Nine US states are teaming up to accelerate the adoption of heat pumps
wired.com
wired.com
If you're in the South, a heat pump makes perfect sense. You're going to want AC anyway and it'll be way more efficient and save a ton of money when you want heat. In most of the country, even if it gets cold your electricity prices are still a ton cheaper. Iowa/Kansas/Missouri/Nebraska get cold, but their electric rates are less than half ours.
Heat pumps do work into freezing New England temperatures, but they're a bit less efficient as it gets to zero fahrenheit. That wouldn't matter if our electric rates were more reasonable, but at our high rates a heat pump would probably cost me an additional $50/mo in the winter (compared to natural gas). That isn't so bad and our electric rates might come down as offshore wind actually starts happening. Plus it might actually be cheaper than gas given that mini-splits would mean I could choose which rooms I want to heat rather than heating the whole place as a single zone. Plus there's the option to get solar power to drive down prices.
But I think the biggest issue in New England (and California) will probably be the high cost of electricity. In most of the country, heat pumps are a huge no-brainer.
I'm in a similar high-priced environment, but we get a fair amount of sun. I'm getting around a 16% return on capital based on electricity usage reduction.
NREL has solar availability maps. Alas the scale sucks; there's great monthly average views, but all done with the same yearly average scale, so during the summer everything is the same full-red potential (>5.75 kWh/m^2/d) and during the winter everything is (mostly) the same low potential (<4kWh/m^2/d). Still, one can kind of read some pattern from fall/spring & see how a lot of NE looks a lot like, say, Seattle (<<4 average). https://www.nrel.gov/gis/solar-resource-maps.html
Lots of cold places in northern latitudes have short winter days that are overcast more often than not yielding only a little solar energy for a big chunk of the year.
Ground mount is also an option in many places.
Definitely doable.
Even during 115 degree heatwaves in a 70-year-old, 3-bedroom, single-family home. Most I paid was $100 in a month with 2 people with gaming computers working from home.
Not everyone has that kind of money, but my point is that most people have cell service and other services which add up to more than electricity costs.
That’s fine, I make no judgement of what people spend. I’m just setting a comparison. For how much value electricity provides us and how much we use it, I wouldn’t call it expensive, even in California.
YMMV by city, but it wasn’t an issue in Sacramento. The real monster is climate change, and so here we have a chicken-and-egg problem combined with wealth disparity.
I think we need comprehensive social program packages to address this.
Might have been a bit over $100, but I’m just as flabbergasted at your $278.
https://www.smud.org/en/Rate-Information/Residential-rates
https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/resid... (PDF File)
PGE's off-peak rates are 3x SMUD's off-peak rates. PGE's peak rates are 1.5x to almost 2x of SMUD's peak rates.
You’re missing the actual point of my original post
This was your first comment in the thread.
If you don't want the point of your original post to be missed, don't make it cryptic and have surprised pikachu face when multiple people miss your point. We are not attending a stand up comedy here to understand your tone in this text format.
It’s truly amazing to behold.
I pay $0.35/kwh here outside of Boston. The electricity generation part of my bill alone $0.19/kwh dwarfs her entire bill
Assuming $.40 per kWh, which is lower than my PGE rate, that’s $360 per month just to run the ac.
Not sure what kind of setup you have. $100 is my bill if I’m not home in the winter and leave everything off.
SMUD time of day. Ran the AC super cold during the night (so it would run the entire off-peak period). Ran it somewhat cool during mid-peak. Didn’t use it at all during peak.
Other appliances I only ran at night.
Installed lots of insulation at move-in.
Like I said in OP, Sacramento. YMMV.
But in any case I’d argue $360 is still not expensive per se given the value you’re getting. How many square feet were you cooling? What else was operating?
It’s just about perspective. I was responding to the claim that electricity is expensive.
I'm assuming, since you mention Sacramento and peak hours, these[0] are your rates? Next time, share those so folks in other places can compare. That page has these:
Summer:
* Off-peak: $0.1425 kWh
* Mid-peak: $0.1967 kWh
* Peak: $0.3462 kWh
Non-Summer
* Off-peak: $0.1151 kWh
* Peak: $0.1590 kWh
That's pretty high, but I think middling to low for California. For comparison, in my town outside Chicago, we have a year-round all-day rate of $0.12 kWh.
[0] https://www.smud.org/en/Rate-Information/Residential-rates
If California is serious about this, they need to reign in the utilities to reduce prices and or stop the attacks on solar installation.
Pricewise, it's actually a wash. My electric bill went up by about $100 a month, whereas during the winter my gas bill was running about $100 a month to run the furnace (aside from that one random $600 bill one month last year that inspired this change). I've been using the mini split all winter and it's been great.
It's definitely annoying to calculate! Since a heat pump's efficiency can vary with the outside temperature, it takes a bit of work to estimate your potential added electricity cost.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-01-06/get-ready-...
I don't think that's right: look at micro-CHP (Combined Heat and Power) systems: they run an engine to generate electricity, and then capture the heat for heating. I don't think you can get them for residential in the US though.
Well I found this, they used the heat for hot water:
Except it's not legal to do this, and even if it were there'd be a lot of hassle.
If you plumb the radiator to your home you get >100% efficiency
[1] https://www.ehs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/emergency_ge...
[2] https://www.mass.gov/doc/310-cmr-700-air-pollution-control-r...
For example Silicon Valley Power which serves Santa Clara (or something like that) has rates that are literally half as much as PG&E.
In Minnesota I’m paying for Xcel Energy’s mistakes in Texas.
If someone remote wants power, they should secure power and pay for it at a market clearing rate, given the cost and risk to deliver it.
California has wildfires, and climate change has made them worse. Then the people who built their houses in a silly place prone to wildfires watch them burn down. This is becoming a problem as the frequency which with it happens increases, because it can bankrupt fire insurance companies (who then can't pay claims), or make fire insurance there unaffordable and then people don't buy it, their house burns down, and you have angry constituents.
The political solution to this is to put the liability on the power company whenever possible, even though it isn't really their fault. The fire is caused by dry conditions and that wood is going up the first time there is any kind of flame anywhere near it. If it wasn't PG&E it would have been a lightning strike or something else. Having the fires less often can actually make them worse.
But the power company is a deep pocket, so if there is any way to pin the fire on them, that's what everybody wants to do, so that the uninsured people in the fire zone can collect from someone and the currently insured people who are still there don't become unable to afford fire insurance.
Then the power company raises rates on everybody in their service area, including people who don't live in high fire risk areas, because the government has them acting as the fire insurance company, but now you can't cancel your "fire insurance" without turning off your electricity and it also has to be paid by people who didn't build their house in a silly place.
There is some liability on the state and voters for anti burn policy. However, there is more liability on the PG&E for failure to adequately mitigate risk, and failure to asses and frontload charges for probable payment.
If homes are uninsurable, then they shouldn't be. That should only be an issue for an insurer and home owner to work out.
If people want to live somewhere uninsurable, or with more expensive power, I have no issue whatsoever, and won't call them silly. That is their perogitive and values. I view it the same way as if someone wants to base jump, or eat a $500 steak. I fully support them doing whatever makes them happy, as long as they don't expect me to pay for it
Mitigating the risk is pointless. Wildfires are a natural occurrence in California. The ignition source is irrelevant. The fire is happening, you can't stop it.
> I fully support them doing whatever makes them happy, as long as they don't expect me to pay for it
But that's exactly what they expect you to do. Their houses are in a tinder box. There is some absurdly high probability that they'll burn. And then they're going to want to play the sympathetic victim who has just lost everything in a fire and go to the government and try to get someone else (i.e. you, via PG&E) to pay for the consequences of their choices.
The traditional way of doing this is to make the insurance pay, but they didn't have insurance because the high risk was known in advance which made the insurance unaffordable. When that's not available, the lawyers have to find someone else to sue, and in this case it's the power company.
>But that's exactly what they expect you to do. Their houses are in a tinder box. There is some absurdly high probability that they'll burn.
I dont know what you think is "high probability", but it doesnt really matter. The point is that it should be between them and the power company.
I think you have a pretty distorted view of reality. PGE didnt and doesn't get sued for natural wildfires, only what they cause.
But more frequent, smaller fires are actually better. Otherwise dead wood accumulates and then the next fire spreads faster and is harder to contain.
> Take the camp fire. If not for PG&E, 85 people would be alive, and 16 billion in damages would be averted.
And then an even worse fire would have happened later.
> The point is that it should be between them and the power company.
But the power company isn't raising rates for customers in high fire risk areas, they're raising rates for everyone. Otherwise the people in high risk areas would all cancel their electrical service because they couldn't afford it, but the power company would still have to maintain lines there because it's in their service area.
> PGE didnt and doesn't get sued for natural wildfires, only what they cause.
They're all natural wildfires. They're caused by dead wood and dry conditions.
PG&E's liability for wildfire-related damages, blowing up San Bruno, etc., is not a political decision of where to place blame for climate-change effects, it is regular civil liability (and in some cases criminal) for damage provably attributable to acts or culpable omissions by the firm.
I've not heard of any attacks, just reductions in subsidies (tax credits, net metering). Can you share what you're referring to?
I moved to SoCal recently and didn't realize things like net metering even existed, so when people started to rant about these new measures I was very surprised to learn about them, and especially about people presuming these things to be "normal".
I think at first people were (reasonably) scared that net metering might go away with no grandfathering for existing installations. People had a reasonable reliance interest in maintaining at least some of their existing benefits for the payoff period of their panels.
Once it was clear that existing installations would be grandfathered, I didn't hear much ranting anymore — just people who were bummed that a subsidy was going away (or people rushing to get in under the wire).
>…Rooftop solar photovoltaic installations on residential buildings and nuclear power have the highest unsubsidized levelized costs of energy generation in the United States. If not for federal and state subsidies, rooftop solar PV would come with a price tag between 117 and 282 U.S. dollars per megawatt hour.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/493797/estimated-leveliz...
If we want to subsidize a renewable energy source, why should we subsidize rooftop solar when we could subsidize utility grade solar or wind? Money is fungible and not unlimited - a dollar that goes to subsidize residential rooftop solar is a dollar that would go much, much further if it was used to subsidize utility grade solar or wind.
Rooftop solar subsidies are also unusual in that much of the subsidy is often paid by less well-off households to subsidize their wealthier neighbors - sort of a reverse Robinhood scheme.
If a customer is permitted to buy as much electricity as they want at a fixed price while also being able to sell as much as they can at a different time at a fixed price, it seems like there's an obvious subsidy happening anytime they sell electricity at other than when the wholesale price is the highest or buy other than when the wholesale price is lowest. (In areas with an excess of solar generation capacity, these distortions become quite large.)
(I'm still all for these subsidies on the balance of factors; we just shouldn't pretend that they're not subsidies.)
And if the grid itself is saturated, that means it isn't big enough.
The issues start if too many people do net metering. Imagine everyone has a solar roof and reaches net-zero electricity. You can still maintain the infrastructure with base fees, but the electricity company still has to run power plants in the morning and evening when demand outstrips solar supply, and for baseload in the night. And during the day there's now an oversupply of electricity that they somehow have to sell.
In commercial electricity generation many countries have a kind of spot market for electricity, where prices are determined by demand (down to the minute) and available supply. Prices can go close to zero if lots of solar and wind capacity is available, or far above the price charged to consumer for capacity to cover the evening peak. If we changed consumer prices to more accurately reflected this "true" market price (plus markup for the grid operator), with prices changing by the minute, net metering would be pretty fair. But so far there's little desire to dump all that complexity on regular consumers.
Negative prices aren't uncommon during quiet periods in the summer.
In theory yes, but the grid has not used properly scoped base fees to pay for infrastructure. Delivery costs of power are more than half the total cost; to get to a base+generation model, you'd probably see monthly connection fees for Electricity in the $100+ range for many Americans.
I always laughed about the pricing structure of the business ISP that I worked at. We charged $1000 to install your service, then $1000 per month (without a contract). This was a financial game; we would lose money if you cancelled after your first month. I always thought the pricing should be $15,000 to install, and then $5 per month. That's closer to what the actual costs are. But instead of you going to the bank to get a loan to pay the $15,000, we hid that for you. It made more people sign up, and we had a better source of funding than bank loans. But, at the end of the day, we would have been out of business if a bunch of people signed up and didn't pay. If that happened, I imagine the pricing would have changed to reflect actual costs.
