> With a heat pump, you -need- an alternative source of heat
It's only a -need- in certain locations. The one I have claims to be fine down to -5 degrees. There is zero chance we will get anywhere close to that in my lifetime. Heck, even getting down to 32 is incredibly rare. So we are fine without an alternative source of heat.
As for other points, we have never had a power loss/blackout in the nearly 3 decades we have lived here. And electric is cheaper than gas due to nearby hydroelectric dams.
> There is no real world scenario in a place that has a heating season where the cost to the consumer is better with electricity versus gas or oil. Electric costs about 4x for whole house heating...
I guess I live an unreal life. All of my heating and cooling is electric. My bills are lower than anyone I've compared with and in every case I'm heating and cooling more square feet. The magic? Ground source heat pump. Several people tried to talk me out of it and I'm glad I didn't listen.
>In June of 2010 I moved to a place in Montana with only electric heat.
Living that far north and depending on one heat source is crazy! Think about the power going out when its -30 out... or if you used gas, running out or having your furnace break down.
(Not to mention electric is usually the most expensive way to heat). Most houses where I live have 2 or 3 heat sources. I have wood, LP and electric...
>For some remote regions, blizzards taking out the electrical grid is a real concern.
Effectively every fossil fuel powered heater being installed requires electricity for the fans to work.
>You need a local mechanism to generate heat and an on-site propane/oil tank is the only realistic option.
A backup generator that runs on propane. You'd need a backup generator to begin with even for propane heating, so just go full electric with a heat pump.
> Please explain to me how an electric heat pump - even one designed to be highly efficient in a cold climate - is supposed to keep me from freezing to death when my power goes out every winter from an ice storm taking down trees
The warm fuzzy feeling you get inside from knowing you're saving the planet should keep you warm enough. /s
> Not true, heat pumps are widely used as primary heat sources in environments as cold or colder than NY, like in Montreal and other parts of Canada.
As the owner of a 5 year old heat pump in a milder climate in Indiana, I can tell you this:
* When it is under 10°F, my heat pump switches to emergency heat... forced air electric and is very expensive to run.
* Often the temperature swings are pretty wild... 40-50 degrees and that also can force emergency heat.
Oh, and since the electric company is usually using gas to generate the electricity, isn't the environmental impact somewhat of a wash?
> Yes, heat pumps reduce electricity consumption compared to resistive heating which almost nobody in my corner of washington is using. People here use natural gas which is historically pretty cheap even compared to relatively cheap electric rates for heating purposes.
Ya, this made me wonder. I get Seattle, but Spokane? You probably need to install gas heating or a wood burn fireplace since I don't think a heat pump would cut it east of the cascades. But I see how it would do wonders for air conditioning in the summer.
> If I didn't have a propane furnace I'd have to fly to Florida every winter.
Keep the propane. Use it 5 days every year. You still have 95% of the reduction in CO2 and pollution that a heat pump brings, and reliable heat. Nobody is saying you have to be totally reliant on the heat pump. They don't even work the same way.
This is like refusing to get an air conditioner because you'll have to get rid of your heater. KEEP BOTH! You aren't even really replacing your heating, you're replacing your air conditioner, because a heat pump is an air conditioner. It just also happens to be incredibly good at keeping your home warm as well as cool.
It can run on anything. As pro renewable energy as I am, the switch won't happen overnight.
Furthermore, pointing out that heating with a heat pump and grid electricity from natural gas is more efficient than heating directly with natural gas hopefully encourages more homes to use heat pumps now, instead of waiting for incentives that will come in the future.
When I built my house, I had to really push on the contractor to get a heat pump. He wanted to do a gas furnace and still thinks I'm an environmental bozo.
> this is a no brainer in milder climates which is why I have a heat pump and no gas furnace here in FL even though I have gas to the house for other uses.
They're a no-brainer in every climate. Newer heat pumps can handle fairly cold temperatures (-13°F) pretty easily, there may be a loss in efficiency but in the majority of the world it doesn't stay that cold. A few days of lower than normal efficiency, and at worst plugging in a few space heaters if it gets extremely cold for a day or two, does not change the overall math of heat pumps being a better solution.
Hell, that's just me talking about air source heat pumps. No reason for new construction to not use ground source and get better efficiency and not worry about ambient outdoor temperatures.
Yeah I just put one of those in, mostly because I didn't want to run a gas line. And feel a lot more competent running a 30amp circuit than cutting and sealing a hole in the roof.
Works fine.
Also friend in Florida says she has a heat pump with an air handler. It produces heat in the winter and cooling in the summer.
> Heat pumps can have back up electric heating elements to provide the heating in the extremes. You get a more resilient system than gas.
Sorry if I'm misunderstanding, but wouldn't the backup electric heating elements require, well, electricity to function?
I'm no fan of gas, but the idea of losing heating, phone service (the old copper wire systems could function even in a blackout), the ability to cook (since gas stoves are being phased out), and the ability to travel (EVs and some trains) because a transformer exploded is kinda scary. Like, we're putting all our faith in a system that is routinely knocked out by errant tree branches.
Maybe we could do buried lines, but given infra costs in the US that sounds... expensive. Someone in another thread mentioned heat reservoirs of some kind, but I have no idea how realistic that is. Even if it buys a few extra hours, that'd improve things dramatically.
From the sound of it, you're far more familiar with specific legislation than I, so maybe I'm totally off and all this has been taken into account. But having experienced an extended blackout and my family realizing we couldn't even boil water, I'm apprehensive to say the least. IMO it'd be nice to move away from fossil fuels without betting lives on ConEd doing repairs in a timely fashion.
