Maybe I have scar tissue from COVID prices but $20k to install a ductless heat pump vs. a $200 to throw a window A/C in or $700 for a portable heat pump. While I get that these heat pumps are better for the environment and much more efficient it's a last mile issue. The installers charge an arm and a leg and I'm not hurting enough to self install. I'm hoping the window heat pumps that just run off mains will be available to more markets soon, I could buy one of those for every room in my house for less than the install on a single mini split.
Where it did make sense was when I was getting solar. It was only a few thousand since I already had the trades out and reducing the load was important for the ROI on the panels.
For comparison, I just bought a house here in Japan. Installed 6 minisplit heat pumps across various rooms in the house. All together it cost me 750,000 yen ($5,000) for the hardware and 90,000 yen ($600) for the install.
Japan is where early air-source heat pumps first achieved market success, so it's unsurprising that they are much cheaper to install there, because of the relatively large number of installer options.
In the US, they are struggling to break out of the eco-luxury product niche (where they have been stuck for a long time).
Another person living in Japan. Sounds about right. A unit from a good brand (daikin, mitsubishi) costs ~$800? More or less depending on the room size. We had them installed when we built the house, installation price included. Two are enough to keep our house cool or warm in any season (it's a well insulated house). We have another in the guest room, use it only for when guests stay.
Some are trying to cut HVAC install costs in half, and a lot of people are already working on it including Jetson (where the author works) and disclaimer my company Electric Air.
Average install is about $20K in California (varies by state). Here’s how that usually breaks down:
- Equipment: $3–5K for a basic swap (some go up to $10K for single system)
- Direct labor: $3–4K (about 15–20%)
- Materials: $2–3K
- Permits and testing: around $1K total
That leaves about a 45% margin to cover overhead:
- Indirect labor: $2.5K (installers when not installing, install managers, attending city inspector visits, call backs when installers make mistakes)
I'm not sure if you're going to get downvoted here for the advertisement (not by me because I find it useful and interesting), but can you be specific about what "streamline direct labor" means? Also, with the virtual site visit, are you guaranteeing the customer that the estimate you give virtually will be the ultimate price?
Any chance you can you take on solar next because if we could get a solar system for half the price we'd sign right up. All we hear about is how cheap solar is now, but the labor costs have risen more than any hardware price decreases.
It's the opposite for me, much bigger ROI on the heatpump than solar. Rural property, 10 years old, ~3,500 sq ft + basement, in Canada where summer can be above 30C (86F) and winter below -30C (-20F). Electricity costs (Canadian) 7.6 ¢/kWh off-peak and 15.8 ¢/kWh on-peak here.
I spent C$40K (about US$30k) on a ground source aka 'geothermal' heat pump to replace furnace powered by propane tank. I kept propane for on-demand hot water and whole house generator. I have no options for utilities other than electricity.
A couple of years later I spent another C$40k for a 20kW rooftop solar system, with net metering and no battery. Net metering was critical for getting any return at all. A battery is next to useless here- I generate almost all of my solar electricity in May-Oct but use the majority of it in Nov-April. Net metering lets me 'store' excess from summer and use it in winter.
Annual costs:
Before:
C$8,000+ propane (heating + hot water)
C$2,500 electricity (cooling + misc)
$10,500 total
So I'm seeing about C$8k/yr saving for C$80k investment. The heatpump saved me over $5k a year and the solar about $2,500 a year. The heatpump has pretty much paid for itself after 5 years, the solar will take at least 15 years (unless prices go way up) although should eventually see some return 15-20 years out.
In reality it might have cost even more than that to heat with propane. On the propane furnace we barely heated in winter, burned a lot of firewood to make part of the house livable. I'm trying estimate how much it would cost to heat the house to a comfortable 20C (68F) although the thermostat now with the heatpump is set to 22C (72F) in winter so there's an improvement in comfort as well as the ROI.
> Net metering lets me 'store' excess from summer and use it in winter
FYI net metering is unsustainable for the grid and policies will probably change (reducing rates for energy, increasing rates for delivery fees to offset the "freebies") as soon as adoption reaches a critical mass.
For me it helped with the ROI because I couldn't go any larger than a 6kw array due to roof shape/exposure. Only roof mounted solar is permitted in my community :/ So a ductless saved us energy in the summer months vs. window units, so I could bank more with net metering when the sun was shining.
Excellent data, thanks! Net metering does look necessary for economics. Have you factored in relative replacement/maintenance costs for the geo pump vs furnace? Also curious how much your investment was discounted thanks to tax subsidies.
Err, be careful. You made these improvements sequentially, not independently. Each one halved your costs and might still have done exactly that if done in the opposite order.
This is talking about cold-climate heat pumps. A $200 window AC isn't going to heat your house when it's way below freezing outside.
$20k USD is insane though. I live in Ontario and we paid $12k CAD (pre-government subsidy) for a modern heat pump with a backup high efficiency furnace for when temperatures dip down to -40 or lower.
True. We have natural gas and an existing steam radiator setup though, for the two months a year window heat pumps can't keep up. The upfront investment alone would heat my house for 10-20 years.
Honestly, just piling more insulation in the attic and doing an energy audit will probably put the ROI out another 10+ years...
I'm hoping the newer window units that are being rolled out to the NYC market will be good enough to put downward pressure on the outrageous prices in the installation market. Or maybe I'll just dedicate a weekend to DIYing :P
Similar for me, also in Ontario. I got a three zone mini split this year that I’m hoping can cover most of the shoulder seasons and keep me from using the gas boiler, though it remains to be seen if that’ll actually pan out; so far the kids have complained that their rooms are a lot less evenly heated when it’s the heat pump running rather than the rads.
Actually its probably most efficient way because you have best control. That said having whole house ducted you also get benefit of fresh air via ERV (arguably more important than heating).
Its most simply summed up as what I call the tradesman's protection racket.
On one side of the coin you have any moron, calling himself a repair man which can and does end in disastrous jobs which can be unsafe. This though has much lower pricing.
The flip side is, basically a protection racket where suppliers only sell to you if you have a 'loicense' and the hurdles required to become said VIP are so high, giving your body to a master tradesman to get a piece of paper over many years and be allowed to practice installing said systems results in a huge shortage of qualified people. Prices then skyrocket.
