Heat pumps of the 1800s are becoming the technology of the future
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Also replaced our just as old non-working shutters with dual cellular blinds for additional insulation.
One thing I do slightly regret is although Trane / American Standard (they're the same company) is highly rated (according to Consumer Reports) for reliability, if you use a variable speed heat pump and air handler, they use a custom communication protocol (digital instead of analog) that no modern third party thermostats use it, and you have to use Trane thermostats instead.
So far the Trane app works well for manipulating temperature, setting a schedule and holding it like 3rd party hardware and apps, but you're not going to get like HomeKit integration if that's a thing you care about.
I’m also concerned about what happens when their online system stops working. Technically I can program some on the connected unit, but it’s not ideal
Oh, it also can only use the temp from 1 remote thermostat at a time. My last 3rd party one allowed, for instance, the night temp to be the remote in the bedroom and the daytime to be set by the living room remote - Trane doesn’t support that in the schedules at all.
Removed my water heater and HVAC, for two 500 feet deep holes in the ground. Electricity bill is low, and gas bill is gone. You can receive tax breaks from federal, state, and local utility companies (in the US) too.
While I do recommend it, you may need to wait for an available drill if the terrain under your property is difficult to dig through.
Do you know temperature at that dept?
Temp is 52f from our loops. Supposedly very consistent once below the frost line (6ft or so). All depends on the region you are in.
However, I paid significantly less than that even with all of the additions. As the incentives and discounts reduced it by about ~14k. The tax credits are ~13.5k, which won’t be realized until this upcoming tax season.
Only issue I’ve had at all is with the thermostat, which is an Ecobee Pro. While these smart thermostats are okay, they seem to mess up some of the more basic requirements of a thermostat, compared to the older dumb models.
For context, the system went live in January, all permits cleared in November. So about a year of use.
Low-intensity waste heat is valuable. And it is something that can be captured and used. But that is a different kind of mentality, and a different kind of engineering, one that hasn't been much-developed. For example, here in Canada, like in many countries, we like to take hot showers. We take hot showers even in winter, and there can be an 80 °C difference between the water flowing down the drain and the air outside. Is there no further useful work that heat could do?
For example, we didn’t insulate our concrete slab floor because our windows provide too much passive heat 10 months out of the year. We’re on the edge of the region where such insulation is recommended (thankfully, it is not required here - in the fall, we have to run the air conditioning when it is in the mid sixties outside! In the summer, we don’t need A/C until the upper seventies because of the angle of the sun and passive cooling from the slab).
Anyway, our hybrid hot water heat pump has a COP of two or three, and was a much cheaper upgrade than passive heat reclamation would have been.
Because we bought an efficient unit, it uses hardly any power (800kwh per year, so an average of 91 watts, or about $100/year, or charging my car from empty to full 24 times), so we’d be better off with some other upgrade on a thing that hasn’t hit diminishing returns.
For instance, we should have used bigger air ducts on our hvac system to improve the air handler’s efficiency.
I am immediately on the side of the owner-builder, but then
> in the fall, we have to run the air conditioning when it is in the mid sixties outside!
what? building design has a lot of parts to it.. "big cement slab" and "some insulation" are not the only parts.. But good quality design and the parts to build it are expensive. There is an underlying theme of saving money to accomplish something otherwise not possible. I am sympathetic to that of course.. Something is not right about the design, but what bad manners to point it out first! Someone put a lot of effort into some upgrade and they likely cannot change the decisions they made, due to time and costs, etc.
good to hear the details and mostly supportive here -- green building has got to get better, starting yesterday IMHO
Of course, the excess sun means excess solar production when most people aren’t running heaters or A/C.
The expensive fix is to increase the amount the roof sticks out by a foot or so to block the sun for an additional month in fall and spring.
The cheap fix (what we are going for) is to put up curtains or blinds that let us manually tune the amount of passive heating we get from the sun.
Either fix would also reduce glare, but only the curtains let us tune the pre/post solstice passive heating. It is colder post-solstice for a given angle of sun, so extending the roof enough for November probably implies paying more for heat in Jan/Feb.
