comment you're replying to was noting the difference between price-to-consumer and cost-to-planet.

> With a heat pump, at best it will be comparable.

Would it?

e.g. according to https://c03.apogee.net/mvc/home/hes/land/el?utilityname=ure&... unless you live in area with extremely expensive gas and very cheap electricity it will always be cheaper.

Thanks. Went to my gas and electric bills to look up the rates. Plugged in the numbers on the site. Heat pump estimated to cost me $400 extra per year for heating.

If I were doing a brand new build, it may make some sense just because I like to be "green". But paying several thousand just for the install, only to end up paying more per year: Just doesn't make sense.

I guess that's the crux of the green initiatives: people don't care about going green because they don't care about their environment footprint, thus generally don't care about the planet or other humans. Now if I phrased this too negative I'm sorry, but I guess I'm still right.

I think that website is wrong or using obsolete data. I compared with another https://www.pickhvac.com/hvac/furnace-vs-heat-pump-cost/ and it said that with exactly the same numbers the heatpump was 50% cheaper than gas. My own observation is that our heating cost reduced dramatically when we replaced gas with heat pump.

Electric resistive baseboard is obviously extremely foolish as a primary heating source. It's not a real point of comparison, but closer to a straw man.

The point is exactly that electric heat pumps and gas are comparable. Which means that other things start to tip the scale like not having gas in the house (fire safety), having nicer air conditioning for the summer from the same unit, offsetting the grid electricity use with your own solar (lower generation in the winter, but it still helps), and envisioning grid scale sources moving towards renewables.

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