That pole is carrying the power for, say, 100 people.
Half of them use a below-average amount of electricity. If you stick them with a $100/month fixed fee, they don't need a large solar/battery system to get off the grid entirely, so you've made that economical and that's what they do.
Now you have the same number of poles and half as many customers, so the fixed fee rises to $200/month, and more customers do the same thing. This is not going to a great place.
Meanwhile there is a rural road somewhere that only has two things on it. One is a large commercial operation and the other is somebody's house. Putting up poles along that road is going to cost $100,000, but the commercial operation is content to pay the entire amount because their alternative is buying land somewhere that it costs significantly more than $100,000 more. The house on the same road is not content to pay half of that and will just use their $50,000 to install a solar/battery system and have quite a bit left over, even though a model where they only pay for usage would get them to sign up, and the power company is installing the poles either way.
The problem we're looking at is that if you charge a fixed fee for a grid connection, low users opt out of the grid, and then the fixed fee goes up and creates a new set of low users. But if you charge for distribution per kWh, everybody installs local solar generation because it's cheaper than any generation method that has a significant distribution fee as part of the cost per kWh, which in turn raises the distribution component of the price per kWh even more. Under the first option, a large proportion of rural and suburban customers aren't going to want a grid connection at all. Under the second option, they'll take the grid connection but then only use it if local generation isn't available (i.e. it's cloudy) and the grid price per kWh at those times will be quite high. But that's plausibly the better of the two alternatives, because a grid connection with a high price per kWh will generally be better than losing power at those times, or having enough local storage/generation to prevent that from ever happening even in rare circumstances.
A third option is to charge everyone the fixed fee for the power grid and force them to take a grid connection even if that isn't economical, but that's even worse. You've essentially created a head tax with no way to avoid it even if you can't afford it, because you can't cancel your service and you can't pay less by reducing consumption.
Meanwhile if four of the eight people near your house decide to disconnect from the grid because the fixed fee is too high, you still have to cover the cost of that pole with half as many people, some of whom might then decide that the higher fixed fee is too much and disconnect too, etc.
I understand that all kinds of energy production methods are subsidized, but if net metering lets residential solar owners get paid more for the energy they produce than solar farms would be paid, I don't see how that's anything but a subsidy.
> if net metering lets residential solar owners get paid more for the energy they produce than solar farms would be paid, I don't see how that's anything but a subsidy.
Paying them nothing would be even more unfair (and that's the only option available where I am at least - net metering or no household generation)
I wasn't suggesting this. The phased rollback of net metering in California (the state mentioned in my original parent comment as "attacking" solar installation) means that solar owners will still get paid, just not as much as before. I'm sorry that you live somewhere that this middle option isn't available — the two extremes are indeed less fair!
[1] https://www.cbs8.com/article/news/local/working-for-you/sdge...
1: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-progressive-california-epipha...
Thank you for this clarification - I thought the discussion about changes to net metering was general, not California specific. Reading [1] about the changes to net metering in California, it seems reasonable, especially as it has high solar penetration. Hopefully it will (like many things) lead the way so that load shifting becomes simpler/more economical throughout North America.
[1] https://cleantechnica.com/2023/08/18/decoding-the-changes-to...
Those power purchase agreements then makes it really easy to get loans.
> I've not heard of any attacks, just reductions in subsidies. Can you share what you're referring to?
I do appreciate a softball.
https://duckduckgo.com/?va=c&t=he&q=political+attacks+on+sol...
1: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-progressive-california-epipha...
An analogy: your kid's preschool has an option where you can volunteer once a month and save $50/month. One day, they announce that they are going to institute a new fee that ranges from $10-100, depending on your income.
How does that new fee cause fewer people to decide to volunteer?
Break even would then be much further in to the future.
Solar is a large capital expenditure, and this change reduces the return on that investment.
To be clear, I think the income-based fee is a bad idea, but I just don't think it changes the calculus on installing solar. I have also had conversations about this specific question with a friend who has a PhD in urban planning, lives in CA, and is in the process of installing solar panels. It's possible she's wrong, but everything she says lines up with what I have read.
It sounds like you're referring to the net metering changes, which are separate from the income-based fee. That does change the calculus, obviously (which is why they grandfathered existing installs for 20 years).
The upfront cost of doing that with a propane generator is about a half that of a battery + solar system (it's about a third if you go with battery + solar + generator, which is more comparable to a grid connection).
However, the maintenance and fuel costs of the generator mean that the solar will be much cheaper (and quieter!) to operate.
If the income based pricing is $100 / month, and the net energy / base connection cost is $0 / month (assuming an exactly sized solar system), then it'll take about 200 months for the generator to pay itself off. That's 16 years, which is a bit longer than the system will last, though replacing a generator costs about half what I've assumed above.
So, there's a pretty low upper limit to the amount they can screw with these fees before it's economically (though not necessarily environmentally) rational thing for individuals to just cut the cord and let the power grid death spiral.
That's not quite right. Existing installs are grandfathered for 20 years, right? [1]
1: https://www.ecowatch.com/solar/net-metering/net-metering-3-0
Happy to have that conversation. I was replying to this language, which was not talking about new installs, or at least did not indicate so in any way:
> means that folks with solar will get socked with high monthly fees
"folks with solar" makes it sound like you're talking about people who have solar, not people who are considering putting in solar. Anyway, now that you've limited your comment to new installs, we are in agreement. There is a lower incentive for new solar installs, but IMO "lower incentives" do not amount to attacks. If other people think that it's an attack to give less free money to the purchasers of a product, they are welcome to do so (not saying you are, but others seem to think this).
Why would they reign in one of the best ways to ensure that Calpers remains solvent?
1) exhaust out air initially drawn from the house which must be replaced by cold outdoor air coming into the house (this requires more heating of the house) 2) take in fresh cold air for combustion and exhaust that (which requires extra energy to heat up the cold air)
20 years ago quite common.
The efficiency rating of a gas furnace assumes the incoming air temperature is close to the desired temperature of the house- that's why it is negligible in the artificial efficiency ratings. If the incoming air is below freezing the efficiency must be different. I wish I could find a study that properly quantified this.
The market price of electricity vs gas varies quite a bit through time and various distortions of the market. Currently gas is cheap, but you want to compare historical averages when buying something that lasts 15+ years not simply look at current rates.
Combined cycle is like at most 70% efficient, subtract 10% of distribution, you end up with 60%.
At 50f my 5T heat pump takes 6.6 kWh to generate 50,000 BTU.
6 kWh of energy takes 71cf of gas to make - accounting for transmission and generation losses.
71cf of gas will make 71,000 BTU of heat, assuming an 80% efficiency furnace, that comes out to 56,000 BTU usable.
Yes a heat pump will vastly outperform resistive strip heat - but not even an 80% gas furnace.
50,000 BTU = 5.27528 * 10 ^ 7 J = 14.6 kWh / 6.6 kWh = COP of 2.2 at 50f which is absolutely terrible. Modern heat pumps should have a COP around 4 at those temperatures and 3 near freezing.
Also, “Subtracting 10%” would mean your grid losses are 17%. “annual electricity transmission and distribution (T&D) losses averaged about 5% of the electricity transmitted and distributed in the United States in 2018 through 2022.” So, (70% * (1 - 5%)) = 66.5%, but resistive losses are reduced in the cold. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=105&t=3
4 * 0.665 = 2.66x though obviously what matters here is the annual average COP. (3 * 0.665) = 1.995 aka 2.
Also, should have been 60,000 BTU - its a 15 SEER unit.
PS: 2.7 COP * 0.665 = 180% efficiency which still crushes the 80% heat pump in your example but these numbers should be much higher.
The technology isn’t advancing fast enough to make upgrading every 10 years necessary. You could buy units in 2000 with a significantly higher COP than he was implying.
1 kWh = 3.6 megajoules and 1 BTU = 1055 joules
The 6.6 kWh of the heat pump is 23.76 MJ which is 22,521 BTU of energy. Assuming that the power plant and distribution are 60%, it would take 37,535 BTU of gas to produce (22,521/60%).
Instead, using that 37,535 BTU of gas in an 80% efficient furnace would only produce 30,028 BTU of heat, which is worse than the 50,000 BTU from the heat pump.
I'm pretty sure even a poor heat pump will be more efficient than heating directly with gas. (Of course, they have drawbacks, like they can leak their refrigerant that causes more of a greenhouse effect than CO2.)
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=667&t=8
I dont know where EIA gets those numbers, but that was the basis of my calculation. Maybe I shouldn't have multiplied that by the efficiency of the plant, but rather just taken of distribution losses.
However, it’s a misleading number in multiple ways because the fleet is made up of a mix of low and high efficiency turbines. Grid operators use a mix of turbine types as a cost optimization, a far cheaper and far less efficient turbine that’s only used 1% of the time it worth it. The average number of kWh per cf of gas is therefore heavily in favor of high efficiency turbines.
My heat pump contains 2.1 kg of R32 refrigerant. R32 has a GWP of 675, so that 2.1 kg is the equivalent of 1417 kgs of CO2. (older refrigerants were much worse!)
Heat pumps should never leak their refrigerant during their lifetime, and installers will remove and recycle the refrigerant when servicing or decommissioning systems. But of course, accidents happen, so let's pessimistically assume that 50% of systems installed will eventually leak. In the real world it's hopefully far less than that, but that would mean on average 708 kg CO2e in refrigerant is emitted per system over its lifetime.
On the other hand, heating a typical US home with natural gas emits 2900 kgs of CO2 per year.
I think it's safe to say that the climate impact of refrigerant leaks in modern heat pump systems is minuscule compared to that of the CO2 emitted from natural gas heating.
In sane units:
- 2 m^3 of gas generates 6.6 kWh of electricity
- which generates 14.7 kWh of heat (at some temperature differential).
- The same 2 m^3 of gas generates 20.8 kWh of heat
- of which about 16.4 kWh is usable assuming some losses.
Of course your implied electricity generation is only around 31% efficient, so I'm not sure what that 60% you mention in the beginning is about. The COP you're using is around 2.2, which together with a 60% efficiency for generating electricity would be greater than 1, outstripping anything that's physically possible to achieve with a furnace.
California's insanely high electricity rates are about $0.15 / kWh, so the energy costs $0.0375 per mile.
Gas has hovered around $4 / gallon or higher for a long time, giving a fuel cost of $0.0666 per mile.
Big energy guzzling EVs get about 2 miles / kWh, for $0.075 per mile, and gas guzzlers easily get below 15 MPG, or $0.26 per mile.
You'd have to go back to the days of $1 / gallon gas (mid 1990's?) and ignore inflation / lower electricity costs back then to conclude large ICE cars have competitive fuel costs. You'd "only" need to go back to $2 gas for the energy efficient hybrids to be competitive.
They’re more like $.30/kWh.
Wholesale rates are .02-.04/kWh, but in a nutshell, retail ratepayers are paying for all the record wildfire lawsuit costs.
The price has certainly come down (look at henry hub chart..), but also winter has not been too cold..
They should ban oil exports next.. (for "national security")
Actually export tariffs would be better than outright bans.
IIRC Gas extraction has an extremely high EROI (30x) initially, making it a highly productive extractive resource. But each gas well has a productive lifespan of approx 7 years requiring constant activity to sustain development.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/imports-and-...
In 2022 the US imported 3 trillion CF, exported 6.9 trillion cubic feet, and extracted 43.8 trillion CF.
By comparison in 2015 we only exported 1.8 trillion CF.
If shipping makes it an order of magnitude more expensive, then there is no global price.
Large (not ultra large) oil tankers might carry 200,000 tonnes and consume 25 ton of heavy bunker fuel per day.
LNG gas carriers equally have their own stats.
This is something you can (or at the very least should be able to) back of envelope estimate ...
https://www.planete-energies.com/en/media/article/transporti...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%A4rtsil%C3%A4-Sulzer_RTA9...
Now you just need mean trip times, profit margin, etc. and you're away.
Order of magnitude addition to costs, though, sounds a little extreme.
True but it was turned off some time before that happened
Of course there is a global market for all fossil fuels.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-was-top-lng-expor....
