I’m not sure about where you live but where I live (Canada) you can’t legally do your own heat pump installations. You need to be certified to handle refrigerants and that sort of thing.

Well, I would! But I get the point, it's just chance of who's otherwise interested, and to actually get the amount extra they think it's worth you probably need two of them anyway.

I think I would pay at least $5-10k more for a ground source heat pump on a house. The energy cost savings are insane. I think I would even prefer that over a solar installation.

Do heat pumps make sense if you don’t have central air?

I went with the Daikin 5MXS48TVJU for the condenser and 3 models of the head units. All Daikin. I didn’t want a bunch of condensers around the house, and I didn’t want to run power everywhere. I’m not sure about efficiency compared to multiple condensers or the IRA stuff.

We had an energy audit done a few years ago and the conclusion was that we needed about 40kBTU/h of furnace (upstate NY). We have an 80 (came with the house when we bought it). It’s actually quite hard to buy any gas furnace smaller than 60. But modulating gas furnaces seem to be becoming a thing now which is good and may make up for over sizing.

It needs good air flow to work well and the noise is only really a problem inside the house in the room next to it. I may put some sound insulation on the wall at some point.

Really? I'm curious what brand of heat pumps these are. I have two air source units. One is a whole home Carrier Infinity unit (4 ton) and a GE single head ductless mini-split. The Carrier heats and cools our entire home save for a sunroom that's not ducted which is why we also have the mini-split. I never hear either unit.

There must be a more aesthetically pleasing option...

Power outages aren’t an argument against heat pumps anyway. Without power my central fan can’t run and thus my forced air natural gas furnace is dead in the water.

Anyway, where I live in Boise most utility outages are due to physical damage - whether that be animals, auto accidents, extreme weather (not “it got cold”, but wind gusts toppled a tree that brought down a utility pole), and fiber seeking backhoes. Even had the gas get shut off at my old house because an auto accident hit some equipment a street down causing a gas leak.

It’s not bad where I am now in rural Montana but where I grew up near Seattle the power was off for a week plus most winters.

Lots of above ground power lines in heavily forested suburban sprawl means lots of branches in lines every wind storm and they (private) electric co has to visually check all of them before they can turn power back on.

Despite being much more rural the power coop that serves me now seems to never have an outage that lasts more then a few hours. Probally mostly because they have much less pine to check.

> The only exceptions are major natural disasters like hurricanes.

Which is the same as with us Americans.

My last apartment had a handful of power outages and all except one was due to weather. The exception was a transformer that exploded — which seems common as I’ve seen at least three just randomly go boom.

When you get major weather events, where they are pulling in personnel from all over the nation, is when people get concerned about electric heating because it might take a while to get to them.

Does American utilities not pay any compensation for power outages?

My local utility pays 50 EUR starting 12 hours after the start of an outage, and 4 EUR/hr after that. So a 2 day outage would pay out 200 EUR, and it all happens automatically.

There's no exceptions to this (only if you are at fault...), and this gets subtracted from their regulated revenues such that it hits the bottom line.

Naturally, most low voltage distribution lines are buried under ground

I'm American, I think it isn't that bad, people are just like to whine and complain. America is also huge, so there is likely someone with a different experience and reason to complain.

My well pump is electric and I haven't been out of power long enough to be concerned about getting water.

We don’t. Power very very rarely fails, but when it has recently it’s been big infrastructures with flawed designs like the freezes in Texas, from what I’ve seen.

The spread out housing means doing things like overhead power wires to save cost and reach further away places. Easily disrupted by fallen trees.

America doesn't have regular power outages; they're very infrequent and exceptional. However, when they do happen, they can be really big events, such as the big failure in the Northeast about a decade ago, and the infamous problem more recently in Texas during the winter. There's also local outages from natural disasters or extreme weather. Usually, very localized outages from storms (like falling trees) don't affect that many people and are repaired quickly. Outages from hurricanes, however, are bigger and take much longer to fix. What happened in Texas was just really bad planning and legislation, and only affected Texas.

It seems to depend on the area. In the SF Bay Area, wide scale power outages are rare. In Houston, most of my coworkers had small generators to keep their fridges and air conditioners running after a hurricane knocks out power.

Most of our distribution network is above ground, so areas with higher wind and older infrastructure are more prone to outages. When I used to live in Ukraine, power outages were rarely due to distribution infrastructure (which was underground in most of the city I lived in) and much more likely to be related to generating capacity. We would go through periods of rationing where there would be frequent outages that would last a few hours, but rarely long enough for food to go bad.

Like others mentioned, it depends on your region. I happen to live in a town surrounded by trees and the powerlines are above ground.

It’s very common for branches to break and knock out power lines in the summer during windy storms.

This usually means no power for 1-3 day stretches and only happens 1-3 times per year. So worst case it’s no power for 9 days total every year.