I wish I could live in a world somewhere in the middle, but as I've seen both ends of the spectrum, they both suck for different reasons.
> giving your body to a master tradesman to get a piece of paper over many years and be allowed to practice installing said systems results in a huge shortage of qualified people.
The job is physically difficult and does not provide steady hours. It involves driving long distances each day and working in hot and cold and rainy conditions, in cramped corners, in houses with varying levels of cleanliness.
People with options tend towards other careers, resulting in lower supply of qualified people, and hence higher prices to compensate for the drastically lower quality of life at work.
Have you considered that the second path you outlined, "giving your body to a master tradesman to get a piece of paper over many years" (in the figurative sense), is in general a necessary prerequisite to avoid the first path of any moron being allowed to "[call] himself a repair man which can and does end in disastrous jobs"?
> I wish I could live in a world somewhere in the middle […]
This world would just be a mixture of both, with many more semi-skilled tradesmen doing many more half-assed jobs, but not having to train as long.
You think HVAC is bad, plumbers and electricians have their protectionism written into law in many states. You must pay for their stamp. "Here is what I have and it is demonstrably within code" is not sufficient.
We just got quoted $20k for the minimum setup for our house. Meanwhile, I have two "free" window units which probably cost me an additional $300 in the summer. I really want heat pumps, but I just can't see how I can justify it for $20k.
Yup, got similar quotes. I'm really not going to pay that for a day's work (2 people). The price difference over installing A/C is staggering and don't know where it comes from.
That’s wild. Is it something that plugs into a central air so not the usual consumer heat pump? I just got a nice heat pump in Finland for two floors with two indoor units for about $3000 with install. It should handle 99% of our heating needs. The most expensive units on the market are about $3000-4000 and for install I got quoted $1k fixed without shopping around. That includes drilling through two brick outside walls. The units are all made in China and labor is cheaper in the US if anything. Where are these prices coming from ?
The materials they install are small copper pipes and insulation and a 16A capable electric cable and some plastic. Maybe $100-200. I feel like you guys are getting screwed.
My 30 year old central air which covers 1 floor of my home went out recently so I got a bunch of replacement quotes, most vendors I asked for both a traditional central air & a heat pump central air quote.
The quotes were generally 50% more expensive for the heat pump option.
Vendor A: $12.5k AC, $17.7K Heat Pump + extra electrical work for the heat strips.
Vendor B: $8K AC, $11K Heat Pump + they don't think the existing ductwork is sufficient for comfortable heating and would recommend redoing some of it.
And I wouldn't qualify for any tax credits because it doesn't cover full home (there are upper floors without ducts that already are on mini splits & baseboard heat).
Also worth noting the range of HVAC quotes for the same spec cooling in the same home are insane. Every quote I got seemed to widen the range.
Of the $20k, let's assume $5k is the hardware. Now $15k is the work. Let's consider the installation a highly skilled job, commanding $100/hour. This is 150 hours, or a tad more than 6 business days for a team of 3, working with full load 8 hours a day.
Does a split system indeed take so much work? What is so effort-intensive?
2-3 hours planning, parts list, client management,
4-6 hrs to run electrical,
2-4 hrs to mount condenser,
4-8 hrs for medium line set,
4-8 hrs air handler, duct, platform integration,
1-2 hrs with thermostat and condensate protection,
1-2 hours nitrogen testing and pull vacuum,
1 hr documenting photos for incentive programs,
1 hr spending time educating customer about the system.
Messing up a parts order and figuring out a solution 4 hrs too often.
Total: 28 hrs, or 2-3 days of 2 people depending on the travel from their shop to customers home. I agree. Let's get that down to 12-16 hrs or single day and the best shops and installers can do that.
CA Labor law allow about 6-7 hrs of work on site as installers often have to start at their shop.
$3-4k of labor cost for small-mid size. Best might be be 2-3K labor cost. Minor equipment 1-2K, permit and testing required $1K. Then 50% gross margin is the target, net costs $2.5K indirect labor, $2K sales cost, project management, trucks, insurance, software, 10-20% net margin.
I live in Asia and I'm in charge of air conditioning at my company. A ductless A/c is approximately $1,200 installed. $20k? You should put a split unit in each room. If one breaks, go sleep in the other room. I have 6 of them installed in my apartment.
COVID prices just aren't a good comparison. I needed to replace a tankless water heater and was quoted $4k. I laughed, paid $1100 for a top of the line one and had my neighbor help me who used to be a plumber. Took 30 minutes and a bottle of a tequila for my neighbor.
It's a good idea. I'll do that in the Spring. Any recommendations on makes / series that do well in the cold and support some form of home assistant offline control (no cloud integration, zigbee or matter or similar)?
Edit: it seems that the market has decided that every manufacturer will ship the same cloud garbage and that the community has decided it actually isn't that hard to bypass and replace their wifi modules with ESPHome devices.
Agreed. They feel massively overpriced. Covid and government rebates had everyone using them as cash cows.
I installed a 24k btu one for my recording studio myself. Took me 3 hours. It’s a cheap Mr Cool one, but seems good enough for me and has been problem free. $1300 from Costco.
The quotes I got were $10-30k for one to five head units around my house. Nope!
If I’m going to spend that much I’m going to be looking into geothermal for heating
A third of the country rents. Renters pay the utility bills. Landlords pay for appliance upgrades.
Why would the landlord put any effort into upgrading appliances when the cost of not upgrading them is borne by the renters?
I've never rented at a place where they didn't want to fix broken equipment with the cheapest possible replacement. And no renter would ever consider purchasing a major appliance like this since they'll end up priced out before they recover the cost in utility bills.
They're a nice technology, but our incentives are all wrong for a lot of housing stock.
In some locations you can't rent out places without minimum energy efficiency ratings, which then leads to insulation and heat pumps getting installed.
They are efficient but do not have as high of an energy output as a smaller and cheaper gas furnaice. Apart from that, the water temperature is lower, so you need much larger radiators. Due to the lower energy output, you also need better insulation or a relatively massive heat pump. And the tech was not around 20 years ago (for reasons unknown to me).
I listed a reason that impacts a third of houses. I didn't write an essay because the article lists plenty of others. It was just weird that they never mentioned the misaligned incentives.