As of 2023, Australia is the world's second largest LNG exporter (source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1262074/global-lng-expor...) after the US (take that Russia!) and ahead of Qatar. Great for the gas exporting cartel but not so great for ordinary Australians in eastern states who now pay the same for gas as people in Tokyo. (And Aussies wonder why manufacturers keep leaving...)
Banning domestic gas usage for new homes (which the fools running Victoria, the state I live in, have done) will do nothing for emissions but will mean that the gas cartel can make even more money exporting LNG to Asia. Bravo!
The exception is Western Australia which is also a massive LNG exporter but has stricter domestic reservation requirements than the eastern states.
All of the above has been extensively documented at https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/ (source: https://www.google.com.au/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww....).
How can that be?
Direct consumption emissions are eliminated.
Those with solar (a growing percentage) reduce their indirect emissions from grid non-renewable generators.
And there is a growing percentage of green generation on the grid.
Because a reduction of domestic gas usage will just be diverted to less efficient LNG exports.
Given that by far the largest source of Victoria's electricity generation capacity is from dirty brown coal [1] if anything banning domestic gas usage might even make emissions worse since it will force people to use only electricity for cooking and heating.
> Direct consumption emissions are eliminated.
Ah, so burning Aussie natural gas in Asia (after it's been liquified and then turned back into gas) is somehow better for the environment than just burning it in Australia?
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Victoria#Electricity...
The biggest pushers of no domestic gas are the producers and finance guys. They make a lot more money on exports.
It doesn't impact commercial use of LNG, or the extraction or export of LNG.
We are also not talking about ripping out the existing install base of appliances.
It will take at least a decade or two for that switch to reach a critical mass. That's the point when it becomes uneconomic to continue operating the domestic piped LNG network in Victoria.
If it displaces burning coal in Asia, maybe it is? https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14670874
Indeed, if you look at the three Brown Coal generators in Victoria[1], Yallorn is due to shut down in 2028 taking ~30% (1480MW) of that away, followed by Loy Yang A in 2035 which will take another ~40% (2200MW) of that capacity.
So, banning new LNG appliances now, and starting that migration will have a net positive impact.
This is true even if the LNG continues to be burned overseas if it's replacing coal fired generation capacity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coal-fired_power_stati...
Finance for domestic infra is harder to get because no one wants to be locked into 20 year supply arrangements.
The Japanese were, and that's what paid for Gladstone, and that's why for a period, Australian ng was cheaper in Japan than on-shore.
(Personally, I think all countries, to the extent that they can, ought to both reduce domestic fossil fuel use and at the same time impose strict limits on its export. We're all better off if it just stays in the ground.)
It would only be fair to say it was artifically cheap, say, if the Australian government was imposing tariffs or subsidising production. I don't think it was doing that, and as it was, the producers were sufficiently incentivised by the market to produce and sell gas domestically.
A tech shock doesn't mean the old status quo was inefficient.
E.g., conventional mail wasn't inefficient prior to email
What?
You are missing the point. We're talking about "markets" not the specific "tech/substitutes." It could be any technology disruption. Such disruption doesn't mean the prior status quo IN THE MARKET was inefficient. The tech shock just resets equilibrium.
Further, your explanation is circular, and I propose it has to do with muddling terminology and concepts.
Here's one inconsistency. Either the markets didn't exist (You said they need to be "created."), or they did exist, but a pipeline connecting them was too expensive.
> Technology literally created additional markets
> it would have been possible to pipeline gas from AU to markets across the ocean, but it didn’t make economic sense
Higher gas prices is good for fighting climate change - it makes renewable energy more competitive. Now, is the opposite the case for, say the Japanese, who import gas from Australia? Are they less incentivized to switch away? Probably somewhat, but less so, because of transaction and transportation costs.
Anyway, Australia has no excuse for not using solar energy. Which is exactly what they are doing over there despite conservative governments trying to slow that down for the last decade or so. I doesn't need to depend on fossil fuels.
In the US natural gas is a byproduct of shale oil extraction and we have a limited capacity to move or export it so it's almost priced as a waste product.
It's unlikely that electricity will be any cheaper than gas soon either, since that's where 40% (and growing, as our coal and nuclear fleet are retired) of our electricity comes from.
Does that include transmission? Most population centers already have the pipeline network needed to bring them gas but the getting power from giant solar projects in the desert (where it's sunny) to the eastern interconnection (where most people live) is still an unmet need.
> as battery storage prices drop
Eventually, but at present our grid-scale storage has a capacity of ~30GW on a grid of ~1200GW; it's going to take something like a trillion dollars and a generation to build out grid-scale storage to the point where we can even support a 100% renewable grid.
We'll get there eventually but until grid-scale storage is installed and ready, the gas plants (with their fast start/stop ability) are what's enabling the renewables to come online and replace our older coal and nuke plants.
We're probably going to have to lean even more on gas since the first ~500GW of renewables are replacing existing coal/nuclear we're losing, but once the grid storage tech catches up we can start installing that in lieu of new gas plants and replacing the ones we've already built.
Tl;dr: we'll get there but not in the lifetime of a furnace
I'm sorry, but how does that make any sense, when 47% of the electricity production in Australia comes from coal?? They are banning a system that is actually pretty efficient at making heat, to instead use a low efficiency coal power plant, to produce electricity, to then use in heat pumps to produce heat. Simply, wow.
https://www.energy.gov.au/energy-data/australian-energy-stat...
Where I live at 7000 feet, we have so much sunshine, even in winter, solar is a very viable option. Legislation removing people's ability to recoup the costs is the only reason it's not in every house in the city. The only option left is a much more costly battery setup.
Which mostly goes to show the value and necessity for serious insulation and air-sealing, which this house does not have. Nevertheless, the point about batteries remains.
It requires a minimal amount of "smarts" and is all standard plumbing.
Why do you think electricity prices are high?
Why do you think electricity prices are high?
Why should the rates be 4x the rest of the country?
you can see, for instance san diego's rates [1] which are $0.38/kWh in the winter and $0.48/kWh in the summer. for context, this means if i pay 11 dollars in electricity generation (because i'm part of a municipal electric generation coop), i'm still paying $36 for distribution/transmission/etc, which is $47 for 106kWh used or ~$.44/kWh which is roughly what electrify america charges ($.48/kWh) when i go to 'fill up my car.' as far as i can tell from talking to people, this is is more than most people anywhere in the country (including hawaii) pay for their electricity.
[0]: https://www.publicadvocates.cpuc.ca.gov/-/media/cal-advocate... [1]: https://www.sdge.com/sites/default/files/regulatory/1-1-24%2...
Peak is $0.51536 (delivery) - $0.10556 (baseline credit) + $0.16225 (generation via East Bay Community Energy / Ava) or just over of $0.57 per kWh.
Off-peak is $0.48701 - $0.10556 - $0.13772 or just shy of $0.52/kWh.
Add that baseline credit back in for when you reach tier 2 (currently 12.9 kWh/day for my apartment which factors in winter usage and electric heat). I have about 3.5 kW of baseboard heaters (and use 2.75 kW at most). Whatever the duty cycle is to keep the apartment at 60°F 24x7 is well more than 12.9 kWh so obviously I don't do that anymore. Rates are set to go up again in March or April.
Gas is $2.43888/therm with tier 2 kicking in at 6.72 therms/month and minimum charge of $0.13151/day.
Why do you think electricity prices are high?
* spent billions over the past few decades on stock buybacks
* spent billions on fines and restitution for malfeasance like falsifying call-before-you-dig records
* spends tens of millions annually on stock dividends (down from billions annually pre-bankruptcy)
* used their safety budget to pay executive bonuses
* stacked the CPUC in their favor
* rakes in billions in profit (roughly $1/share EPS) annually
I don't know if the experience of a Brit with a roof covered in solar panels applies in California, but: during months when you want to run the heat pump, your solar won't be producing shit.
It will have a lower price but not a lower cost. At this point we can't wait for price efficiency we have to pay whatever dollar amount to avoid the catastrophic human costs of burning fossil fuels.
Besides that, a gas power plant easily achieves 33% of efficiency for generating electricity from gas, rather 50% for the new ones. In other words, if the price for electricity is more than 3 times as high as gas, there is a high chance that it's due to tax, regulations, etc. Though, the price for maintaining a stronger power grid comes on top.
I understand a bulk of that cost comes from the aux resistive electric heater. But for really cold places, that’s needed when the heat pump can’t keep up or you need to rapidly warm the house.
As is, we are still quite far from heat pumps being cost efficient as gas for places that get really cold
Check those measures for some example heatpump: https://www.eurovent-certification.com/en/catalog/program/ce...
They are not from the manufacturer but from an independent service that is used by various states that are members of the eu.
As you can see, at -7 degrees celsius, the COP is still almost 4. So even at that temperature, this heatpump is still about twice as afficient as burning gas directly.
Of course, it depends on the correct installation. It's easier to screw up the installation of a heat pump than a gas heating system. But it doesn't invalidate the theoretical bounds.
And it's also true that it's much easier to use a heatpump wrongly compared to e.g. gas heating.
On the other hand it's also not black magic and the more people install and use it, the less mistakes will be made.
The classic thing is cogeneration. It's a thermodynamic sin to create a large temperature difference (say, furnace combustion chamber vs. house) without running that heat through a heat engine. In the Nordic countries, in parts of Russia, and on some university campuses in the US, that's done with a "neighborhood power plant" and district heating (steam pipes). Heat engines get less efficient as they get smaller, but possibly a house-scale cogeneration setup could still make sense?
But I'm also now curious about something more interesting: In the same way that you can have, say, a propane powered refrigerator, is it also possible to have a natural gas powered heat pump? Suppose it's a cold winter day, and you're burning natural gas in a combustion chamber in an appliance in your basement. There are three temperature reservoirs: The outdoors, the house, and the combustion chamber, at temperatures T1 < T2 < T3, respectively. By harnessing heat flow (Q32) from the combustion chamber into the house, can additional heat (Q12) be pumped from the outdoors into the house? Then the house will get a total flow Q = Q32 + Q12.
From Q32, work
W = (1 - T2/T3) * Q32
is available. That can then be used to pump
Q12 = 1 / (1 - T1/T2) * W
= ((1 - T2/T3) / (1 - T1/T2)) * Q32
additional heat. And thus
Q = Q32 + Q12
= (1 + (1 - T2/T3) / (1 - T1/T2)) * Q32
= B(T1, T2, T3) * Q32 .
Here, B (a function of T1, T2, T3) is the coefficient by which the natural gas' energy is effectively multiplied, for heating purposes.
T1 = -9.4 F = -23 C = 250.15 K (Outdoor temperature in winter on cold day.)
T2 = 71.6 F = 22 C = 295.15 K (Indoor room temperature.)
T3 = 2236 K (Adiabatic flame temperature of methane at constant volume.)
Then we have B(T1, T2, T3) = 6.69.
That's very substantial!
Of course, this assumes Carnot efficiencies for everything, so it's an upper bound.
Also, my assumption of T3 being the adiabatic flame temperature may be too optimistic. Google says
> Today's commercial jet engines can reach temperatures as high as 1,700 degrees Celsius (that's 3,092 degrees Fahrenheit)
https://engineering.virginia.edu/news/2018/11/generating-cur....
so letting T3 = 1,700 C = 1973.15 K, we get the slightly lower B(T1, T2, T3) = 6.58.
This is still fantastic.
This is also assuming a very cold day, which is when the system will have lower efficiency. If we instead assume T1 = 0 C = 273.15 K, and use the more conservative T3 = 1973.15 K assumption, then we get B(T1, T2, T3) = 12.4. That's huge.
So, assuming my math/modeling is right, a hypothetical heat-pump furnace could (using Carnot bounds) use around 1/6th - 1/12th the natural gas as a conventional one, even in a very cold place, if you keep all the other properties of the house (insulation, air exchange) constant.
MW&L is community-owned, PGE is traded on the NYSE. They both buy a ton of hydro from the Bonneville Power Administration.
https://findenergy.com/providers/mcminnville-water-and-light... gives an average. Actual per kwh rate is cheaper but there's a $16.10 customer charge to have an account. https://www.mc-power.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/pdf/ra...
If they sold you a 14 SEER1 for that then you got absolutely screwed.
Just as a data point, $20K is right in the ballpark for estimates you'll get for professional installation of a modern ≈3-ton forced-air 17SEER heatpump + air handler in the Seattle area.