The problem is it usually hits in the hottest days of the year so people really complain — myself included.

WFH also makes matters more complicated.

Horrible weather.

Very very spread out population.

And huge spikes and troughs of infrastructure investment over decades.

Pretty much every rural community will have one if not multiple propane providers. It generally is more expensive than natural gas, but the difference isn't astronomical. Heating with fuel oil is, by comparison, much more expensive.

Propane is a bit more expensive then traditional electric heat depending on the year.

It used to be much cheaper so a lot of old houses that aren't near a natural gas line were built with propane heat. You might save $200-1000 a year by switching to a heatpump but that means 10+ years to offset a ~$10000 install cost for a large unit professionally installed with a new 220 circuit run for it etc so most people just keep paying for propane or maybe use small electric space heaters.

And if you are somewhere you need to worry about pipes freezing in power outage a while you are away or temps bellow the heatpumps minimum -15f range a propane stove is a nice option. Relatively cheap to install and they can be setup to run on a thermostat with no grid power.

If i was building a new house i'd go heatpump + a propane stove for back up heat and a dual fuel induction/propane range.

In case you don't get a reply from the parent commenter, it is basically putting many heat pumps together. So one heat pump steps the temperature up a bit, and your next heat pump takes that warm fluid and bumps up its temperature and so on. You don't want to do large changes in temperature all in one go because it's inefficient - heat pumps love small temperature differences.

The same reason can be asked why not just buy a couple hard drives and a server instead of going to cloud, because most people can not do much beyond their professions.

You should use vacuum pump to avoid emitting GHG

It's interesting math. You can turn natural gas into heat directly at around 90% if it's plumbed to the building. You can turn natural gas into electricity at around 50%. You can turn electricity into heat (resistive) at 100%. You can pump ambient heat inside using electricity at 300% (depending on several factors; adjust as appropriate).

Therefore the choice is between a gas furnace at 90%, or gas to electricity to a heat pump at 150%, if we care about the efficiency of gas usage between the two options.

But when comparing price per kWh of delivered gas vs electricity, ignore the 50% gas-to-electricity efficiency, because that's irrelevant. It's just the 90% vs 300%.

Therefore a gas furnace is cheaper if the delivered price per kWh of gas happens to be no more than 30% that of electricity in your area. Of course the rate for gas will more likely be in therms than kWh, but that's a simple conversion (1 therm = 29.3 kWh).

I suppose that's the case in Texas?

Where in the country is electricity actually getting cheaper? Everywhere I’ve lived along the west coast electricity prices have only gone up.

> assume you have an AC unit as well as a gas furnace

A typical Texas house has one unit that is both AC and furnace.

Most houses built in the last 50 years have central AC. Given that you'll have ducts, the simplest and easiest way to heat the house is to use them. In other words, it's forced air heating. It's really not a great form of heating, but it's adequate for relatively short, mild winters.

So if you replace your one AC/furnace unit with a heat pump unit, you probably won't have a gas furnace anymore to do the comparison. (Apparently, there is such a thing as a "dual fuel heat pump", though, which can heat with gas or heat pump. I'm not sure how much those cost.)

Another factor is that AC is the bigger concern for energy usage because AC is used much more of the year. So when replacing your system, whatever money you can spend on an upgrade, you're probably better off putting it toward improving AC efficiency rather than heat efficiency. Or toward something that will help with both, like insulation.

I wonder if there is business to be made refitting old AC units to work in reverse. In theory only difference is some piping/valves.

You could replace the gas at the source with a renewble biogas [0] and leave all the existing appliances in place.

[0]: https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/natural_gas_renewable.html

Solar panels aint free

This hasn't been my experience at all. I'm doing a pretty comprehensive remodel and swapping out 3 furnaces and I've done my own manual J/D/S calculations.. I've compared my cost of electricity & gas and while natural gas may be marginally cheaper if I were to upgrade to high-efficiency units, I've decided to install HPs anyways since our electric costs are much more stable here and our electricity is lower carbon. I literally can't find a company to install them. It has nothing to do with callbacks or expense, it's just that most of these companies are staffed/run by older guys who want to install the same massively oversized low efficiency furnaces and SEER 15 AC units they've been installing for the past 30 years.

The only people willing to install heatpumps are from an hour away and who spend their time building luxury homes. It's crazy to me that the rest of these guys aren't out there working with those Federal IRA funds and installing heat pumps left and right. We're climate zone 4 with a design temp of 6ºF, just about every modern HP will spend 99.9% of its time working at full BTU here.

They make the most sense in a hot climate! You already have a heat pump, for air conditioning, why not use it for heating too and stop spending money on a furnace?

Gas is cheap because it is not carbon taxed. Which it absolutely should be.

US natural gas is at lowest since 2020, and price is way below 5, 10 or 25 year average.