301–310 of 406 posts
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That must have included furnace replacement components for cold weather (e.g electric heat strips). Otherwise, heat pumps are essentially the same as modern A/C units.
Almost certainly. Proper/modern heat pumps do not need heat strips until -20F or so
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Ditto Australia. We've been using 'reverse-cycle air-conditioners' for heating in Australia for decades. I'm puzzled as to why there is any debate at all on their use for heating. A heat-pump is far more efficient for obtaining heat than direct resistive heating using electricity. Many houses here use no other form of heating at all. And then at the press of a button, we get cooling in summer too. What's not to like?…
Heat pump dryer system is state of the art for efficiency. I saw some complains by American that it takes too long time for drying, but I don't know why they need to dry things so frequently.
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$49k for a Mitsubishi heat pump, variable speed air handler and two ducted head units for upstairs rooms. Supports 3000 sqft with multiple zones.
This comports with my experience pricing out a similar sized mitsu system
Also, I have 15k BTU available for one or two additional head units. I opted for this approach instead of under-sizing the heat pump or assuming we'd need the extra head unit and buying them during initial install. Half of our basement has no ducting so we thought a unit for heat would be nice. Also considered adding another unit in second floor landing for additional capacity. Not sure yet if we will.
My only complaint is the Kumo cloud is terrible.
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Heat pump dryer system is state of the art for efficiency. I saw some complains by American that it takes too long time for drying, but I don't know why they need to dry things so frequently.
If I’m doing 3 loads of laundry for the family, I don’t want a 2.5-3 hour dry cycle to make laundry take all day (or make me do laundry of half the days of the week).
??? That's excessively long. Our heat-pump dryer takes about 20-30 minutes to do one of our loads.* The dryer invariably ends up waiting for the washer to finish.
* Our loads aren't excessively tight in the machine. You have to allow room for the clothes to tumble loosely thus allowing lots of surface area for evaporation.
The article mentions the most important point towards the end: “The better you insulate, the less heat you need in the first place,” No heat pump will help if your house is leaky or under insulated.
I have new heat pumps in a very old, under insulated, and leaky house. I didn't use my oil furnace last winter (the first since two additional pumps). My costs were about half of the previous year, and I'm sure my carbon footprint was much better as well. Can you say more about what your comment is supposed to mean?
The gist is that we’d need to spec larger units and/or run them harder than usual, removing savings vs. gas.
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I have new heat pumps in a very old, under insulated, and leaky house. I didn't use my oil furnace last winter (the first since two additional pumps). My costs were about half of the previous year, and I'm sure my carbon footprint was much better as well. Can you say more about what your comment is supposed to mean?
Our house (in Europe) is relatively old and not well insulated by modern standards, and all of the advice we read and receive from experts is that heat pumps are not a good fit without additional insulation. The gist is that we’d need to spec larger units and/or run them harder than usual, removing savings vs. gas.
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A large part of it is that heat pumps only within the past decade became efficient enough to install in northern US climates, where temperatures are below freezing 4+ months of the year. It's relatively easy to design an air-source heat pump that will work efficiently down to freezing, it's much harder to design one that will work efficiently well below freezing, and frankly the A/C manufacturers who traditionally so…
Air source heat pumps have worked well at -20c for a few decades now over her ein Finland. Not sure what type of chinesium grade heatpumps you have over there in the US.
Every one of these “heat pumps are the future” articles is so soft on data, and they often fail to explain the basics or a simple “why.” Once we get past the clickbait heat pump articles, we can actually make an impact.
When I needed a new air conditioner a couple years ago I was quoted $17,000 for a heat pump. I can only guess at that point whatever energy cost savings it would bring would never be realized within the service life of the system. I went with a $6000 standard replacement AC unit.
Is this in the US? Maybe the market is distorted just because not enough people are buying them yet, so nobody has much stock and there's little competition... We have that problem I think for air to water - super common in the UK and Europe, but since everybody uses air to air, split and ducted systems are super cheap but air to water are quite expensive. I really would quite like some heated floors in my bathrooms if I end up doing a big renovation, and don't want to go electric in-floor because hydronic with a heat pump should be more efficient.