People use the term "heat pump" to sometimes describe quite different things, so it's hard to know what's apples-to-apples.
https://www.reddit.com/r/heatpumps/comments/raocha/heat_pump...
What's the temperature in the ground? Did you look at a ground source heat pump (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_source_heat_pump)
Planning to put things underground in at least that part of New England is not likely to go very well. It can be done (plenty of places have septic tanks, for example), but it's not easy.
Ex, Massachusetts: https://www.masssave.com/-/media/Files/PDFs/Save/Residential...
More: https://www.jefftk.com/p/running-the-numbers-on-a-heat-pump
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/hydro-quebec-1.68167...
https://www.hydroquebec.com/projects/appalaches-maine-interc...
It's already done -- RV fridges work on propane directly, without converting it to electricity. A fridge is a heat pump.
[ETA] I just did the math to include delivery as well as generation cost if that’s what the table is meant to reflect, and I’m still below $0.20/kWh in November. Shrug. I was paying nearly $0.50 in California before moving here…
The outside unit constantly froze up, which even ideally requires a defrost cycle (wasting energy pumping heat back outside), or worse, uses heating element outside just to make operable.
While those cycles run, heat couldn't. Except that even emergency heat (heating element inside) would disable the outside defrost, supposedly to meet EPA set energy budget, not technology limits.
That's not the kind of BS you want to put up with on frozen nights, whether from a technology or policy standpoint.
I live in New England in a small house (<700 sqft), and it easily drops 5 degrees an hour when it's 65 inside and 15 outside.
However for other hydronic applications such as solar water heaters there is typically a thermal storage tank which can help store heat like a battery.
Keep in mind a few things. One is some heat pumps are now operating down around -22*F. Second is geothermal is a water to water heat pump that isn't affected as much by the limitations of air temperature (but has other limitations). Third is radiant heat flooring with tubes in concrete acts as a thermal storage tank. Finally heat pumps for heating work best at low temperature hydronic water and can also be used for other applications such as DHW (domestic hot water) which needs to be at slightly higher temperatures than a buffer tank has.
Electricity = $.26 / kwh
Propane (LPG) = .134 / kwh
Heating oil = .095 / kwh
Gasoline = .091 / kwh
Natural Gas = .082 / kwh
An electric vehicle is on the order of 5X more efficient than a gasoline vehicle per kWh (that is, an EV that will go 5 km on 1 kWh of electricity would be lucky to get 1 km per kWh if it were running on gasoline).
So in this case, it's still cheaper to operate an EV than a gasoline vehicle in MA, even if electricity costs more per kWh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_efficiency#:~:text=in%2....
But anyway, the big issue is for electric cars fast chargers, more like $.48 / kwh..
For carbon emissions, the WTW (Well to wheel) efficiency is more important- they are about the same unfortunately (we need more solar):
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020SJRUE..24..669A/abstra....
At 8.9 kWh per litre, that means gasoline takes 81.88 kWh to get you 100 km. A typical EV, on the other hand, will use about 18 kWh to go 100 km (at 5.5 km per kWh). That makes the EV around 4.5 times more efficient.
As for carbon emissions, burning 1 litre of gasoline creates 2.3kg of CO2. At 9.2 litres per 100 km, that works out around 210g per km.
Grid carbon intensity varies greatly by country and region. In France at only 42g/kWh, an EV's energy would emit less than 10g per km, even after accounting for grid and charging inefficiencies! But even in coal-dependent Germany at 354g CO2/kWh (2023), an EV would be well under 100g per km, still better than an average petrol car.
(Also, remember that auto industry emissions/efficiency numbers are based on testing protocols which produce far lower figures than the real world. And do not account for upstream emissions in the fossil fuel supply chain - there is an awful lot of upstream carbon emitted to produce 1 litre of gasoline!)
Maybe the math is different for those who can charge at home. I’m tired of people waving abstract thermodynamics math at me when talking about real life economics I faced
https://www.blaschakanthracite.com/dealers/pricing/
6250 kwh / ton... "$200 / ton at the mine" in Pennsylvania..
So this works out to: $.032 / kwh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TewWb8xmyzk
$.06 / kwh bagged and delivered (to Ontario) according to above video.. ($7.50 / 40 lb bag)
Even homes with ducted AC, it's likely they are sized for cooling only, not heat (not enough CFMs).
The alternative is removing the baseboard and with a calculated heat load, replacing with panel radiators which run with much lower temperatures. The retrofit wouldn't be too difficult (compared to ducting) as it would involve running 1/2 inch PEX to each room.
For 185:
https://www.arcticheatpumps.com/high-temperature-heat-pump.h...
Or much more common, if you can deal with 176F, the SANCO2 ones will generate that down to -20F.
The hydronic temperatures you're talking about are only required if you have to stick with the existing radiators. They make radiators with little fans that work at lower temperatures, or larger panel radiators. There's lots of options for lower temperature forced hot water.
As far as replacing baseboard goes, if you're going to go to that expense, then probably it's just best to switch to forced air since you also get AC.
But you'd be looking at probably close to $40K to entirely replace a forced hot water system with a heat pump and forced air (and/or replacing baseboards) as well as a DHW system of some sort -- so quite cost prohibitive.
The end.
Tell me more about your frictionless spherical world.
Stop it.
But I think the biggest issue in New England (and California) will probably
be the high cost of electricity. In most of the country, heat pumps are a
huge no-brainer.
The big thing to keep in mind is that California natural gas prices spiked for a bit last year. All of a sudden gas heat was very, very expensive.
Here in NJ there aren't any days like that any more. Its like heat pumps wouldn't be great in the old days but in today's new climate they're great.
This was recently, btw, as in last month. I am still kind of shaking my head.
It also appears that the tech for the more typical air source heat pumps has improved significantly in recent years which makes it more viable for colder climates
If above ground ranges from 0-100 degrees F, underground likely ranges from like 64-68 degrees F, which makes it really energetically "cheap" to get to your preferred temperature range, heating to idk 70 at most and cooling to probably not even 65.
Why do you even respond if you don't know enough about heat pumps?
But do go on about how I don't know enough.
Modern heat pumps do fine well below 0 degrees Celsius. Here's one that's great to -15 C and okay down to -25 C[0]. If you search cold-climate heat pumps, you'll find plenty of information about how modern heat pumps are fine in most the temperatures you'll find in most of the US (including up north).
(I have heard that a lot of them are still only available in Europe, but you can definitely find some in the US.)
So his point still stands.
"Below 0° Fahrenheit, heat pumps can still heat your home with more than twice the efficiency of gas heating or standard electric heating (such as electric furnaces and baseboard heaters). They’ve been tested and approved as far north as the Arctic Circle, and are popular options in very cold countries like Finland and Norway."
Finland has over 60% heat pumps.
And heat pumps, just to be clear, work by generating a temp difference. The main problem is the efficiency and that drops also because there is a heating cycle needed for the air intake.
How many models did you actually research yourself?
For a similar reason, heat pump water heaters tend to have a larger storage tank, as they take longer to heat the water and you want more of a usage buffer.
Not sure the trouble is over. You are only good until you need servicing, and then you need to shop around again. Servicing is even worse, because it is an acute problem and you are under so much time pressure to solve the issue.
Sometimes even the company that sold the unit does not honor their warranty. They shut down. They re-incorporate under a new company, etc.
My father had similar issues with his new boiler although in his case after constant failed repair attempts his local place finally hired some guy who knew what he was doing.
There's also rebates on heatpumps around here but local forums seem to suggest that the installers are super backed up and quote "go away" prices. You can't get the rebate unless you go with a state approved installer, so even if you can install it yourself you're out of luck. Seems like they've just raised their prices to compensate for the rebate since they already had to much work.
Or they're so busy they can pick and choose their jobs. I had a quote to replace a 12 foot section of pipe come in at $700, not even two hours worth of work.
The HVAC contractors here are pretty small, maybe they do not want to take the risk.
As someone else said, if I had more time, I would have purchased a few DIY split systems... I might do that for AC only, as I did not replace the AC at that time.
Heat pumps have the benefits of both.
I left my oil furnace intact and added 4 high wall units (each bedroom and living room) with 2 outdoor condenser/compressors.
I still use my oil furnace when it gets below 40.
But otherwise, yeah, almost identical and a little crazy they'd cost much more over a typical install.
The hard part is that you have to recover the refrigerant and refill, which takes HVAC/R equipment and and EPA certification to do legally.
Other things like the blower and condenser may need to be swapped out. It also depends on how old your system is. The controller will probably most certainly need to be swapped out. Do the normal thing with contractors like that. Call 3 different dudes have them come out and give you an estimate. Tell them you want quotes for partial swap out, full swap out, and 3 different price points. Within a couple of weeks you will have most of the knowledge you need if you want to do it.
My parents when they switched out they replaced both the indoor unit and outdoor too because they were 30+ years old at that point.
Now you probably have NG? If so you can also leave that fairly in place as is. I did that with my prev house. Then have the heat pump for when it is warm outside. Then switch over to NG when it gets to a particular temp. I set it to switch over at about 30F. I could have gone as low as 15 with that unit. It worked decently for most of the time. Where I live it maybe gets in the 20s for about a week a year at most. So the heat pump worked decently.
One thing though I would say is if you have a older home especially 1990 or older start with the insulation. It is wildly cheaper to get and gets you part of the way there. Many power companies even run deals where they will help you buy it.
Oh and I guess another thing a heatpump has that an AC doesn't is a defrost controller board. You'd need one of those too.
A lot of the installers run small businesses. If one of these units goes wrong or if they do the install wrong because it's new to them, then that's lost time and lost revenue rectifying it.
I spent some time trying to get a heat pump instead, but no one around here was familiar with them. I worried that if it failed service would be a pain.
OTOH, if you're replacing a gas furnace and already have A/C, then installing a new gas furnace + heat pump shouldn't cost much more than a new gas furnace + new A/C.
They likely exist, but none of my local residential HVAC companies carried them.
Electric resistive heating is not a suitable backup. If adopted at scale, it would tend to amplify demand spikes when the grid is at its most vulnerable.
They will pair to low ambient temperature capable condensers.
Daikin FXTQ series models
Mitsubishi SVZ series models
If you are searching.
I don't think having backup heat is a terrible idea, but it could be any fuel source. The fan should still function with minimal power to circulate air as long as there's some heat to move around.
People always forget the hot water. A GSHP usually has a de-superheater that can provide some heat during the shoulder seasons, but you can't rely on it and need the backup heat (as you do for the AUX heat for both when it's super-cold out and for the defrost cycle).
Since most maintenance staff don’t do the special procedures properly (and barely manage to deal with normal toilets properly!) they were a big headache. [https://www.waterless.com/blog/the-pros-and-cons-of-selectin...].
Everywhere I know of that was using them eventually got rid of them because they weren’t worth it for the small water savings they actually got.
Especially since water usage was never anything but a hot button PR topic - there are probably only a handful of places humans habitate that the difference is actually non-negligible when you factor in showers, landscaping, etc.
https://www.12ft.io/https://www.wired.com/2010/06/ff-waterle...
The links you're pointing to are to articles when the idea was 'hot'. And when all the press was going on around saving water in California (notably dead now, as is the norm).
If you didn't notice the issues, then congrats! someone in the maintenance team was doing the work so you didn't have to see what was happening.
I'm not a plumber, but I do own property and have installed (permitted/inspected) several toilets and had to do my own maintenance. Flushless was never worth the squeeze for me, but then I never had to deal with PR issues or fads. I was my own customer, and got to pick what worked for me and those around me.
It costs about 2kUSD to get air to air exchange heatpump installed here (minisplit, includes the cost of the pump, EU). Takes approx 3 hours.
I saved ~ 10k doing the install myself. The equipment is inexpensive, labor can be upwards of 2x equipment cost.
That said, some will inevitably leak out (ie. while disconnecting manifold gauge set) but no big deal. I've done four installs and nothing catastrophic.
My experience was that it was simpler and quicker to pay someone despite having basically the simplest possible installation: inside and outside units on opposite sides of the same exterior wall. The guy was great, and recommended a unit with an easily removable blower wheel for the dusty wood shop application[1]. I wouldn't have gotten there on my own, for sure. And he made sure that it qualified for the incentives. The list is long, and the models that are actually in production/available change pretty regularly.