That doesn't square with the fact that new rentals are built with granite countertops and stainless-steel appliances. Tenants do shop around on the basis of amenities.
Sure, but those amenities are highly visible. Lots of units have a stainless dishwasher exterior, but most will still be the landlord-special plastic tub inside. Who is shopping around based on whether or not there’s a heat pump? I would consider myself relatively well-educated on this and still the heat/cooling source is an afterthought.
The combination with air conditioning and dehumidifying is genuinely compelling for the simplicity. Especially in new construction.
But these things trickle down to renters last. And if the landlord installs it, you bet your ass the rent is going up more than your savings on electricity.
Lose lose lose, if it gets installed then the current residents probably get priced out anyway. It eventually trickles down but we could do so much better.
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 the winters as old fashioned gas furnaces when it comes to the cost.
I made the massive investment because I could and I eventually want my house to run completely on rooftop solar as a way to reduce my carbon footprint. But the cost is nowhere near mass market adoption price range.
I was shocked when I saw the price of heat pump installation in the US, even with an existing ducted system. There’s no reason a reversible heat pump system should be significantly more expensive than a cooling only one.
Tuning a heat pump vs resistive heat is a much tougher game than it should be. In a moderate climate, I use my ecobee to ensure aux heat doesn't come on until it's below freezing, and it should only come on if something has gone wrong at that point too. Unfortunately, many thermostats by default will use resistive heat in relatively normal scenarios, of worse, when you've programmed home and away times intended for efficiency but disparate enough to activate resistive heat.
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 actually see operating cost parity or a slight decrease, even with super expensive electricity. Silicon Valley Clean Energy recently did a study substantiating this: https://svcleanenergy.org/wp-content/uploads/Bill-Impacts-of...
That is precisely why im not planning to install a heatpump until i have rooftop solar.
Here in Bay Area my gas furnace is generally off late March through late october and while gas costs have gone up over the years, electricity easily goes up 10% year over year. We are currently in $0.43 per kwh territory OFF-PEAK. This is nearly 3 times the average rate in the United States.
I wont be investing $$$ in heatpumps until i spend $$$$ on solar panels and that wont happen till i replace my roof in a few years.
PS. this is why buying a hybrid a few years ago instead of buying an electric was a good call. Our gas prices stayed pretty much the same, while our electricity is up 30% since that time.
The same problems apply to evs and yet people seem to buy those too. Maybe most folks end up getting them second hand which is not an option for heat pump.
Solar + heat pump will take me 10+ years to come out financially ahead (if not longer) but if you're invested for the long term it does come out ahead (even factoring in opportunity cost). The comfort level is also dramatically better in my house due to more even temperature, so I would argue in many situations it can be worth a premium. I thought for sure I was going to need ductless per room to get this level of comfort but it turned out to not be true. If you didn't have ac before, it's also nice to have the option to use it on hot days.
I got a heat pump with a backup gas furnace this year. A heat pump just felt like a no-brainer of I was going to get an AC anyway. But gas in PA tends to be cheaper, so the system will use gas at a certain point. The problem is I couldn't have picked a whose installer if I was throwing darts at the wall, but that's another story.
I ended up self-installing my HP-WH. Professionals either tried to talk me out of it like you described, or charged a premium for the upgrade. My county has a rebate that allows for self-installs. It was rather straight forward and ended up being ~$700 in the end. The old unit I tore out took an extra $350/year in electricity, so I've already broken even.
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.
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
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.
Costs are a big thing, sure, but for me it's electrical reliability. For better or worse our heating oil and natural gas supply are both more reliable than our electricity supply. I don't need the heat going out in the dead of winter when some wind storm drops a bunch of branches on power lines.
I'm aware that both my boiler and a natural gas furnace have electric blower motors. It's a lot easier to power them from a generator than it is to have a generator than can power a house worth of heat pumps.
You can have both, though. A person doesn't have to make a binary decision of heatpump OR natural gas.
Please remember that traditional aircon is also literally a heat pump. It's perfectly acceptable to have a ducted heat pump and a ducted natural gas furnace both sharing the same ductwork.
In this use, the heat pump and the furnace are just installed series with eachother, with one singular blower motor that is used for both roles. This arrangement is very similar (identical, really) to the layout that combined (heat+aircon) systems have used for many decades.
Power out, or simply very cold outside? Your house still has a natural gas furnace (which can be made work with a fairly small generator), and your rig doesn't require expensive-to-use heat strips for the coldest days either.
I have a house where the first floor is served by a gas/ac combo unit, and the second floor with a heat pump.
I literally see no advantage to the heat pump and wish I didn't have it. It takes forever to heat and cool, comparitively, and likes to ice over when it gets too cold in the winter while running 24/7 doing nothing. The emergency heat eventually kicks in and fixes it, so I'm considering just running emergency heat all winter.
The fact that your heat pump setup is also taking longer to cool suggests there's something fundamentally different between the setup on your different floors, not that there is something bad with heat pumps in general.
A heat pump in cooling mode works exactly like an AC unit, because that's exactly what it is. So if your AC unit on the first floor cools more quickly than you AC unit (i.e. heat pump) on your second floor, it's because A) your floors are different sizes or insulated differently or something else is different about their construction, B) your units are sized differently, or C) your heat pump has some mechanical problem. But the fact that it's a heat pump should make no difference to its cooling performance.
>Rates for my northeast town increased by ~25% in 2024 and are going up by another ~10% this year.
Don't forget that those costs are going up in large part because heat pump subsidies are being rolled into electricity prices.
Imagine being a ~$100k HHI household and paying $300+/mo for electricity so that $200+k HHI doctor/lawyer/HN households can have subsidized heat pumps and our sleazy contractors, and the dealers, and everyone else upstream) can over-charge us for the privilege (thereby getting their cut of the subsidy).
It's a miracle we haven't all caught hot lead yet.
A heat pump just makes no sense whatsoever for me in my northeast town. The electric bill alone would outpace the old propane bill, not to mention installation.
And it won't even work during some of the coldest winter weeks when you _really_ need it to work.
Maybe I would consider it if I was in, like, Nevada or somewhere.
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.
