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Harnessing America's heat pump moment

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Re: Harnessing America's heat pump moment

#121

Post by twothamendment »

ssuds wrote: post #76
blahedo wrote: post #33

People are reluctant to install them because they don't work as well as the good old boilers we'd be replacing. I'm not saying they can't, and I'm not saying that there are zero models out there that work. But in practice, a lot of us that have interacted with heat pumps have the specific experience that they get anemic as the temperature goes down and eventually become unable to do much of anything. I live in the mi…

I just wrote a big thread yesterday responding to someone with similar concerns to yours ( https://bsky.app/profile/shreyassudhakar.com/post/3m3w3nra2h... ). Copying it here if it's helpful to other folks. FWIW, the challenges you are facing seem to be grounded in bad design and application, which happens more than it should and really sucks. We need to move the bar much higher for the contractors installing heat pum…

I'm in Northwest Montana. My ground source heat pump doesn't struggle until the highs outside are -20F (actual, not wind-chill). I have the backup heat strip, but the breaker is off. I don't know when it would turn on, I just wanted to know it wouldn't without me knowing it.

Re: Harnessing America's heat pump moment

#122

Post by crazygringo »

Loughla wrote: post #101
doctorhandshake wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The notion that heat pumps don’t work at low temperatures hasn’t been true for years. I think you may be surprised to find that just about any heat pump you look at has good efficiency down to very low temperatures.

Define low temperatures. Mine struggles if it gets below 30, and might as well not exist below 10. They're not great at low temps.

I've got one about 8 years old, and it does just fine down to 0°F (it hasn't gotten colder than that here). It doesn't even have any kind of auxiliary heat.

It's fine. The only difference when it's super-cold is that the air coming out of it isn't as warm, so the heating cycle stays on for a longer proportion of the time. But it keeps it 70°F inside no problem at all.

Re: Harnessing America's heat pump moment

#123

Post by Spooky23 »

jbm wrote: post #6
galoisscobi wrote: post #3

> 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 had a similar problem too. Was unable to find anyone who was willing to quote me on a heatpump when I was installing my air conditioner. I assume it will be better in 5-10 years when I have to replace them.

Unlikely. Private equity is swooping in, especially in places like New York that have taken bizarre regulatory stances against gas.

In my area, about 75% of the HVAC companies have been swept up. Prices are up 75-150%. I got my gas furnace replaced to to beat the ban, and had a fireman who works a side gig do the job for $15k. The bids from the companies ranged from $25-85k

Re: Harnessing America's heat pump moment

#124

Post by tzs »

Loughla wrote: post #101
doctorhandshake wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The notion that heat pumps don’t work at low temperatures hasn’t been true for years. I think you may be surprised to find that just about any heat pump you look at has good efficiency down to very low temperatures.

Define low temperatures. Mine struggles if it gets below 30, and might as well not exist below 10. They're not great at low temps.

That's one of the older style units. Starting in 2007 when Mitsubishi introduced their "Hyper-Heating Inverter" heat pumps, and continuing with Fujitsu and Daikin following with similar technology in the 2010-12 timeframe, and others a few years later, heat pumps got way better in the cold.

Mitsubishi's maintain 200%+ efficiency down to -4℉ (-20℃) and 150% down to -22℉ (-30℃) [1]. Only a few towns in the continental US get below that, and even those aren't going to get cold enough long enough to make it worth it an an all electric home to switch to your emergency electrical resistance heating.

Their capacity doesn't start dropping until you get down to 23℉ (-5℃), dropping to 76% at -13℉ (-25℃).

[1] https://www.coolingpost.com/world-news/study-proves-heat-pum...

Re: Harnessing America's heat pump moment

#125

Post by [deleted] »

darth_avocado wrote: post #57
galoisscobi wrote: post #3

> 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’m in California, I have two heat pumps installed. I can sum up the problems as follows: 1. They are EXPENSIVE. The equipment itself isn’t that expensive tbh but installation is pretty expensive. The government subsidies have made sure that the contractors jack up their own prices by as much. 2. I end up paying more in utilities because electricity is very expensive and heat pumps aren’t nearly as good at heating in…

[deleted]

Re: Harnessing America's heat pump moment

#126

Post by [deleted] »

pureagave wrote: post #118
ssuds wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote an op-ed in the SF Chronicle a few months ago about electricity costs in California holding back electrification, it's a real challenge: https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/heat-p... That said, I've found that in most cases (assuming you're on the right electric rate plan, that's a whole other conversation, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42763695 ), most homeowners in california ac…

Electricity prices in San Francisco are so bad that it makes gasoline a reasonable alternative to an electric car.

[deleted]

Re: Harnessing America's heat pump moment

#127

Post by morshu9001 »

darth_avocado wrote: post #107
ssuds wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote an op-ed in the SF Chronicle a few months ago about electricity costs in California holding back electrification, it's a real challenge: https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/heat-p... That said, I've found that in most cases (assuming you're on the right electric rate plan, that's a whole other conversation, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42763695 ), most homeowners in california ac…

> most homeowners in california actually see operating cost parity or a slight decrease, even with super expensive electricity But you’re missing my first point though, installing a heat pump system comes with a price tag of tens of thousands of dollars. I’m not doing that if my operating cost is at parity or a slight decrease. It’s the same reason people are no longer incentivized to install solar. And to add to tha…

I feel like home solar makes no sense without subsidies, even now with economies of scale. Commercial solar may be a different story.