Technically, it can be a pretty simple job. Practically, local regulations and circumstances might sway things towards hiring it out.
I say all this as someone who is a fairly competent shade-tree mechanic. I've done an engine swap and replaced a couple of clutches (transmission seal failure and previous owner's poor work; I know how to drive stick)
[0] I'm playing fast and loose with the exact words; it's been a few months since I looked into it.
[1] Cooper-Hunter, which is a Midea brand
You can buy a Mr Cool unit, you won't need to cut/flare/vacuum the lineset, just connect. I don't personally don't use them as their units generally cost a bit more, (30$ ~ 50%) and you're stuck with whatever lineset lengths they offer. However it's a great starter install and work just fine.
Cooper-Hunter units come precharged, so fairly easy to DIY.
I'd like to replace my 25+ yr old system (gas furnace/AC) with a new gas furnace & heat pump so I can have the option of heating with gas or electricity... but when I ran this by an HVAC technician who was here for a service call, I got the same kind of exorbitant figures thrown at me with the heat pump in the equation.
Same technician wanted $750 to replace a control board when my furnace had gone out during a blizzard - I sourced my own & did it myself for <$150.
"Heat pumps use refrigerant to condition the air in your home by adding or removing heat through thermal exchange."
"Air conditioning is a cooling system that circulates cool air into an enclosed space, creating a comfortable atmosphere and improving indoor air quality."
"Air conditioners generally last longer than heat pumps because air conditioners only run when the air needs cooling, while heat pumps operate year-round."
This is what air conditioners do, too.
> "Air conditioning is a cooling system that circulates cool air into an enclosed space, creating a comfortable atmosphere and improving indoor air quality."
This is what heat pumps do, too.
These are two sentences that describe the same process, just in different words.
The last quote is potentially relevant: a heat pump is an air conditioner that can run in reverse to provide heat in the winter, so you're running it in both situations, and thus for more time.
Overall it was a great experience, there were some minor issues immediately after installation that got dealt with quickly and efficiently. I think the list price was similar to what you were quoted, but in northern california (menlo park, peninsula clean energy) there were around $5000 of grants/tax incentives, and an interest free loan from pce for the rest, over 5 years meaning our monthly repayment should be about equal to the reduction in our gas bill.
We already had solar and batteries, otherwise I would NOT want to put myself at the mercy of PGE and their crazy electricity rates. But as they reduce the payment rates for solar electricity, the heat pump becomes a better deal.
So great to have you as a customer! We're stoked we were able to help you ditch natural gas and decrease your carbon footprint.
Menlo park (and much of the peninsula) are such a no brainer for heat pumps. Like you mentioned, ~$5500 in incentives plus interest free financing can net to almost no out-of-pocket costs for most homeowners in San Mateo County. Many contractors aren't as familiar with heat pumps, and their quotes are often so expensive that it doesn't make economic sense to fuel switch. We are focused on offering affordable heat pump installations that have a positive ROI for homeowners.
From your site: "In the SF Bay area common incentives are the Federal 25C Tax Credit, Tech Clean CA and Peninsula Clean Energy."
I'm assuming Federal 25C and Tech Clean CA apply but Peninsula does not. But I don't know how much these are without further research. It would be nice if you had a tool on your site to determine my net cost with incentives included.
We call a specific incentive API, automatically generate the net cost estimate, and send it to you. No issue for our software, pls add a note that you just want incentive info, and I'll know to remove you from our hounding salespeople (ME )
We're working on our live instant quote tool, but it's not ready yet.
... we love Alameda and have done a few projects there now.
I mean, it's good to force me out of my bubble, but maybe not right into the deep end where, and this is from about 8 hours ago, "heat pumps are no good in the Pacific Northwest because they use more electricity than resistive heating". The PNW: a climate renowned for two things: rain and mild temperatures, where heat pumps are no good. All I can do is nod and say "uh huh".
We were planning to fully electrify our house + transportation in the next few years. PG&E rate hikes and net metering policies put the damper on that. It's now more expensive to fuel a vehicle with electricity than gas, so I'm charging my PHEV at work and using gas for the rest. We have solar + battery sized for the existing usage of our house (gas heating, cooking, and vehicles), because that's what PG&E would let us interconnect. Upgrading the size to support a heat pump or EV would make us lose NEM2, so we've just chosen to defer those upgrades until NEM3 is rolled back or NEM4 comes out or there's new technology or the Californian government falls.
In a way this is the market doing what it's supposed to. There's a shortage of electricity because of everyone doing electrification upgrades, so the price of electricity rises, which incentivizes people to defer further electrification upgrades until the grid can handle it. But if states actually want adoption, they need to solve the utility bottlenecks and increase generation capacity to support all the new usage.
How is that possible? Even at 20c/kWh it's still a good 4x cost difference I though
I would call my rate 18 cents but not sure if we are doing an apples to apples comparison.
My crossover EV gets 2.5-3.5 mi/kWh. Call it 3. / $0.2/kWh = 15 mi/$
Avg fuel economy in US ~ 25mpg. At $3.50/gal that's 7 mi/$
So at 20c/kWh, your dollar goes roughly twice as far on electric. California has been seeing brutal rates, though -- 40c/kWh not uncommon.
Californians can play games with Time-of-Use rates (charge at night), get onto EV-specific rates, be on a CCA which tend to not have the try-to-not-burn-down-the-state adjustment fees, get solar +/- NEM2 vs NEM3, etc., so your numbers may vary. And different cars will have different MPG's of course. But all of that is to say, "more expensive to fuel a vehicle with electricity than gas" is not necessarily wrong in California.
ZIP: 95950
https://www.gasbuddy.com/gaspricemap?lat=39.08984244471869&l...
My electricity is 0.35/kwh. So that’s also ~10mi/$, except I don’t have the added headache of worrying about range
Even if you have solar, and got in before NEM3.0, that's still not an incentive to electrify, when you're just selling the non-peak energy to the grid for the increasing rates that PG&E is charging/planning... (if that income-based minimum monthly bill thing happens, this maybe changes a bit)
Not sure about the current gas/electricity per mile costs as I'm still driving a 15 y/o gas car.
FYI, some legislators (including very left-leaning ones) are moving to repeal this pending change: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-progressive-california-epipha...
In MA, I bought gas yesterday in our ICE car for $3.10/gal. Our electricity is $0.27/kWh. An ICE car getting 31 mpg is $0.10/mi for energy. Our EV getting just under 4mi/kWh is $0.07/mi for energy.
They’ve recently retired and restructured a bunch of rate plans, but almost all historical and current rates can be found on their website[0]. Somehow they still managed to keep things nice and complex.
Keep in mind that none of these reflect so called CCA pricing, which is another story in of itself. Same for the “baseline allowance” after which rates go up, although they’ve now seemed to have structured is a discount to somewhat simplify rate comparisons.
0: https://www.sdge.com/total-electric-rates
Edit: Got curious so looked at some statistics. Top lists of most expensive electricity rates all mention Alaska and Hawaii, ok fair enough, but even in the contiguous states California isn’t even mentioned somehow.
At the same time there are articles like[1] these[2] that claim SDG&E was the most expensive (at the time).
So I guess what I’m saying is that I’m not sure.
1: https://fox5sandiego.com/news/local-news/fox-5-asks-sdge-why...
2: https://www.cbs8.com/article/money/amped/san-diego-has-the-h...
I wish. Instead they'll just do what they're doing in my home city, Seattle: ban gas furnaces and other forms of heating entirely while raising electric rates even further. The masses will cry that you have to be rich to live here, and they'll respond to that by raising taxes and spending the raised funds on consultants and bureaucrats studying electric utility inequities. I wish I was making this up.
Housing prices are up now, but early pandemic it was like just south of $600k for a 3k sqft house built in the late '90s in a nice neighborhood.
We have dual fuel heating (heat pump, oil burner). It's prohibitively expensive to run the heat pump below 32F (0C), but the oil works great then, and is way cheaper. Just like the heat pump is cheaper at warmer temps. The heat pump won't work at all at 0F (-18C), so it's a non-starter to only use air based heat pumps for all of our needs. We've tried to get quotes for geothermal, but we'll just have to wait for the next big recession to do that.
As an engineer, I just have to shake my head at the unrealistic timelines being pushed by politicians. All that does is increase cost and drama.
Do you really think that's a coincidence? Not being snarky, just curious.
around my area we blew up two substations during a heatwave last summer. we constantly get brownouts at 4-6pm during the post-work peak load such that I'm almost not even comfortable running the freezer/etc anymore (brownouts are really hard on motors). and now you want to push all the gas heating (and this area gets cold!) onto the grid too?
a lot of this is that urban and suburban areas are subsidizing rural and ex-rural areas - more than half of my bill is already capacity-charges and delivery fees and not the actual cost of the electric, and we're still blowing up substations regularly due to strained and overloaded infrastructure. Where is the money going? Mostly to keeping miles and miles of power lines out to the middle of nowhere, I'd think.
That's a problem America is going to face in a lot of "ghost town" scenarios - when "the mine dries up" or "the train doesn't stop here anymore" and a place stops existing, the infrastructure costs to service the 20 people still living there don't. Repaving the roads every couple of years, plowing and salting them during the winter, etc aren't free and the reality is that in some areas there's really almost no economic activity anymore to justify the cost. We just have covenants and mandates that prevent ever undoing it. And that runs up the bills for everyone else.
We have 400k people in this county of 700mi^2, and that's suburban, not-particularly-dense either. Another county we have 40k people in 2700 mi^2. Should everyone in the former have to subsidize the lifestyle of the latter? We are talking about 2 orders of magnitude less density here, while it's not quite 1:1 there's no doubt they are incurring significantly higher infrastructure costs for their lifestyle and we are paying for it.
And since people won't pay for it, what we end up with is everyone's infrastructure falling into neglect, to pay for a handful of rural customers.
PG&E electricity rates have absolutely nothing to do with free markets. The only thing setting PG&E rates is corruption and incompetence, but mostly corruption.
I think that there's a lot wrong with the utility system in California (and the corruption actually incentivizes incompetence - the only way for executives to increase profits, make the stock go up, and get higher bonuses is to increase their costs, so PG&E is very good at inflating costs by doing stuff like burning down cities). But given that PG&E is as incompetent as they are, the logical market response is to make yourself as independent from them as possible.
When I lived in Texas I could choose my electricity provider and see what different rates they charge for electricity to choose a provider.
In California I can choose Edison for my electricity or have no electricity.
This is very hard to believe, what are you paying for electricity? California gas prices are also way above the national average at the moment. Here's a per-state comparison from last year, I'm sure it's a bit out of date but I doubt things have completed flipped in a single year: https://energyinnovation.org/2023/07/27/ev-fill-up-savings/
But maybe you don't actually care about fuel efficiency, then you have an argument that it's cheaper to fuel a Tesla Model 3 instead of a BMW M3.
I think it is still true in California that an average EV is cheaper to fuel than an average gas car, but if you have a very efficient hybrid then it's a bit cheaper than a pure EV.
I live in the Bay Area as well and I have an EV (2015 Fiat 500e), and am on the PG& Home Charging EV2-A plan. I charge my car between 12am and 3pm and pay $0.28/kwh, 29kwh/100 miles and I should be getting about 12.3miles/$.
I but about $700/year in gasoline. And pay about $600/year insurance. And drive about 6500 miles a year.
So insurance and gas are both about 10 cents a mile. I think depreciation and maintenance are higher at about 15 cents/mile. So 50 cents a mile. IRS says a business can write off 67 cents a mile.
Whoooooa ok that makes more sense why folks are complaining; I paid 13 cents/kWh last month, less than 1/3 of what you're talking about.
Note for others, paying $0.45/kWh is highly unusual for the US as a whole; see the US Gov published stats on average electricity prices by region which puts the average at ~$0.17/kWh: https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices...
https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHED...
For this tank only I have been charging at home (and at work, and anywhere I can), because I want to see how much mileage I can get out of a tank with full PHEV driving. In this regard it hasn't disappointed; I'm at 1200 miles and just passed half a tank of gas. But once I have a baseline for how much of my driving can be done on electric, I'll probably switch to just charging at work (where it's free) and using gas for most other driving, because it's so much cheaper.