I don't know what sort of heat pump systems are common in the US, but Sweden (and AFAIK Norway and Finland as well), are probably >%80 heat pump for single family homes (most apartments are community heating at least in the larger cities). So it's absolutely now problem to run a heat pump even if it is very cold outside, but if you want to improve efficiency in areas that are super cold you can drill into the ground for a heat sink (those are called Bergvärme in Sweden).
Regarding cost, in most of the countries I've lived in a large fraction of the cost in the gas bill was the distribution cost. So once you switch to a heat pump, you also switch to electric cooking and even if heating with electricity would be significantly more expensive you would still win. Is that different in the US?
Heat pumps are just air conditioners in reverse. They use the same amount of electricity whether heating or cooling. While many people have air conditioners, and grids seem to be able to handle them in the summer, an assertion that the grid can’t handle them in the winter is doubtful. Plus there are fewer people using them in the winter (just because fewer are installed). Most people in the NE heat with oil, gas, or wood, so that would reduce the electric load (compared to summer) even further.
There would be an increase only if people were supplementing the heat pump with electric heat, which to be fair is a possibility.
There’s a lot of misinformation about heat pumps, especially by HVAC people who don’t have a lot of experience with them, so they tend to recommend what they’re more familiar with.
But yes, understanding the electricity cost is essential when considering one.
> They use the same amount of electricity whether heating or cooling
This is completely wrong. The amount of power depends on the temperature delta. When cooling, you are typically not cooling your home to 30 degrees Celsius below the outdoor temperature. However, when heating, you are typically heating your home to around 20 degrees above outdoor temperature. Heating consumes more power than cooling.
I would be curious to know the difference. In summer you might find 30c outside and inside 20c so a difference of 10c. In winter it can reach -30c and inside is 20c. This is 5x more!
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 mid-Atlantic (US) climate zone, where it's certainly not as cold as the north but definitely goes well below freezing regularly for several months of the year. The place I've lived for 15 years had a heat pump and a (oil) boiler with radiators, and when it was below 40°F (~5°C) I had to switch to the radiators. It's because it's old, everybody told me, modern heat pumps are better! So last year when both systems needed repairs at the same time, I not-entirely-willingly switched to a brand-new 2024-model heat pump. It absolutely could not keep up when the temperature was freezing until they came back and installed resistive heat strips for low temperature---these seem to be a fancy version of the heating elements in a space heater or a toaster. They do not seem to be particularly efficient. And to the extent that my "heat pump system" does now more or less keep the house adequately warm, if not as comfortable as the radiators always could, it's not solely due to the heat pump, but the other stuff they had to put in because the heat pump couldn't keep up.
My experience is far from unique. Maybe it's that they only install the good ones in farther-north locations! Maybe it's that the good ones are just way more expensive! I'm perfectly prepared to believe the factual statements about the physics and the tech. But if we're talking about perception and "why aren't more people looking to install heat pumps", it's because lots of people have experiences like the above, and that is what the industry needs to work on.
This is such a weird tale to hear. I heat my 2 story 147m2 house in Sweden with a single heat pump and it's downright cosy down to -10C. I have noticed that my office, which is located at the furthest possible place from the heatpump, tends to get a bit chilly when outdoors temperatures fall below -10°c. usually a blanket is enough to keep me toasty, but on the rare occasion that it gets real cold (below about -15°c), I have a fireplace to save the day. That fireplace actually gets used more for the cozyness of a fire than it does for actual need of heating, but it does help on the worst days of Scandinavian winter.
All this to say: if your pump can't handle +5°c, I wonder if you got scammed or if there are other factors at play? Is your house insulated at all? Do you keep your windows open throughout winter? Your experience is so different from mine it's hard to believe we're even talking about the same technology!
It's the insulation. While it depends on the location and geography, I'd wager that American homes are probably less well insulated than Swedish homes because they didn't have to be.
That contrasts quite a bit with Swedish home standards, which have long been built more air-tight and with considerably better insulated even if they're of comparable age. This has been true for decades, became even more stark in the 1980s, and likely remains very different on the balance: https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings/1984/data/papers/SS8...
> The place I've lived for 15 years had a heat pump and a (oil) boiler with radiators, and when it was below 40°F (~5°C) I had to switch to the radiators.
When was the heat pump manufactured? Mitsubishi, for one, publishes data were they have 100% heating capacity at -15C, which some models being 100% at -20C and -23C:
OEMs can optionally have publish data on "Lowest Cataloged Temperature" if it's below 5F/-15C.
Also: how (air) leaky is your house? how much insulation? For a lot of folks dealing with those two things would be more cost effective than anything.
As it stands, even if you are heating with "cheap" methane (née 'natural') gas, propane, or oil, you're throwing money out the window by letting the heat out in winter. (And the heat in / cold out in the summer.)
I have to agree. I've spent about 2/3s my life in houses with heat pumps and the last 5 years with a gas furnace (the rest being wood heat as a child). Mostly in Western NC and Eastern TN near the mountains, so chilly but not extreme cold.
Heat pumps work, but they aren't nearly as _pleasant_. You can write essays about the efficiency of heat pumps, how lukewarm air works just fine to warm the house, how heat pumps are great _most of the time_ and you can supplement with space heaters or whatever when they fall short... But as long as furnaces are accessible and affordable, an awful lot of people are going to choose to have nice warm heat that is always going to be nice and warm regardless of the outside temperature.
I have never had a heat pump, so I wasn't aware of this shortcoming. Could you please explain a bit more how different it is with heat pump compared to furnace?
Resistive heat strips are what all electric furnaces use. It's just a bunch of coils of nichrome heating wire. The efficiency of a resistive heater is basically 100%. One Watt of electricity in gives you one watt of heat out.
The mistake people make is assuming a heat pump can do everything by itself anywhere in any climate. If you have cold winters, you need a dedicated furnace to supplement the heat pump.
I say supplement because while an electric furnace is near 100% efficient at turning electricity into heat, a heat pump can be far more than 100% efficient. And that's the crucial detail: a heat pump can give you more heat per Watt than a resistive heater when outside temperatures are warm enough.
Im in NY, 6 heads across 3 floors with 2 heads per outdoor unit. 2500sf covered.
Mitsubishi h2i (i think im on my phone). Get plenty warm in the winter as my sole heat source. I could have gotten smaller outdoor units and had resistive backup but I didn’t want that.
