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Comment by oooyay | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I made this mistake this year. I pumped $20k into a heat pump system, coming from what used to be Natural Gas. I wasn't given any kind of relief because I live in Oregon where most relief is income based. Then at the beginning of the year PGE announced a 20% rate hike. My house is covered in trees, so solar isn't really an option. I really regretted my decision once I got a $300-$400 bill for heating three months in a row. In the summer I now have AC where I didn't at all before, but it hardly makes up for the cost of a heat pump during winter. I probably won't be doing any of these kinds programs again.

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I'm moving from Portland to McMinnville in a couple of months. Price of kwh goes from $.1945/kwh to about $.0720. I've noticed that McMinnville Water & Light doesn't help pay for EV connections, etc. compared to Portland General Electric but at almost 1/3rd the cost, they probably don't need to.

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...

https://portlandgeneral.com/about/info/pricing-plans

IIRC there's also a legacy superfund cleanup charge that PGE customers have the privilege of paying.

Yeah, this is the move, imo. I think once my mortgage goes positive I'm going to look at where to go next. This is not worth it.

For those installation comparing costs, the subreddit has a Heat Pump Quote Comparison Survey:

https://www.reddit.com/r/heatpumps/comments/raocha/heat_pump...

$20k for a heat pump is sky high, you better have gotten a 24 SEER2 state of the art fully variable system for that.

If they sold you a 14 SEER1 for that then you got absolutely screwed.

Perhaps you know already, but a lot of the price is often the installation labor, not the device itself.

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.

Even in the expensive Bay Area, I got a quote of only $10k to install a heat pump. It was basically the same price to install a new gas furnace + AC for summer.

But what kind? For instance, a mini-split in an apartment is quite different from the 3-ton forced-air system I described.

People use the term "heat pump" to sometimes describe quite different things, so it's hard to know what's apples-to-apples.

It's a forced-air system sized for a moderately insulated 1300 sqft home. Don't know how many tons or the SEER rating.

You hit the nail on the head, but mine is a 5 channel Daikin heat pump. I got a bit of a deal because I paid in cash.

It was a 5 channel heat pump with a single condenser. As the other commenter wrote it was mostly wrapped up in labor. For what it's worth, they're 24 SEER Daikin units. It's priced at replacing the AC and heat for an entire house, so compare it to a large AC installation.

That feels like a lot of electricity usage for such high seer, in Oregon. Are you positive that electric backup wasn't being triggered for some reason?

You mean the heat strip? It likely was turning on, but I have no way to know.

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