We had been planning a highly insulated slab with exposed concrete floors, but your comments on having to run AC seems concerning if I am reading it right. We plan for awnings to keep sun off the windows in the high summer sun.
We went all electric in an area where PG&E outages are frequent. We have battery and solar, but during extended outages there usually isn’t any sun. Our solution is to get a propane tank and generator that can charge the battery. This is a complicated compatibility problem, so we should have put the generator in at the same time as the battery and solar.
Heat pumps are fine, but the contractor undersized the ducts. Run a system backpressure test yourself (get the service manual) before writing the final check for the install.
Permitting and insurance in California are maliciously bad.
If you want a graywater system, apply for the permit at the same time you start the project. Also, be prepared to pay $20-30K for “engineering” and permits, but only $1-5K for parts and installation. (Or look around more than we did for an ethical designer.)
Get the best possible insulation and if possible pay for plaster. We’ve had a few leaks, and plaster / rockwool is much more tolerant of water than drywall / fiberglass.
Pay for all the smarthome stuff, but insist on offline home assistant compatibility.
Wire multiple outdoor circuits (120v and 240, if possible) so you can charge a car, run a hot tub, run a pool pump, charge a lawnmower, etc, etc without thinking about circuit capacity. You won’t do those things, but they cost basically nothing now, and $10K or more later.
AFCI breakers are a scam (incompatible with appliances that contain motors or switches), so expect nuisance trips unless you replace them with GFCI post-inspection.
The fancier the lamp, the more compatibility and capacitor whine you will encounter. Our most trouble free lamps were under $100 at ikea. I know which ones cost 10x that, but meh.
Under no circumstances purchase doorknobs made by emtek, assa abloy or kwikset. (Two of those brands are $$$).
Keep a bottle of spray air on hand at all times because modern smoke detectors will go off at 2am and the only way to fix it (other than a hatchet) is by spraying off the sensors.
Whatever your plan is for a roof, get a nicer one.
Pick a general contractor that has put up lots of homes in your county.
https://www.vetrinawindows.com/styles/tilt-and-turn-windows
(I’ve never heard of that brand, but their webpage has a nice animation explaining the product.)
I paid to heat that water up, so I damn well want to get as much out of it as I can.
If I took baths every day then it might become a problem but once a week or so had had no negative effects.
The marketing material claims energy savings of up to 50%, but presumably you'll only reach that amount of savings if you take hour long showers at ridiculous temperatures.
What confuses me is that, I could understand if this is uniquely an Australian experience to have this in your home, office and shops, but don’t all modern cars have heat pump air conditioners? They usually don’t reverse to heat the inside space, the car instead just dumps the engine’s heat into the interior space and/or uses resistive heating, but still the technology is exactly the same! It’s just missing one component and configuration that makes it reversible.
Maybe I’m way wrong and it’s a completely different thing but idk
Do you guys have… fridges? Freezers?
There was a lot of lobbying by the natural gas companies in the 80's, so there's a pretty significant group of people that write off heat pumps not realizing that yes, fridges, freezers, air conditioners are all single-direction heat pumps.
- Wikipedia
Carrier and friends were already getting huge by this time in North America, and we were still decades away from any Asian imports being seen as anything more than bottom of the barrel goods.
The shittiest VCR you could buy at Best Buy in the early 1990’s in the US was produced by Goldstar, a Korean manufacturer, which today sells some of the very most expensive home electronics options. A change like that calls for a rebranding, which is why you and I know the company by a different name: LG.
Australia seems to have a more direct line to Asian manufacturers, particularly before shipping improved, so it’s not surprising you all ended up with mini splits. Also old American cooling loops are bulky, making them less efficient to ship that far.
They never used it as gas heating was cheaper to run back then.
Previously electricity and gas was so cheap it wasn't worth the cost of a heat pump, now its worth considering even for things like clothes dryers.
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Interesting that the author of the article doesn't mention the AfD at all, or politics, for that matter, his world is this techno-utopia where we're told what "the future is" and we, the masses, should blindly follow. Very dangerous game to play.