Yes this is actually the worst – when open minded people get a heat pump for "the right reasons" and then have buyer's remorse. Completely backfires the transition. Do you have a ducted or ductless heat pump? Sounds like ducted, and if so that might be part of it too. The air cools down in the ductwork and if that's not accounted for - i.e. you reuse ductwork that was meant for a furnace – you run into issues like this. And you also need a cold climate heat pump.
(disclosure/transparency I'm the founder of Quilt, a ductless heat pump manufacturer)
Hi Paul - I'm a big fan of Quilt from Vancouver Island.
It seems to me that you're helping to close the loop on some of the quality concerns that the parent commenter has. Inappropriate sizing/installation and poor product selection seem like common issues from HVAC installers that aren't particularly well versed on heat pumps.
Wishing you continued success, and that hopefully it'll be available in Canada at some point! And also I remember you from the Scala meetup in Vancouver :)
We account for duct losses at Electric Air when sizing. It’s baked into industry standard Manual J sizing calculators and other methods. ManJ isn’t perfect find for this purpose.
In this case, contractor should have advised the heat pump would not keep up and recommended a different solution.
When we had our ducted heat pump installed, we also had the ducts in the attic covered with extra insulation, as well as spray foam at the top of the foundation to seal that completely. This all really helped.
The radiators might make you feel warmer despite not actually making the air in the room warmer: the black body radiation from the big warm radiators affects your perception of warmth in a not insignificant way.
Basically the idea behind infrared (and far infrared) heaters. I'm really curious about them, but there's no good way to trial them without buying and installing.
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 pumps. Here's what I wrote on that thread:
This is why contractor & homeowner education are so so so important to get this energy transition right! I always hate to see reviews like this from folks that have installed a heat pump.
It’s almost always a combo of poorly communicated expectations & installer issues.
A few thoughts…
1) “Air doesn’t come out hot” is a common complaint. It’s by design! You don’t need scalding hot air to have a comfortable space. If you’re targeting a 70 degree setpoint, even 80 degree air will get you there eventually. Heat pumps work best when you let them run - they soak the space with heat.
Your furniture, walls, floors all equalize in temp and radiate heat. A totally different form of comfort than standing in front of a vent that blows hot air at you for 5 minutes and then shuts off!
2) AC doesn’t reduce humidity as well. Unfortunately, this is a classic problem with oversized heat pumps. The key to dehumidification is runtime. A well sized system will run for longer, which will pull the humidity out of the space. If the system is too big, it’ll cycle on and off & not dehumidify.
Your contractor should be do load sizing calculations to determine the size of your heat pump, not using rules of thumb or matching the size of the existing equipment! The very best contractors use performance based load calcs, where they look at your past energy bills to size your new system.
3) Supplemental heat runs a lot - this SUCKS. Electric resistance heat is really expensive to run. It really should be something that comes on for emergencies, if ever. Definitely not regularly.
Many contractors set the temperature where the supplemental heat kicks on way too high. You could be running the heat pump (which is way more efficient) to a much lower temperature, but it’ll switch to expensive aux heat instead. Fortunately, the fix to this is simple - just a thermostat setting.
In other cases, they’ll install a cheaper mild climate heat pump in a truly cold climate. This might save money up front, but it’ll kill you in operating costs when you’re paying 4x as much as you could be in the middle of winter to heat your home. The lowest bid could cost you in the long run!
PS - this homeowner later chimed in that swapping the thermostat helped reduce their electricity bill roughly $30/month! A lot of heat pump issues actually boil down to a poorly configured system. Choosing the right contractor is probably the single most important decision you'll make when you get a heat pump installed.
This. I had 12 contractors come out for an estimate. I insisted to each that I would only consider estimates accompanied by a Manual J (aka show your work). I got 4 estimates with a manual J, and one of them the vendor said ‘despite that the math says you need a 4 ton outdoor unit, I’m giving you two,’ and refused to budge on that.
I went with a vendor who did the math and sized accordingly and my system works great - great comfort year round and very low energy usage.
> 2) AC doesn’t reduce humidity as well. Unfortunately, this is a classic problem with oversized heat pumps. The key to dehumidification is runtime. A well sized system will run for longer, which will pull the humidity out of the space. If the system is too big, it’ll cycle on and off & not dehumidify.
What if I want more humidity?
(The traditional way with a furnace would be with a bypass humidifier, where ultimately, the energy to vaporize the water comes from whatever the heat source of the furnace is.)
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.
Mitsubishi sells heat pumps that produce 14kw of heat output all the way down to 5f at a COP of 2.3.
Resistive heat has a COP of 1, by definition.
Do you know the size of your oil burner? It's likely over 20kw output.
It's not that pumping heat cannot work sufficiently at cold temperatures, it's that you are expecting the electric car rated 100 horsepower to go as fast as the gas car rated at 300 horsepower.
An oil burner sized to the same output as the heat pump also would not keep up.
If you installed two of those Mitsubishi heat pumps (which would require two independent 240v circuits), you would be at 28kw output and would not need resistive heat strips. These units also claim 75% rated capacity at -13f so that would be about 21kw of heat output even when very very cold.
If your resistive heat strips activate at any point other than extreme weather events or emergencies, your "system" is not sized properly. They are a massive waste of power and money.
A big part of the problem is that the contractors who are essentially the point of sale for these systems are just obscenely dumb about them. They will sell you utterly undersized units or sell units that aren't rated for cold, as well as just install things so poorly that they drain condensate into your walls and cause mold issues. They had similar problems with Oil burners, but at least those they tended to upsell bigger systems so their ignorance didn't matter. They seem very bad at doing the planning or design required to actually spec out a system, so you have to be your own engineer.
>and that is what the industry needs to work on.
I don't know how the industry is supposed to force contractors to read their very very clear documentation, or follow the very clear instructions (of boiler manufacturers no less) of "You must measure heat load to accurately size a heat appliance".
The strength of your heat pump shouldn't be outside surface temperature, but underground aquifer temperature. Those two temperatures are related but not as directly as they seem. A good aquifer in certain cavernous regions of the US might stay about 55 degF year round, regardless of outside surface temperature. 55 degF is still below what a lot of people want their home to be year round so a heat pump still has to supplement heat somehow in winters (or radiators or what have you), but a "free" boost to 55 degF is still a better starting place than 20 or 40 degF outside temperature.