A typical EV would get more like 4 mi/kwh, but then, the equivalent ICE car would get more like 35 mpg. The delta's a little bit closer because of peculiarities of the CX-90's powertrain, but not a whole lot.
https://www.pge.com/en/account/rate-plans/find-your-best-rat...
With that said, unless you are comparing the most efficient ICE against the least efficient EV's you should still see savings with an EV. If I charged our EV at the peak electricity rate (which I rarely do) it still costs about half as much as a fairly average ICE vehicle on a per mile basis. Compared against some of the most efficient ICE vehicles (hybrids like the Prius) I would still come out ahead, maybe by only 20% though. But again, that is comparing the worst case scenario where I only charge at peak rates. In practice we probably average around half of the peak rate from a mix of at home, at work and around town charging.
I will admit though that it is not a particularly good look for CA regulators to be pushing electrification so hard while also allowing huge rate increases. It ends up looking like a huge handout to the investor owned utilities. And the proposed rate changes that implement an income based fix charge are absolutely idiotic. With batteries coming down in price we could soon see the economics of going off grid become much more attractive, which would further exacerbate the situation (CA IOUs will need battery adopters to stay connected to the grid to help with intermittency)
- California
- Colorado
- Maine
- Maryland
- Massachusetts
- New Jersey
- New York
- Oregon
- Rhode IslandI had to have floorboard heat on for that week. So, it does work (not if you buy a cheaper unit not made for your climate) but it works a lot better above freezing.
(via https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/2023-12/stgdppi3q23.... )
What percent of the population those states make up might be somewhat interesting at least.
But even then, 90% of new installations requires us to know what percent of installations those states make up, and population isn't necessarily (but could be) a good corollary for that.
- California -0.9
- Maryland -0.5
- Massachusetts -0.6
- New Jersey -0.5
- New York -1.1
- Oregon -0.1
- Rhode Island -0.39 million in NJ
4.2 million in Oregon
7 million in Massachusetts
6 million in Maryland
1 million in Rhode Island
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_median_home_price
#2 California $554K
#3 Massachusetts $422K
#5 Colorado. $397K
#6 Oregon $361K
#8 New Jersey $335K
#9 New York $322K
#10 Maryland $308K
#13 Rhode Island $300K
#25 Maine $242K
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_income
#1 Maryland $90K
#2 Massachusetts $89K
#3 New Jersey $89K
#5 California $85K
#9 Colorado $82K
#14 New York $74K
#15 Rhode Island $74K
#18 Oregon $71K
#32 Maine $64K
EDIT: I actually spent one winter in San Diego, and apartments there don't even have any heating installed (except occasional fireplace in the living room). I know that more to the north it might get worse, but by how much?
EDIT: My grandparents' house had a thermostat that looked like this: https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/uqsAAOSwTVlbyNN9/s-l1200.jpg They would call very cold (for Florida) weather "blue light weather", because the blue "aux heat" light would turn on on their thermostat, indicating that the system had switched from the heat pump to the resistive heat strips.
I don't know what the climate is like in Poland. Maybe 0F is as cold as you ever get and you are okay. Maybe your system will work to -20F even though you haven't tested it. But your might have a system like mine that while it can deliver heat at 0F, it is sized such that below 30F it can't deliver enough heat (I have the backup system for those colder days)
If I were building a brand new house, I probably would do it 100% electric. But most people here already have natural gas furnaces, and when they reach end-of-life they're usually replaced with another natural gas furnace. Hybrid systems like mine are catching on, but it will be a while before 100% electric is commonplace here.
⸻
1. They fixed minor furnace issues like this for free.
I’m not sure what your bogeyman “progressive” bandwagon has to do with not wanting to live in 50° living spaces?
Now, with a heat pump, the wife and kids can set the thermostat for their comfort and I am less anxious about the monthly bill. The freedom was worth it, for us.
The efficiency wins from a better quality system are nice, too. I live on the east coast now and went all electric a few years back. Our energy costs in the winter went up modestly - not much because heat pumps are great on all of the not incredibly cold winter days we get in the mid-Atlantic - but the savings in the summer versus the cheap AC the previous owner had purchased were substantial. The savings up front for a less efficient unit get eaten up pretty quickly if you use it regularly.
Yes, it's efficient. But it breaks about once every other year. Last winter the compressor circuit board malfunctioned and cost $5k to fix. Two years ago it was another issue entirely.
All of our savings have been lost to service calls. I'm not super price sensitive, but it's still a pain when the heat goes out in the middle of winter and all the service techs are booked up.
This is a Daikin system, which I thought was a pretty standard, respected brand. But like a lot of things built today, it just wasn't built to last.
If we ever have to replace it, we're going to have to rip open half of the house to remove the heating lines. It'll be a nightmare.
I had a heat pump water heater at our previous home, and the compressor also broke after a few years. We just operated it as an old-fashioned electric water heater after that because it would cost more to fix than it would to replace. And both sounded like a pain.
Why? Assuming you have a split unit, the lines are just copper pipes and will work with any other heatpump.
Controllers, otoh, are a different story. You will probably need to replace your head units if you also replace the compressor with a different brand. Same story with being careful about line size.
Refrigerant isn't a big deal as you'll need to flush it and repressurize anyway if you replace these parts.
Oh, that's totally true for newer models. They no longer use simple dry-contacts interfaces, but instead have complicated digital protocols between head units and the compressor.
So quite likely you'll have to replace them all.
But you won't need to open up the walls and replace the piping.
Ok, so it sounds like you got scammed. HVAC circuit boards cost $100.
> Two years ago it was another issue entirely.
Which was?
> All of our savings have been lost to service calls. I'm not super price sensitive
Yeah, obviously, if you're willing to spend $5k on a service call.
> If we ever have to replace it, we're going to have to rip open half of the house to remove the heating lines.
Heat Pump units can just go in place of a regular AC unit. They can use existing ductwork and coolant lines. Not sure why you ran heating lines everywhere? Do you have a mini-split unit per room or something?
I recently did some research on ducted Daikin systems in the Seattle area, and estimates were all in the $20K range, for full installation. The equipment itself may be ~$6K or so (not sure exactly), but it's the labor that costs a lot.
Just saying if the equipment cost of the whole system is well under $5K, it shouldn’t cost anything like that to replace a circuit board (which as others have said, the part probably costs $100 wholesale to the technician).
This very much depends on the brand and the board, no?
A quick search for the brand the OP mentioned (Daikin) shows some boards easily in the $1000 range.
Just one example: https://airconditionersrus.com/en/components-parts/2423-daik...
I don't know the details of OP's situation, but I'm not sure what makes you say such things so confidently.
A contractor should do some kind of heating need analysis, at the least by studying old utility bills, and ideally by doing a Manual J heat loss calculation for the house. But almost none of them do that.
There are some startups attempting to handle these design steps as a service, but the construction industry is slow to adopt new technology.
Variable speed compressors are better, but blowers may not also be variable speed. So you'll get better efficiency but may still suffer a feeling of draftiness.
A properly sized variable speed unit will operate within some optimal band of efficiency and constantly output nearly the minimum necessary air volume to achieve the target temperature.
But yes, I have a heat pump and in NYC Summer I cannot run it on anything but low otherwise it increases the humidity. It took me a few weeks of looking at the temp humidity graphs to understand that point.
It's not compressing air (like in a car tire). It's compressing a refrigerant. That refrigerant goes through phase changes (liquid to gas).
One major issue is that for most ACs, the compressor is cycled on and off according to the target temperature (via a thermostat, usually at a single location), not humidity. That means humidity can rise without the AC kicking on to bring it down. Remember in most typical houses, temperature and humidity are not very uniformly distributed.
Furthermore, if the humidity rises high enough before the AC kicks on, and then the AC kicks on at high power, you can get sudden localized cooling and then condensation of humidity to liquid water inside the building, which leads to other problems, especially if it happens behind the walls.
So when the unit runs it can drop the temperature by the necessary (e.g.) 5F (2C), but it may only drop the humidity by 5%, when it needs to drop by (say) 10%. So a 'too-short' run-time can adequately cool the air, but not necessarily remove moisture.
It's also easier to generate 'excess' humidity by bathing/shower than it is to generate excess heat (cooking could generate both). So the humidity can creep up in value while the temperature stays more steady.
It's possible to independently add humidity when heating -- using a mist gun -- but not to remove it during cooling. However, if the heat pump has a "dry mode" it can dehumidify without also cooling by switching back and forth between heat and cool mode. If not, to dry the air further, it must cool it further.
- Short cycling leading to lower equipment life (also true for gas furnaces, although heat pumps have more moving parts)
- Greater discomfort as the house heats up rapidly then cools down rapidly (especially if it has a leaky building envelope).
- Higher peak electric loads, possibly during hours of high electricity prices, leading to higher electricity costs.
> My understanding is that for cooling, having one that is oversized can be a problem because of humidity issues,
Yes, because moisture will build up when it isn't running.
> makes me wonder what can be done if a space has an imbalance between the size needed for cooling versus what it needs for heating.
Many heat pumps have different output ratings for heating and cooling modes to deal with this. Often however, this has as much to do with the distribution of the heated/cooled air and placement of supply registers, which is often an afterthought when the system is purposely oversized (which is presumed to make up for lack of air distribution design).
If you get a normal single speed heat pump see the other reply - there are significant downsides.
The other thing I've kept thinking about is the replacement interval , material input (compressor, refrigerant, etc.) and ease of maintenance. They generally have a lifetime of 10 years IIRC.
The compressor and refrigerant should never have to be replaced as a maintenance item. The compressor should be cleaned off occasionally since it's outdoors, especially if you live in an area with high dust/pollen, but that's no different than an AC. The interior air handler maintenance is the same as for any furnace or AC system. The lifetime is also similar to a similarly built AC.
Things will improve in a few years but until then you really need to be careful with making sure you get the right stuff installed properly by the right people for the right price.
The temperature is wildly inconsistent. I don't know if this is a software issue, a hardware issue, or just the way heatpumps work. I've had the installer come back and look at it, I've had the heat pump rep come and look at it too. They basically checked everything and tried to convince me this is normal.
With oil, I can set the temperature to, say, 70, and the temperature will stay at 70.
With heatpumps, I can set a temperature and it can vary by ... let's say 8 degrees. That's a lot. I have my bedroom temperature at 66, and the wall thermostat often gets up to 73+. I look at the software and it tells me the room is 68. Is the hardware not reporting the right temp? Does the software just suck? The heatpumps also vary in efficiency, so when it's warm outside it tends to overheat, and when it's cold outside it tends to struggle.
Wondering whether I got lemons or if other people have similar experiences.
Our situation is the opposite. The house feels more comfortable overall. Its still a little warmer upstairs where the home office and bedrooms are but generally around the house it feels a little more consistent.
You can definitely tell when the oil furnace kicks in as the air is noticably hotter. But when that happens the house gets warmer faster and gets a little too hot before it turns off again. And stays a little too hot for too long.
We went with a midrange system. In hindsight I do kind of wish we went with a different installer who was pushing a more "cadillac" type system where the fan (according to him) would always be (or just about) on but be variable in speed basically keeping the house at the right temp more often and slightly more savings.
Just this morning I woke up to it feeling chilly. The thermostat said it was 65 and the programmed temp was 68 but it wasn't running. When the furnace runs it works great but something is off with the controller system. I need to call the heating people....
It took me a full week to troubleshoot this (what helped was I bought a thermometer and placed it next to the thermostat to verify temperature readings) and when I realized what was happening, the contractor came and re-wired things, and now things work like how it should. The temperature stays consistent for both floors.
So definitely test your dampers.
I have 2 floors with multiple units and I was running around with a wall thermometer taking measurements. This was actually my guess as well since the temperatures seemed to align this way. But the installer assured me it was wired correctly .... I might need to find someone else to check things.
Also, a thermostat should be away from the air flow from supply registers to measure representative temperature
I pay $0.30-$0.40/KWh for electricity, and $0.08/KWh for natural gas ($2.35/therm) *.
My heat pump has a COP of 3.62 when the outdoor temperature is 47F: it uses 1KWh of electricity to move 3.62KWh of heat into my home. The old gas furnace was 80% efficient ("AFUE"): it used 1KWh of gas to dump 0.8KWh of heat into my home.