Re: Harnessing America's heat pump moment

#128

Post by kragen »

> what it’s going to take, from the human side of the equation, to make heat pumps the obvious, accessible, and default choice for millions of American homes.

Well, this has already happened; living in a third-world American country, I've been heating my houses in winter with heat pumps every winter for many years (even though they iced up occasionally) and most air conditioners here are already heat pumps. Frio/calor, they're called.

But, installations strictly for heating are probably never going to happen en masse. In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45698730 I analyze the costs. It turns out that heat pumps cost around 39¢ per peak watt they save, while low-cost solar panels cost 6.5¢ per peak watt they produce, so it's almost always cheaper to install enough solar panels to heat your house resistively. And that gap is going to continue widening for the foreseeable future.

Our heat pump, a cheap-shit Electrolux mini split assembled in Tierra del Fuego, broke down last winter; somehow the refrigerant escaped. The repairman did a pressure test with nitrogen but couldn't find a link. He pre-emptively soldered shut a pipe that had been crimped shut at the factory, and pointed out that, probably, if we hadn't been using it as a heat pump, it would have been fine. Certainly it would have had many fewer hours of operation. We ended up spending about US$100 on the repair, which is the price of 1500 peak watts of solar panels. I think that brings us to about US$500 total spent on the thing—insignificant to people in the US, but a significant chunk of change in most of the rest of America.

Heat pumps are an energy-crisis-era efficiency measure to conserve energy. But energy is no longer scarce. After 50 years, the energy crisis is, if not ended, at least ending. If your house's solar panels are producing more energy than you can use or sell back to the grid at a decent price, the energy to run a resistive heater is free.

Re: Harnessing America's heat pump moment

#129

Post by ssuds »

darth_avocado wrote: post #107
ssuds wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote an op-ed in the SF Chronicle a few months ago about electricity costs in California holding back electrification, it's a real challenge: https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/heat-p... That said, I've found that in most cases (assuming you're on the right electric rate plan, that's a whole other conversation, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42763695 ), most homeowners in california ac…

> most homeowners in california actually see operating cost parity or a slight decrease, even with super expensive electricity But you’re missing my first point though, installing a heat pump system comes with a price tag of tens of thousands of dollars. I’m not doing that if my operating cost is at parity or a slight decrease. It’s the same reason people are no longer incentivized to install solar. And to add to tha…

The first point is very valid too. There was an energy commission study a few years ago, and up front cost is pretty consistently one of the biggest barriers to heat pump adoption.

I think there's some nuance to that, though. Even replacing a furnace + AC in California amounts to tens of thousands of dollars! It's not that heat pumps are expensive, it's that construction work in general is expensive.

When you frame it in terms of percentage of home cost, it actually feels a lot more reasonable. Robert Bean is a pretty respected voice in HVAC, and shared this article a few years ago (https://web.archive.org/web/20150210053806/http://www.health...). The gist is (and this is focused a bit on new construction, so not entirely apples to apples) that you should budget 3-5% of the home's cost for a bare minimum code compliant HVAC installation. When you look at it in that lens, $20k to replace the most complicated mechanical system in a $3M home is less than 1%.

I recently read a piece about the "Cost disease in services" that was really enlightening (https://growthecon.com/feed/2017/05/15/What-You-Spend.html).

"Productivity growth in the goods sector raises the wage in that sector, but also raises the output of that sector. So the ratio of wage to output - a measure of the cost of a unit of output - stays constant over time. Higher wages in the goods sector put pressure on wages in the service sector, so wages rise over time there. But (taking the exteme position) productivity is not growing in services, and so output is not growing. The ratio of wages to output in services - a measure of costs - is thus rising over time. This is the “cost disease of services”."

While I don't think that's all of it, it is a helpful framing of the economics around these dynamics.

There are some companies out there that are truly price gouging. But many are just pricing around the true cost of labor and to run a construction business. I've done a little writing around this topic too: https://www.heatpumped.org/p/pricing-transparency-peeking-be...

Ultimately, I would love to see upfront prices & operating costs for heat pumps both fall. But there are a lot of tough realities baked into the cost of these systems. They are still a very logical choice for most homeowners at the time of failure. Especially with rebate & incentive stacks in many places, a heat pump actually works out cheaper than a new furnace + traditional AC for many homeowners.

Re: Harnessing America's heat pump moment

#130

Post by kragen »

darth_avocado wrote: post #107
ssuds wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote an op-ed in the SF Chronicle a few months ago about electricity costs in California holding back electrification, it's a real challenge: https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/heat-p... That said, I've found that in most cases (assuming you're on the right electric rate plan, that's a whole other conversation, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42763695 ), most homeowners in california ac…

> most homeowners in california actually see operating cost parity or a slight decrease, even with super expensive electricity But you’re missing my first point though, installing a heat pump system comes with a price tag of tens of thousands of dollars. I’m not doing that if my operating cost is at parity or a slight decrease. It’s the same reason people are no longer incentivized to install solar. And to add to tha…

> installing a heat pump system comes with a price tag of tens of thousands of dollars.

Mine cost US$250 for the machine, refrigerant included, and another US$80 for the installation. We've had to have it fixed twice due to factory defects. Its heat output is 3400W, nominally consuming 941 watts of electrical power. It's not a great machine, but you're smoking crack.

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