I don't think latitude is a factor in how efficient a heat pump you can find, I think the type geography under you feet is (probably where "interior" regions probably have more luck than coastal regions), combined with how well regulated or unregulated your area's aquifer generally is (things like nearby wells and industrial water dumping will effect aquifer levels and temperatures). (Maybe not enough heat pump proponents realize that you only have good, cheap heat pumps if you have a powerful EPA and other Water protection groups fighting the good fight in your region.)
Right as COVID lockdowns were starting in early 2020, our gas furnace reached the state of nearly broken and would have been unfixable if it finally broke. We called local HVAC for a quote and they convinced that instead of simply replacing the furnace, we should get full-house air conditioning with electric heat pump with gas furnace backup. We agreed and what was amazing was that they wanted to install it the NEXT DAY. Unprecedented speed. This was because it was COVID and everyone was stopping construction projects etc. Their technicians were ready to go and needed all the work. Next day wasn't good so we installed it the next next day. 4 burly guys, all masked and gloved, did it all in just a few hours. Our friends trying to do the same couple of years ago had to wait months for installation. We've been enjoying AC since then, a lot.
I think it cost about $13k for heat pump and furnace and labor, maybe a bit more with tax, and I got ~1.7k rebate/refund of some sorts? Or 1.3k? I don't fully recall why but it must have been government sponsored.
My ongoing energy costs are about the same, but the mix completely switched from gas to electricity. I cook with gas so there is just a bit every month, but virtually no heating with it, the gas hardly ever starts except in the height of winter. If I only had solar to feed it with sun, but the house location with shade, hill and trees isn't suited for it. Instead I pay a little extra to energy company to presumably source my electricity from solar. Works.
In Asia, manufacturers sell direct or through highly competitive retail channels and the installers really only have to know minisplits.
Minisplits in the US get sold by the brand -> distributor -> dealer (contractor) -> homeowner with each step being a 20% market up. Sometimes there is even a master distributor in there AND usually there is a “rep group” taking points too.
That is fundamentally what drives up costs. That and the fact that the US housing marketing is very heterogeneous so contractors have to know boilers, ducted heatpumps, furnaces, packaged units, ductless, etc.
I recently got a Mr. Cool DIY minisplit at Costco for $1600. I called an independent electrician to run the wiring for $200 and he helped me install the thing for another $200. So I got a fully installed minisplit for $2k and it works great.
Everybody seems to agree that installation costs way too much.
There's a few parts to this. Everything has to be carefully sized - power, pipe sizes, unit locations. You need to put a house's thermal profile (how much heat loss, how much air leak, how much thermal mass) along with the regional thermal profile into an engineering calculation which computes what you need.
Thermographic inspections are a thing.[1] Usual price is around $400. They're not very standardized. You get IR images of a house, which is good for finding leaks but not quantitative enough to size a heating and cooling plant.
This would be a great drone application. Fly over and around the house. Build a 3D model of the house and paint heat loss on top of it. Crunch on data to get the engineering info needed to correctly size HVAC. Also discover big heat leak points. Turn this from experienced guessing into measurement.
Then submit that data sheet to multiple sites that offer heat pumps.
I would argue that accurate sizing is not that important as labor constitutes the bulk of the cost. My total bill was about $20K and going for 30% less capacity would net about $19K so its easier just to go for the maximum. Calling in an IR imaging drone would certainly cost more than the potential savings from accurate sizing.
Unlike gas furnaces which basically can only do ON or OFF, heat pumps can regulate the heat with much higher granularity.
What certainly calls for innovation is managing the labor costs. In my case installation involved way too many people and way too many visits.
For commercial applications, modular/off-site builds are a way to reduce labor costs. Yet, homes design are so fragmented that it's hard to build something plug-n-play.
Isn’t it important to right-size non-heat-pump installs anyway? Too large a system causes short cycling, humidity problems, temperature swings. I have read installers habitually guesstimate over size to over charge (rather than do the proper calculations).
They oversize because customers who have an oversized system generally don’t complain but customers who have an undersized system definitely will complain when it can’t get to and hold their desired temperature.
The reality is that this is all solving a problem that people don’t have.
Forced air is a terrible way to heat a building yet thats how most homes are heated, and it is good enough for most people.
If you perfectly size a furnace for the coldest days of the year, it is now oversized for the other 90% of days.
The cheapest way is to install a multi stage heating/cooling system that works on first stage most of the time, and second when it needs to, like having 2 small furnaces. This passes the ‘good enough’ test for the vast majority of homeowners.
This wouldn't work, unfortunately. A lot of insulation has a reflective layer yielding invalid readings from thermal imaging.
There are several other factors like air tightness which requires a blower door to measure and even the number of elbows in the duct system could have an effect. It's a surprisingly complex field. You wouldn't gain anything over a traditional home energy auditor.
The real opportunity is to scrap everything and rethink the system from scratch.
>There's a few parts to this. Everything has to be carefully sized - power, pipe sizes, unit locations.
No. Not even in the slightest. A two bit could make conservative guesses or work off a conservatively spec'd sizing table and then deal with the resulting excess capacity with controls/distribution.
Whether it's a sewer line or a hvac system or retaining wall it's the same stupid situation. The only reason that we do calculated minimum-ish sizing for all this stuff is because if you're being screwed by law into paying to make work for a credentialed professional you might as well make them save you money on the rest of it so that you're only getting screwed out of $0.95 on the dollar instead of $1 on the dollar instead.
You're better off guesstimating yourself than trusting contractors. The contractors are incentivized to severely oversize any AC units they install or else people leave bad reviews on their pages/listings when the installed unit can't keep up the one day every two years that the temperature gets abnormally hot.
I did this myself and insisted on a unit half the capacity that the contractors wanted. Several flat-out refused. But it works perfectly! Approximately one day ever two years it can't keep up. Which means that all the other time it doesn't short-cycle. Perfect.
Readit News
Where it did make sense was when I was getting solar. It was only a few thousand since I already had the trades out and reducing the load was important for the ROI on the panels.
In the US, they are struggling to break out of the eco-luxury product niche (where they have been stuck for a long time).
