One other challenge is for existing homes a water heater may only have a gas line running to it. Want a heat pump hot water heater? Hiring the electrician alone, not to mention potentially ripping up walls will ruin any economic advantage.
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Harnessing America's heat pump moment
21–30 of 571 posts
Re: Harnessing America's heat pump moment
#22When I needed a new air conditioner I looked into heat pumps. 3x the price.
Re: Harnessing America's heat pump moment
#23[flagged]
Cold climate heat pumps have improved a lot, even in the last 10 years. Modern models can maintain comfortable temperatures down to -15F (-26C). Lots of happy customers in this reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/heatpumps/comments/146jg7k/cold_cli...
This would not work in Chicago.
Re: Harnessing America's heat pump moment
#24[flagged]
The physics of heat pumps disagrees with you. The freezing point of water has no bearing on at what point they become less effective.
Not exactly true, one of the main issues with heat pumps in cold weather is the outside coil freezing up with ice blocking airflow due to them being below the freezing point of water.
This is actually why older heat pumps became less effective around 40F because the coils would start to hit 32F since they are attempting to pull heat from the warmer outside air and are therefore colder than the outside air.
There are various solutions to this problem, the standard way is to run it in reverse as a air conditioner for a short period if it detects the situation to defrost the coils and if the system has resistive heat strips it uses those to warm the air that is being cooled. This obviously reduces the efficiency of the system the more it has to defrost and may not be very comfortable to the users.
Cold weather heat pumps work better in drier climates due to this as well because the lower the outside humidity the slower frost will form on the outside coils.
Some cool weather heat pumps will have two compressor units and fans and alternate between them with one defrosting the other, there are many other tricks they are using to prevent frost buildup and continue working above COP 1 far below freezing.
Re: Harnessing America's heat pump moment
#25One other challenge is for existing homes a water heater may only have a gas line running to it. Want a heat pump hot water heater? Hiring the electrician alone, not to mention potentially ripping up walls will ruin any economic advantage.
A possible challenge, yes, but there exist 1500w, standard outlet hpwh, and it's a lot less common to not have any power near a water heater.
Re: Harnessing America's heat pump moment
#26Electricity costs are a big factor in this, imo.
Rates for my northeast town increased by ~25% in 2024 and are going up by another ~10% this year. It's a hard sell to spend a large amount of up-front money (even after rebates, which decreased this year) to convert to a system that will cost you more than you pay today, and may not work as well in cold weather (every heat pump company I talked to suggested keeping my existing gas heating in place and automatically switching to it when it gets cold enough).
I was also told that the electrical grid in my area is having difficulty keeping up with the push towards heat pumps, which increase load exactly on the coldest nights of the year, when you need heating most.
Re: Harnessing America's heat pump moment
#27> we’re waiting on people Right on. I have a heat pump water heater and a heat pump heating system in my HVAC. Getting those installed felt like swimming upstream. Most contractors would try to dissuade me from them. Luckily, I found a contractor who was skilled and knowledgeable about heat pumps and rebates (back when govt thought climate change was real). Very happy with my heat pump tech.
I guess I lucked out; our house had a (very old) whole-home (that is, ducted) heat pump system for heating and cooling when we moved in. When it was time to replace, our local contractor knew exactly what we needed. They even do mini-splits, had we wanted one.
Re: Harnessing America's heat pump moment
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I’ve tested it down to around -5 degrees (f), and it was 100% able to keep the house above 63 degree (f). Some customers will accept that. Most will not. Reddit is not a particularly representative sample of the entire market.
63 when it’s -5 out seems totally fine. More than fine for much of the US.
“Paid more, and now we are cold”. This is not my preferred version of the 21st century.
Re: Harnessing America's heat pump moment
#29When I needed a new air conditioner I looked into heat pumps. 3x the price.
That's crazy. It's a reversing valve.
But you might also be comparing multi-stage variable load DC heat pumps with single stage air conditioners and not an actually equivalent air conditioner.
Re: Harnessing America's heat pump moment
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I’ve tested it down to around -5 degrees (f), and it was 100% able to keep the house above 63 degree (f). Some customers will accept that. Most will not. Reddit is not a particularly representative sample of the entire market.
63 when it’s -5 out seems totally fine. More than fine for much of the US.
Maybe totally fine for you. But that will not be "totally fine" for much of the US when they are expecting to keep their house at 72 degrees and the new technology they got talked into can't do it.
The tech has limits and cold weather states can't avoid that or the reputation will get really bad and the tech will fail.