So, at 47F, as long as the ratio between the cost of electricity and natural gas is less than 4.53x (3.62 / 0.8), the heat pump saves me money. In my case, this means I save money when electricity costs less than $0.37/KWh, which it does almost all the time.
At $0.30/KWh-electricity, I effectively pay $0.083/KWh-heat with the heat pump, a 17% total heating cost savings over the $0.10/KWh-heat the old gas furnace cost.
Heat pumps do become less efficient as it gets colder outside: at an outdoor temperature of 17F, my heat pump COP is only 2.44, which would cost more than my old furnace ($0.123/KWh-heat vs $0.10/KWh-heat).
Extrapolating linearly between the 17F and 47F COPs from the manual (it only gives those two points; this isn't strictly correct, but close enough), the temperature below which my heat pump starts to cost me more money than my old gas furnace is roughly 30F (3.0 COP). In the decade I've lived in the bay area, I've never seen it get that cold, which is why this is such a perfect climate for heat pumps.
* These numbers are from August 2022
The non-solar rates[1] in Bay Area right now range starting from $0.42/kwh on tiered plan which you will blow through if you elect heat-pump heating and going all the way to higher than 50 cents per KWh if you are on one of the Time of US plan.
[1]https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/resid...
As much as i love the efficiencies offered by heat pumps, unless i splurge $10-$20k on a solar system with a battery backup, heat pumps are too expensive to operate with CA electrical rates.
My gas(which i use for heating) during same period cost $2.54 per therm, although i dont know how to compare it to kwh for heating purposes. Update: I just checked my electrical bill for January.
My total cost for generation and delivery of 478 kwh which is what my household used in 32 days, cost me $209 after fees and taxes which makes my rates around 44 cents per kwh on average.
It's just out of date from the math I did two years ago, I should have mentioned that.
> heat pumps are too expensive to operate with CA electrical rates.
It depends on your furnace. Typically it's going to be 80AFUE. $2.54/therm is $0.087/KWh-gas. If you pay $0.42/KWh-electricty, a heat pump with a COP >= 3.7 saves you money. Heat pumps with COPs above that at bay area temperatures are widely available.
If you have a 96AFUE furnace, the necessary COP is 4.6. That's a lot harder to find: I'm no expert on the heat pump market, but it seems like the standard units are mostly 3.5-4.0. I can find mini splits up to 4.5 (like [1]), but they're more expensive.
[1] https://www.homedepot.com/p/GREE-Sapphire-9000-BTU-0-75-Ton-...
I don't think it would ever make economical sense to replace a working furnace: my pitch assumes the furnace needs to be replaced, and you're deciding whether to install another furnace or a heat pump.
I think that mini-splits could be a much better introduction to heat pumps for a lot of folks. They are cheap, easy to install, and the units in my house have been running 12 years as our only source of heating/cooling with zero maintenance. (The manufacturer recommends replacing after 10 years, but they are still working fine). This is in an area where we get a lot of snow in winter, but temps almost never fall below -10c.
And you can keep your existing furnace as a backup or secondary heat source.
These systems are quite simple in design and implementation while also offering a pretty effective way to control temperature in a zoned way in various parts of the house. They also can be had in 120V sizes making them far easier to accomidate for solar-powered households, etc.
Either I have some magic heat pump or a lot of the horror stories are overblown or based on using out of date technology.
For the past 11 years, every season it's failed to maintain minimum temperature of 68 degrees when it hits below 5 degrees outside, or maintain cooling in the summer. Another adjacent building built 2 years after this one with the exact same setup, same story. The complex had resorted to providing residents temporary space heaters up until this year where now they are prohibited by the city from using it to maintain minimum temps thanks to changing the code.
The sheer amount of costs associated they've dumped into the maintenance of this mini split system, along with the electricity costs (electricity is included with rent) is mind boggling and certainly will offset any gains.
The idea behind heat pumps is to eliminate the need for the natural gas distribution infrastructure. As the infrastructure ages, more pipes will crack (emitting greenhouse gasses, not to mention blowing up), and the cost will go up. Meanwhile, more renewable electricity is coming online, driving the cost down. (It is a much harder problem to replace every gas furnace in the US versus replacing every power plant in the US. That's why the process is starting early with "hey, maybe you don't want to replace your furnace".)
Right now, it probably doesn't make a lot of sense to have a heat pump for the average midwestern house unless you have a pretty big solar installation. But in the future, the day will come where "we're going to pipe explosive gas into your house" is simply not done anymore. That will come in the form of gas companies not being able to maintain their infrastructure at the prices they charge, declining fossil fuel reserves, international demand to lower emissions, etc. It's not a crisis today, but today is not a bad day to start looking towards the future.
(I'm looking forward to replacing my gas stove with an induction stove. CO2 levels are through the roof whenever I cook to the point I have to open windows. I don't need to be breathing all of that.)
Resistive baseboard heating is the permanent option.
And hilariously, if too many people artificially heat their apartments, it actually crashes the system somehow because if too many zones in the mini split have heat, it flips to AC mode.
sure seems like someone is. could it possibly be the heat pump salesmen? the idea behind heat pumps is to sell heat pumps.
In the event you're cold, maybe you should get a furnace too. But that wasn't part of the sales pitch. Regardless, there are now two appliances you have to maintain. Tell me again how much money this saves?
Who said that was the goal?
Now that I think about it, that happened in both apartments I lived in in Chicago. I remember going for a bike ride one summer afternoon with a friend. Got home, AC didn't do anything, so I went to the grocery store and bought a bag of ice, poured it in my bathtub, and rolled around in it until I was numb. I was cold the rest of the day. Very effective but do the math correctly when you install building-wide air conditioning systems.
There's several apartments with broken mini split head units, and last I heard the other adjacent building, they've been working to connect the apartments to the forced air ducts in the hallways they think will take the load off.
If you'd followed the topic long enough you'd know that what the heat pump advocates are recommending is suffering. It sounds like the OP's building has that covered.
The issue was that builders didn't properly size the AC unit for the amount of heat it needed to reject in a 5th floor apartment when it was 100F outside.
> or maintain cooling in the summer
Here's the key phrase.
This isn't an issue with a heat pump. They just undersized the unit.
A heat pump is absolutely a no-brainer in our case. I like being able to get away from natural gas, although I must say, moving all electric means we'll be held hostage more and more to PG&E. (We have solar, but it'll be well below our needs once we had square footage and the heat pump, and don't want to get screwed by NEM 3.0).
I'm installing a heat pump system in PG&E territory as part of a remodel, but pairing it with a large solar system.
Presuming you meant it the first way, it's still possible that heating with gas is cheaper, since the national average for a joule's worth of natural gas is quite a bit cheaper than the same for electricity.
The story only gets worse once you start carefully accounting for baseline allowances.
Uh, you still need a furnace (though it could be electric) if you live somewhere that ever really gets cold, right?
[edit] I mean, seeing it presented as a furnace replacement is weird to me. I’ve always seen it sold as an air conditioner replacement that also happens to heat (with weird characteristics that often confuse people—they’ll think their heat is broken, because the air coming out is only kinda warm, not very-warm like furnace heat) when it’s not really cold out.
On older homes, with much worse insulation, this would immediately be a problem.
Heat pumps are great, but they absolutely need some kind of emergency heat back up.
No, that's just not functional. "Less efficient" means consuming more joules of electricity but still providing the required function.
> Heat pumps are great, but they absolutely need some kind of emergency heat back up.
They include it. You were sold an inadequate pump for your situation.
If your locale gets life threateningly cold though, I’d feel more comfortable with a furnace because of the fewer moving parts. Burn gas, get heat, dead simple.
It's a high-efficiency one with a control board (Nobody can convince me FCS isn't Fire Control System) and a separate draft motor.
One of the vacuum sensors went out and the furnace couldn't prove it was safe to run, so it would turn on the draft motor, suspect a clog, and then shut it back off.
An easy fix but not as simple as lighting a Bunsen burner. And I haven't seen the electrical cord for it, I'm not sure how I would hook it to a generator if I lost power. The water heater oddly enough is battery-powered, so I guess I could just fill the tub with hot water.
Are your 70 and 80 switched? What you describe doesn't sound like it needs any addition.
The thermostat just sees the resistive heaters as another phase, so I have three phases, and if it doesn't see a temp rise within a certain time of calling for phase 1/2, then it goes to phase 3. Mine also has support for an external temperature probe, that can skip 1/2 if it is already too cold.
I also have other ways to make heat if I have a prolonged electrical outage, but outside of maintenance, I've not used that.
I converted my garage into my office by adding a mini split AC/heat pump. The garage walls, door, and attic are insulated - but it's still a garage, which means that it's not nearly as well insulated as a regular room in a house.
The unit is 18k BTUs, which is quite oversized for the size of the garage. I made this choice because the heat pump BTUs are significantly less than cooling BTUs. This is definitely obvious, experientally - the unit can make my garage uncomfortably cold even in the peak of summer.
But even though this unit is supposedly rated for operation in temps down to about -20F, when winter gets really cold, it struggles to keep the space warm. Once the temps are below about 20F or so, I usually add a space heater to the mix, which, combined with warm clothes, makes working out here at least tolerable.
For now - and only in part of the country. Most of the newest models can output 100% of their rating down to something like -5ºF -- they're easy enough to oversize as well, so if your 99% heating load is e.g. 48,000BTU, a 60,000BTU heat pump that's only outputting 80% of rated BTUs due to the extreme cold can still cover the full design load.
Here's the spec sheet for the newer Mitsubishi hyper heat models - 87º output at -4ºF and 76% output at -13ºF -- very few places in the states ever get that cold: https://static.appliancesconnection.com/attachments/D5bf5709...
One of the states in the article is Oregon too, where I have family that just a few weeks ago lost electricity for 4 days, but were able to use an electric generator to keep the air handler going and gas to heat the the house and cook.
I fear heat pump only heat will fail exactly when I most need it not to.
She had to get a hotel room for the night because she wasn’t comfortable sleeping with the gas fireplace on.
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1. I would guess that thermostats also powered by electricity not working would add to the complication.
Natural gas is just a very convenient and very dense source of energy when you need it most.
We have an (almost[1]) all electric house. A year ago we lost power for six days. Last spring we had a generator installed. Over the summer we lost grid power for five days but the generator worked flawlessly the entire time.
I don't like having gas for a number of reasons and if the grid was more reliable we would never have bothered, but, for us, it's just so much more reliable.
[1]: We have two HVAC systems that service different sides of our duplex-ish house. One side is a ground source heat pump, the other is a 95% efficient gas furnace.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tdK_AMaZ9pg/Vb51WrvPDhI/AAAAAAAAD5...
Which is quite a lot of the country.
Light blue is a typical Winter low point in the -10°F to 0°F, which means you will see -15°F or lower often enough to worry about it.
> Our modeling finds that even if Focus incentivizes 800,000 heat pumps with electric resistance backup (10 times the number of heat pumps as it did furnaces in the past four years), the state will still be able to meet its electricity demand with currently operating power plants, even on the coldest days. Depending on the efficiency of the heat pump, in-state winter generation capacity would still exceed peak demand by 1,400–4,300 MW on the coldest day.
https://rmi.org/three-questions-wisconsinites-are-asking-abo...
https://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/bldrs_lenders_raters/...
Though heat pumps are unique in that they produce less heat as the colder it gets - A few hours of -15º every few years shouldn't be the primary consideration in spec'ing a system that still produces 75% of its heat in that worse case.
I live in that blue area and ran through all of the math and considerations recently - I pulled the hourly temperature data for 6 years. Of the 94,000 data points in that period, a total of 26 hours were below -5º: https://imgur.com/a/P7A3kan
Oddly enough, it tends to snow when it's cold. Even rain can a problem since the nature of a heap pump means the unit is cooler than the surroundings.
So often for a few nights of the year, the alleged "heat pump" actually just falls back to electric heating.
He said 2.9 coefficient of efficiency average over a heating season for him - https://youtu.be/7J52mDjZzto?t=1522
Because for the scandinavians reading the thread and with the "It works in my country", US house build quality, in my experience, is even worse than UK houses build quality (and that's a pretty low bar).
(And maybe a rocket stove combined with a heat storage hypocaust.)
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2017/03/heat-storage-hypoc...
And I know electricity production is not renewable everywhere in the world yet, but at least it’s on a path and possible. Burning natural gas doesn’t have that course.