I got HVAC drop-in replacement quotes ranging from $7k to $14k for what upon some quick research was about $3k in hardware.
regardless, this is incredibly cheap
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Average install is about $20K in California (varies by state). Here’s how that usually breaks down:
- Equipment: $3–5K for a basic swap (some go up to $10K for single system)
- Direct labor: $3–4K (about 15–20%)
- Materials: $2–3K
- Permits and testing: around $1K total
That leaves about a 45% margin to cover overhead:
- Indirect labor: $2.5K (installers when not installing, install managers, attending city inspector visits, call backs when installers make mistakes)
- Sales: $2K (around 10%)
- Project management: $500
- Trucks: $500
- Misc costs: $1.5K (insurance, software, payment processing, etc.)
Total overhead: $7K: Net margin: 10%
10% net margin at the end of the year isn't egregious.
That’s how a typical small-mid HVAC shop runs. The best HVAC shops can make these numbers be much more competitive. How do we make it better:
- Bulk order equipment
- Streamline direct labor
- Use virtual site visits instead of in-person sales calls
Do all that and you can bring a $20K install down close to half, while paying installers better and speeding up electrification.
Any chance you can you take on solar next because if we could get a solar system for half the price we'd sign right up. All we hear about is how cheap solar is now, but the labor costs have risen more than any hardware price decreases.
I spent C$40K (about US$30k) on a ground source aka 'geothermal' heat pump to replace furnace powered by propane tank. I kept propane for on-demand hot water and whole house generator. I have no options for utilities other than electricity.
A couple of years later I spent another C$40k for a 20kW rooftop solar system, with net metering and no battery. Net metering was critical for getting any return at all. A battery is next to useless here- I generate almost all of my solar electricity in May-Oct but use the majority of it in Nov-April. Net metering lets me 'store' excess from summer and use it in winter.
Annual costs:
Before:
With C$40k investment in geothermal heatpump: With heatpump and then C$40k investment in rooftop solar: So I'm seeing about C$8k/yr saving for C$80k investment. The heatpump saved me over $5k a year and the solar about $2,500 a year. The heatpump has pretty much paid for itself after 5 years, the solar will take at least 15 years (unless prices go way up) although should eventually see some return 15-20 years out.In reality it might have cost even more than that to heat with propane. On the propane furnace we barely heated in winter, burned a lot of firewood to make part of the house livable. I'm trying estimate how much it would cost to heat the house to a comfortable 20C (68F) although the thermostat now with the heatpump is set to 22C (72F) in winter so there's an improvement in comfort as well as the ROI.
FYI net metering is unsustainable for the grid and policies will probably change (reducing rates for energy, increasing rates for delivery fees to offset the "freebies") as soon as adoption reaches a critical mass.
Though, the returns are (edit: "not great") if the figures above INCLUDE net metering revenues.
$20k USD is insane though. I live in Ontario and we paid $12k CAD (pre-government subsidy) for a modern heat pump with a backup high efficiency furnace for when temperatures dip down to -40 or lower.
Honestly, just piling more insulation in the attic and doing an energy audit will probably put the ROI out another 10+ years...
I'm hoping the newer window units that are being rolled out to the NYC market will be good enough to put downward pressure on the outrageous prices in the installation market. Or maybe I'll just dedicate a weekend to DIYing :P
On one side of the coin you have any moron, calling himself a repair man which can and does end in disastrous jobs which can be unsafe. This though has much lower pricing.
The flip side is, basically a protection racket where suppliers only sell to you if you have a 'loicense' and the hurdles required to become said VIP are so high, giving your body to a master tradesman to get a piece of paper over many years and be allowed to practice installing said systems results in a huge shortage of qualified people. Prices then skyrocket.
I wish I could live in a world somewhere in the middle, but as I've seen both ends of the spectrum, they both suck for different reasons.
The job is physically difficult and does not provide steady hours. It involves driving long distances each day and working in hot and cold and rainy conditions, in cramped corners, in houses with varying levels of cleanliness.
People with options tend towards other careers, resulting in lower supply of qualified people, and hence higher prices to compensate for the drastically lower quality of life at work.
> I wish I could live in a world somewhere in the middle […]
This world would just be a mixture of both, with many more semi-skilled tradesmen doing many more half-assed jobs, but not having to train as long.
It's insane and really made me look into the DIY installs. Even if I broke 2 of those it would still be cheaper than one professional one.
Solar install is another scam. All those companies want to steer you into a PPA rather than let you buy panels.
The materials they install are small copper pipes and insulation and a 16A capable electric cable and some plastic. Maybe $100-200. I feel like you guys are getting screwed.
My 30 year old central air which covers 1 floor of my home went out recently so I got a bunch of replacement quotes, most vendors I asked for both a traditional central air & a heat pump central air quote.
The quotes were generally 50% more expensive for the heat pump option.
Vendor A: $12.5k AC, $17.7K Heat Pump + extra electrical work for the heat strips.
Vendor B: $8K AC, $11K Heat Pump + they don't think the existing ductwork is sufficient for comfortable heating and would recommend redoing some of it.
And I wouldn't qualify for any tax credits because it doesn't cover full home (there are upper floors without ducts that already are on mini splits & baseboard heat).
Also worth noting the range of HVAC quotes for the same spec cooling in the same home are insane. Every quote I got seemed to widen the range.
Does a split system indeed take so much work? What is so effort-intensive?
4-6 hrs to run electrical,
2-4 hrs to mount condenser,
4-8 hrs for medium line set,
4-8 hrs air handler, duct, platform integration,
1-2 hrs with thermostat and condensate protection,
1-2 hours nitrogen testing and pull vacuum,
1 hr documenting photos for incentive programs,
1 hr spending time educating customer about the system.
Messing up a parts order and figuring out a solution 4 hrs too often.
Total: 28 hrs, or 2-3 days of 2 people depending on the travel from their shop to customers home. I agree. Let's get that down to 12-16 hrs or single day and the best shops and installers can do that.
CA Labor law allow about 6-7 hrs of work on site as installers often have to start at their shop.
$3-4k of labor cost for small-mid size. Best might be be 2-3K labor cost. Minor equipment 1-2K, permit and testing required $1K. Then 50% gross margin is the target, net costs $2.5K indirect labor, $2K sales cost, project management, trucks, insurance, software, 10-20% net margin.
