481–490 of 766 posts
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> If California is serious about this, they need to reign in the utilities to reduce prices and or stop the attacks on solar installation. Why do you think electricity prices are high?
A combination of: mismanagement and corruption. To pay for all the people that PGE murdered with their negligence? Why do you think electricity prices are high? Why should the rates be 4x the rest of the country?
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I had my heat pump installed in Dec. The contractor really screwed up where they wired the zoning incorrectly - the upper floor thermo controlled the lower damper and vice versa, meaning that the pump would run almost indefinitely because the thermostat would never register the temp of the opposing floor. It took me a full week to troubleshoot this (what helped was I bought a thermometer and placed it next to the the…
> the upper floor thermo controlled the lower damper and vice versa 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.
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Its a wash when gas prices are at historical lows: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/rngwhhdm.htm
That isn't the table you actually care about because it doesn't hit the residential customer like that. The nominal $/therm in my area has been stable for the last 10 years which might be artificial but to my bank account it's all the same.
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Income-based base billing is indeed terrible, but it is not an attack on solar. You'd pay it whether you have panels or not. Also, legislators have apparently come to their senses and are looking to repeal it. [1-2] As for the pricing for power sent to the grid, I did mention the changes to net metering, which offer grandfathering for existing installations. 1: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-progressive-california-ep…
The high fixed monthly cost regardless of utilization means that compared to previous, my total costs for solar go up, even if my total costs for PGE supplied power don't. That will cause many fewer people to switch to solar or solar + battery.
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?
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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.
People use the term "heat pump" to sometimes describe quite different things, so it's hard to know what's apples-to-apples.
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> Like, a new power pole costs (say) $1000 regardless of how many watts are going through the wires attached to it. Someone has to pay the person that cut down the tree and hauled it to its final location money. 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…
There's a pole in my backyard. It generously connects 8 houses. There is another pole a few hundred feet down the road, also connecting 8 houses.
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 have NEM2 solar, so obviously a heat pump is a big win. But I'm convinced the heat pump I installed a couple years ago would save money even without the solar: 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…
Is your $0.30-0.40/kwh rate based on your Solar cost? 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 pu…
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-...
One of the big problems with heat pumps in New England is that our electricity costs 1.7x the US average ( https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph... ). 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 t…
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 mont…
https://www.reddit.com/r/heatpumps/comments/raocha/heat_pump...
One of the big problems with heat pumps in New England is that our electricity costs 1.7x the US average ( https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph... ). 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 t…
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.
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In MA this actually does work at first glance: a 23% efficient Generac 7171 is rated for 9kW at full output on natural gas, and uses 127 ft3/hr (1.37 therms). This is $0.30/kWh at $2/therm, compared to the $0.323/kWh I pay the power company. If you were doing this for real you'd put in the work to find something more efficient than this unit, which would then be enough to make up for the cost of the generator and the…
Why isn't it legal? Is that an MA thing? 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...