And somewhat counter-intuitively, even if you are going to consume that natural gas, it still works out better for the power plant to use it to generate electricity that's used to run a heat pump than to burn it directly for heat.
My next car will be a plug-in Prius though. My old boss had one and almost never had to put gas in it. All-electric commute with a range extender / emergency heater
If you are in one of the cities with public utilities where electricity is cheap, then go for it, great choice. But on PG&E, the monetary proposition is awful compared to a gas heater, modern wood stove, or masonry / rocket mass heater.
Given the extreme excess of wood in the region (that otherwise ends up in huge forest fires), it makes a lot of sense to be running an efficient wood stove / masonry / mass heater.
The big loss is of course automation, so it pays to have some automated backup source of heat for when you are out of town, but that could just be whatever heating method you are using already.
If you are already heating using electric baseboards though, yes, definitely move over to a heat pump. It will save you a lot of money. Not as much as natural gas or the others, but savings are savings.
Also, there are plenty of ducted air source heat pumps that work as drop in replacements for gas furnaces. Use one of them if you already have a ducted system that works well and do a heat pump replacement.
Because they’re completely coherent but for some reason you’re not thinking any further than “they’re essentially the same device”?
It was a great choice, and we've been net negative since installation.
We also get a lot of passive solar via low angle sun through large windows. I think passive solar in winter is a completely under-appreciated benefit. On sunny days in winter we do not need heat for ~10 hours of the day.
We supplement our heat with a wood stove in very cold weather (< 20ºF). It's not necessary, but brings a cozy warmth.
Seems like a perfect fit for our weather patterns but was definitely not the most economical option as it kicked off a domino effect of upgrades I wasn't missing before.
Its no where near as "cozy" as the oil heat was, and the temperature of airing coming from the vents is significantly lower than the oil system. So the domino of upgrades is now looking at insulation, windows, etc. Which likely all needed upgrades in our old home anyway, but it's been a journey.
The heat pump did struggle a little during the more extreme cold weather we saw a few weeks back (going down to -15C) but we've kept our natural gas fireplace as backup and "assist".
I'm pretty sure it's a little more expensive to run with a heat pump, so you need to be willing to pay more for reducing your carbon footprint. The incentives do help though. Similar to switching to an EV which we also did for similar reasons. I think if you're purely looking at $$$ then it's not necessarily the optimal decision.
The electric heat pump alone isn't sufficient compared with gas, and the "add-on" you get to add more heat to the heating output is like a space heater, thus very expensive month to month.
What helped the most for my old house was attic insulation. I spent around $700 to buy blown-in packs (and got free machine rental) and got my attic to around R-40. I'm able to set my thermostat 5 degrees higher without any change to my energy bill.
I've had a Mitsubishi Hyper Heat mini-split system with 2 outdoor units and 3 indoor heads for ~7 years now. I'm trying to move houses to get away from it. It's crazy noisy during the winter, the temperature control is whacky, and it's 2-3X the price to run than a gas furnace with electric vs gas rates around here. Not only that, with new 95% or 96% efficient furnaces, I'm not sure heat pumps are any greener.
Don't get me started on the install costs and the fact that your average mini split unit is barely sized to heat a room, let alone a full house. For me, it was better than the electric baseboards I replaced, but I'd still prefer a standard furnace.
I think we need to be very careful forcing everyone to convert to these until the tech is more mature, especially in the Northern states and places like Colorado. I looked on forums recently to see if the tech has evolved in the last 10 years, but many of the recent buyers still had the exact complaints I listed here.
Colorado is actually a relatively heat pump friendly climate; it can reach incredibly low temperatures some winter nights, but once the sun is up it’s back to 20-40F. Compare this to months of continuous deep cold near the Great Lakes.
Using these numbers and an average COP of 2.5 (guess) you're at about 6 therms of gas per day, or about $5-6 while the electricity sets you back about $8.
When was your home built? When I was in the northern front range, we averaged maybe 1.5-2 therms of gas per day.
But yes, this is another reason I want to move. I’ve done all the insulating I can easily do without tearing everything down and starting again.
70 kWh a day sounds about right. That’s what I calculated for a max load when I was sizing solar systems.
I'm going to at some point get an electrician in to look at things and see what the options are, but my house just isn't wired for it currently.
The real question is what kind of service you have. If the power company cannot deliver enough power then you need more power and this will cost you at best $4000 to replace your panel, and could be in the tens of thousands depending on what your power company wants.
From there, I've got a few automations including:
- Automatically turning off "conflicting" units (Heat vs Cool)
- Schedules (set bedroom to cool at night) and "Away" modes
- Temperature overrides using custom built temperature sensors (BME280 to the rescue)
- Access and control via voice (via Google Assistants)
I would love to know if there is a better way to do this.
If you really want to make it super easy to switch, design new heat pumps that people can install themselves without having to pay a contractor to install one. Start with window units that look like air conditioners.
Mini splits are also fairly easy to install and don’t take up a window.
The stated COP of 3.0 at 47° isn’t great, but it’s fine for a backup heat source.
https://www.geappliances.com/appliance/GE-J-Series-Window-Bu...
https://www.ajmadison.com/cgi-bin/ajmadison/AJHS08ASC.html
https://slymanbros.com/air-conditioners/air-conditioner-appl...
This is unfortunately common, I've been looking for small window heat pumps (that don't require a special power connection) for a few years now. Actual heat pump units have been discontinued and currently available ones turn out to actually be resistive heaters. You can tell by looking at the current draw spec for heating mode.
This one may actually be a heat pump but according to a review it won't work below 41F and hose connected units are known to be very inefficient:
https://www.amazon.com/MAP14HS1TBL-Inverter-Portable-Conditi...
It seems a few manufacturers tried selling some small window heat pump units years ago, but nobody bought them because they cost more than an air conditioner (they charged twice as much) so they discontinued them. Perhaps poor marketing on the manufacturers part, but it means that now there are none on the market when people might actually buy them to offset climate change.
https://www.acwholesalers.com/Amana-AH093G35AX/p100206.html?...
Expensive, but it does seem to be a true heat pump. Looked at several stores that sell it and they usually have just one in stock. Requires 240V wiring so it's not just plug-n-play. Almost no reviews but the few that exist are positive. Adoption would be easier for those who want to offset some of their fossil fuel use if it was 120V, but it's encouraging that one even exists.
I wonder if it will use the heat pump at lower temperatures. Found this document:
https://www.acwholesalers.com/manuals/56299c6db1bcec798cff6d...
which says the AH models (the ones that use the heat pump for heating) also include a resistive heater, probably for when the temperature goes below what the heat pump can handle. They provide cooling specs per temperature range, but not heating specs per temperature range. So I suspect the heat pump cuts out at 41F like similar models. If it was a modern heat pump they wouldn't need to include the resistive heater.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/heat-pumps/renters-you-...
Ones sold in the US won't work below 41F temperature. Two new units that will work at lower temperatures are going to be introduced this year, but will be stupidly expensive.
Something I’ll need to research is how a heat pump would compare to electric heated flooring, though because the way my house’s HVAC system is set up the upper floor is heated before the lower floor, which exacerbates the natural temperature difference that results from heat rising and means the lower floor can be chilly while the upper floor is warm. My AC is fairly new still too which makes me think that installing heated floor in the base floor, letting heat rise to heat the upper floor with the old furnace remaining as a backup might be smarter.
Electricity costs aren’t too bad here ($0.10-$0.14/kWh) so switching from consuming gas to consuming electricity won’t impact bills too much.
Will consider going with a heat pump nonetheless.
In the UK we have poor insulation, noise concerns (dwellings very close together), high electricity rates, periods of sub zero temperatures in winter and from what I can gather a lack of skilled fitters in this space.
All together it doesn’t make a convincing argument
Plus all the comments here about broken systems, high electricity costs, inadequate temperatures etc doesn’t fill me with hope
Yes I’ve heard every rebuttal (“but Nordics”, “your fitter was bad”, “you under specced”, “you over specced” etc)
Building code should have solved insulation issues decades ago. Heat Recovery systems etc instead of relying on drilling holes in to window frames as the primary source of ventilation
I am surprised that all these companies are charging arms and legs for heat pump units. PTAC is about $100 extra if you get it with a heat pump.
If you don't have access to natural gas, heat pump water will save you a lot in winter.
I have baseboard heaters, and even I don't know if I could make up that cost before the heat pump needs replacement.
Every year now, though, it seems like we add one to the number of days we need AC, something that was unnecessary when I first moved here, so that would be nice...
I'm in SF and have a gas heater, but a 115 year old house with only 4 vents (none in bedrooms), and it's been cold. I'd like to replace, maybe DIY, but not sure.
https://www.rewiringamerica.org/app/ira-calculator
Plus a lot more
My understanding is the tech has gotten better and more efficient.
Running heat or ac off electric can be expensive. But climate control is fairly important.
ACs/heat pumps are over 100% efficient (in terms of joules of heat energy moved/joules of electrical energy consumed), because they aren't turning electrical energy into heat, but rather using electrical energy to move existing heat.
So, a heat pump should always be more efficient than normal resistive electrical heating, because that is just converting just about 100% of the electrical energy into heat energy. Heat pumps may or may not be cheaper than gas/oil/whatever fossil fuel based heat, depending on fuel and electric prices in your area, and that will likely change over time.
The reason that AC is seen as wasteful/inefficient, I think, is just because historically most places people live, you can get away with just opening windows and being a bit uncomfortable during the warmest parts of the year. The opposite isn't really true, it's not really feasible to live without heat in most places people live. Additionally, heating or cooling in any form is just very energy intensive. So, any "optional" form of that can be seen as a luxury.
To be clear, I'm a big fan of AC, and am not suggesting people should go without it if they need it, just trying to answer the question of why it was seen as inefficient when it is technically very efficient.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39288940
I feel like I started talking about heat pumps a long time ago. I'm unable to find evidence for this before 2021. Anyway, it's certainly hit the cultural mainstream really fast over the last couple of years, and the story on the street is... manufacturers are running at capacity, installers have long waiting lists, some people are getting systems installed that aren't right for their space (too big or too small) and regretting it.
It's good that we're doing this, but it feels like a microcosm of our general cultural impatience. There's a limit to how much government subsidies can speed the adoption of a new technology. There are going to be issues with hiring a bunch of technicians to install heat pumps really fast if they suddenly don't have as much work in five years. The Spanish solar-energy debacle of the early 2010s rings in my head.
Maybe instead of setting big, distant, ambitious-sounding targets, we should set shorter, smaller, more gradual targets, and update every couple of years to accelerate in a sustainable way. It's pretty easy to say that the way to decarbonize the economy is "as fast as reasonably possible"; forecasting how fast that will be is hard, unnecessary, and potentially distracting.
Better late than never but it’s a shame…
Of course, seeing what happens with Netflix now, I guess it wouldn't last long until things turn back to the old way...
I'd love the information subscription but with, say, a NetNewsWire-style interface: reverse chronological feeds and search box.
The new media companies seem completely oblivious to how people consume information. I touch 10+ news sources a day, at a minimum. There is no way in hell I'm going to subscribe to 10+ new services.
Used to be you simply paid your ISP and -bam- that was it: you had the Netflix of information at your fingertips. Now everyone has their hand out.
Heat pumps are zero-emissions now. Shipping them and replacing your gas furnace also emits no carbon.
"Accelerating a transition" != "this has been 100% accomplished"
This is corporate propaganda. Its expensive and won't be adopted. Expensive technology is stupid. People won't adopt it because no one has $100,000 to trench their yard - save a few tech workers in Atherton who wish to virtue signal.
Politicians in these states are virtue signaling.
We need abundant low cost energy. If it has to be carbon free - nuclear is the answer. I personally invest in Uranium because life is a struggle for energy and capital is really a form of stored energy. Nothing is more abundant in potential energy than splitting atoms. Its the answer we will reach.
California is experiencing huge annual increases in energy costs because of virtue signaling. This is more virtue signaling. Yes we can heat our homes with heat pumps. But it will cost 10 times as much money.
To be clear, digging up your yard is for highly specialized geothermal heat pump installations. We should be skeptical of these projects because the geologic sites that allow it to be cost effective are quite rare. Normal heat pumps are just an air conditioner with a reverse configuration (not to minimize some of the difficulties of both implementing and then successfully retrofitting this)