> Heat pumps heat more efficiently than gas, but I wouldn't be surprised to see in the near future some sort of rolling blackout and thousands of people freezing to death because we went all-in on electric. Will these buildings also have generators to combat this potential problem?
Everywhere I've ever lived if the power was out there was no way to burn the natural gas for heat.
Forced air furnace needs power for the ignition, control circuitry, and the fan that actually circulates the heat through the house.
I don't think it's a bad problem to solve, but it's not one that natural gas heating solves.
> He does, but he omits a lot of important considerations that make heat pumps impractical for normal Americans.
Some form of this comment always comes up in these heat pump threads, and I never understand the idea that heat pumps are some elite affectation that doesn't make sense for anyone else. Many millions of Americans live in parts of country where it gets warm enough in the summer to justify central air conditioning and chilly enough in the winter that you need heat but the heating source doesn't need to handle super low temps on a regular basis.
A heat pump is literally one of the simplest ways to address the year round climate control needs for those people since it's a single system that handles both heating and cooling with only marginally more complexity than the air conditioner you'd want anyways. Throw in electric backup heat, which is probably the simplest backup and keeps the system all-electric, and you have a system able to handle a pretty broad range of temperatures all year. As heat pump technology gets better, the applicable temperature range gets colder and colder and makes heat pumps practical for a wider range of "normal Americans".
This isn't just theoretical. Heat pumps account for 17% of heating systems in the US, which isn't huge, but over 40% in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Alabama and a significant percentage in many other states as well. Obviously there are cases where heat pumps are at least currently impractical given the construction, climate, etc, but dismissing them as some effete toy seems a bit silly.
Edit: Interestingly, most states seem to have a significantly higher percentage of homes with electricity as their primary heating fuel than they do homes with heat pumps, suggesting a lot of homes with things like electric baseboard heating. While not all of those homes necessarily have central AC, using Georgia as an example, 85% of homes have central AC and 53% use electricity as their main heating fuel, while only 29% have heat pumps. That suggests quite a few homes with central AC that use electric baseboard or similar. Heat pumps for those homes seem like they'd be very practical.
> If you get a nasty February ice storm that cuts a power line, you can be without electric power in 0F weather for up to 5 days
I live in Indiana and we've had power outages like this during both winter and summer. What sucks is that newer (last 25 years) gas furnaces have fancy-dancy blower motors (power vent) and if I lose electricity, I also can't run the furnace because the power vent won't work. My gas water heater was the same way. Last time it failed (they only last 10 years these days), I switched to electric because the power vent on the gas water heater was so noisy you could hear it throughout the entire house.
My house is somewhat livable in the summer heat with a power outage because I have a basement, but in winter, forget it.
Having said that, I'm not so keen on spending $10-15K to convert two gas furnaces to heat pumps.
So I have a heat pump. In central Indiana. Temp ranges from -15F in the winter to 100F in the summer. Today it was in the mid 50s. My across the street neighbor has the same floorplan house, but he has gas. When we compare bills, I pay about $40/mo more for heat. He pays about $40 more for AC... so it ends up being a wash, except my HVAC plant cost about twice what his conventional electric AC / Gas forced air setup. As a bonus, the electric that I use comes from a giant gas plant so... Would feel better about electric if it wasn't just shifting production to a giant facility on the other side of town.
>Don't Americans use electric heat pumps / air-conditioning units for cooling and heating
In the northeastern US where I live, it gets down below 0 C for a good portion of the winter and usually once or twice to around -18 C.
While certainly there are apartments, maybe houses, with electric heat and heat pumps, my experience has been that electric heat is expensive and undesirable and a heat pump is a useless gimmick that doesn't work in actual cold weather (although maybe a newer system would be better). It seems like the cheaper apartments in terms of rent have electric heat, which is more expensive.
I think natural gas (I use around 140 therms at peak in the winter, which I think is about equivalent to 400 m^3) is typical if you live reasonably close to the city/inner suburbs, and if you don't have gas, you may well burn fuel oil, which is essentially diesel fuel that's delivered in trucks and stored in tanks. In some parts of the US, where coal is produced, I think people use that for heating, but it's less common overall because it isn't cost effective to ship a long way.
Last month I used about 500 kWh which is higher than you but not hugely.
I wonder if your climate is as cold as where I live though, or if you are using as much gas for a significantly more temperate region.
> Caution to the reader who thinks one could pump heat from frigid external temperatures into their very warm, high temperature house
I heat my house with a heat pump. I live in Eastern Canada and we regularly have -20c days and I still heat my house to a comfortable level. Our pump is >=100% efficient all the way down to around -25c at which point it's less and less effective.
These pumps are extremely popular around here. We heat during the winter and cool during the summer with the same unit.
I consider our heat pumps to be our primary source of heat in our house. We only run the gas furnace if we get into sub -25c days which is not often, we had none this year.
(I will admit that I have a gas stove in my basement to handle power outages, a gas stove, and a gas grill. I will also admit that I really, really regret installing a gas stove and will switch to an induction stove when it's time to replace the stove.)
It's only a -need- in certain locations. The one I have claims to be fine down to -5 degrees. There is zero chance we will get anywhere close to that in my lifetime. Heck, even getting down to 32 is incredibly rare. So we are fine without an alternative source of heat.
As for other points, we have never had a power loss/blackout in the nearly 3 decades we have lived here. And electric is cheaper than gas due to nearby hydroelectric dams.
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