Just added the details in a comment above. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45705876
Quite the racket here in the US. They’re still a luxury product.
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Edit: it seems that the market has decided that every manufacturer will ship the same cloud garbage and that the community has decided it actually isn't that hard to bypass and replace their wifi modules with ESPHome devices.
I installed a 24k btu one for my recording studio myself. Took me 3 hours. It’s a cheap Mr Cool one, but seems good enough for me and has been problem free. $1300 from Costco.
The quotes I got were $10-30k for one to five head units around my house. Nope!
If I’m going to spend that much I’m going to be looking into geothermal for heating
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A third of the country rents. Renters pay the utility bills. Landlords pay for appliance upgrades.
Why would the landlord put any effort into upgrading appliances when the cost of not upgrading them is borne by the renters?
I've never rented at a place where they didn't want to fix broken equipment with the cheapest possible replacement. And no renter would ever consider purchasing a major appliance like this since they'll end up priced out before they recover the cost in utility bills.
They're a nice technology, but our incentives are all wrong for a lot of housing stock.
But these things trickle down to renters last. And if the landlord installs it, you bet your ass the rent is going up more than your savings on electricity.
Lose lose lose, if it gets installed then the current residents probably get priced out anyway. It eventually trickles down but we could do so much better.
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.
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 the winters as old fashioned gas furnaces when it comes to the cost.
I made the massive investment because I could and I eventually want my house to run completely on rooftop solar as a way to reduce my carbon footprint. But the cost is nowhere near mass market adoption price range.
Tuning a heat pump vs resistive heat is a much tougher game than it should be. In a moderate climate, I use my ecobee to ensure aux heat doesn't come on until it's below freezing, and it should only come on if something has gone wrong at that point too. Unfortunately, many thermostats by default will use resistive heat in relatively normal scenarios, of worse, when you've programmed home and away times intended for efficiency but disparate enough to activate resistive heat.
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 actually see operating cost parity or a slight decrease, even with super expensive electricity. Silicon Valley Clean Energy recently did a study substantiating this: https://svcleanenergy.org/wp-content/uploads/Bill-Impacts-of...
Here in Bay Area my gas furnace is generally off late March through late october and while gas costs have gone up over the years, electricity easily goes up 10% year over year. We are currently in $0.43 per kwh territory OFF-PEAK. This is nearly 3 times the average rate in the United States.
I wont be investing $$$ in heatpumps until i spend $$$$ on solar panels and that wont happen till i replace my roof in a few years.
PS. this is why buying a hybrid a few years ago instead of buying an electric was a good call. Our gas prices stayed pretty much the same, while our electricity is up 30% since that time.
Solar + heat pump will take me 10+ years to come out financially ahead (if not longer) but if you're invested for the long term it does come out ahead (even factoring in opportunity cost). The comfort level is also dramatically better in my house due to more even temperature, so I would argue in many situations it can be worth a premium. I thought for sure I was going to need ductless per room to get this level of comfort but it turned out to not be true. If you didn't have ac before, it's also nice to have the option to use it on hot days.
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Edit: (or so you mean mini splits?)
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
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.
I'm aware that both my boiler and a natural gas furnace have electric blower motors. It's a lot easier to power them from a generator than it is to have a generator than can power a house worth of heat pumps.
Please remember that traditional aircon is also literally a heat pump. It's perfectly acceptable to have a ducted heat pump and a ducted natural gas furnace both sharing the same ductwork.
In this use, the heat pump and the furnace are just installed series with eachother, with one singular blower motor that is used for both roles. This arrangement is very similar (identical, really) to the layout that combined (heat+aircon) systems have used for many decades.
Power out, or simply very cold outside? Your house still has a natural gas furnace (which can be made work with a fairly small generator), and your rig doesn't require expensive-to-use heat strips for the coldest days either.
I have a house where the first floor is served by a gas/ac combo unit, and the second floor with a heat pump.
I literally see no advantage to the heat pump and wish I didn't have it. It takes forever to heat and cool, comparitively, and likes to ice over when it gets too cold in the winter while running 24/7 doing nothing. The emergency heat eventually kicks in and fixes it, so I'm considering just running emergency heat all winter.
A heat pump in cooling mode works exactly like an AC unit, because that's exactly what it is. So if your AC unit on the first floor cools more quickly than you AC unit (i.e. heat pump) on your second floor, it's because A) your floors are different sizes or insulated differently or something else is different about their construction, B) your units are sized differently, or C) your heat pump has some mechanical problem. But the fact that it's a heat pump should make no difference to its cooling performance.
Until it gets under 30. Then you can watch the power meter crank when auxiliary heat kicks on. And we only keep it 65 in the house in the winter.
Luckily I live in the upper Midwest, so it's only that cold for like 4 months. . . Pretty cool. P.r.e.t.t.y. cool
Don't forget that those costs are going up in large part because heat pump subsidies are being rolled into electricity prices.
Imagine being a ~$100k HHI household and paying $300+/mo for electricity so that $200+k HHI doctor/lawyer/HN households can have subsidized heat pumps and our sleazy contractors, and the dealers, and everyone else upstream) can over-charge us for the privilege (thereby getting their cut of the subsidy).
It's a miracle we haven't all caught hot lead yet.
And it won't even work during some of the coldest winter weeks when you _really_ need it to work.
Maybe I would consider it if I was in, like, Nevada or somewhere.
(It is more expensive to operate than the natural-gas furnace was, though).
Regarding cost, in most of the countries I've lived in a large fraction of the cost in the gas bill was the distribution cost. So once you switch to a heat pump, you also switch to electric cooking and even if heating with electricity would be significantly more expensive you would still win. Is that different in the US?
There would be an increase only if people were supplementing the heat pump with electric heat, which to be fair is a possibility.
There’s a lot of misinformation about heat pumps, especially by HVAC people who don’t have a lot of experience with them, so they tend to recommend what they’re more familiar with.
But yes, understanding the electricity cost is essential when considering one.
This is completely wrong. The amount of power depends on the temperature delta. When cooling, you are typically not cooling your home to 30 degrees Celsius below the outdoor temperature. However, when heating, you are typically heating your home to around 20 degrees above outdoor temperature. Heating consumes more power than cooling.
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I live in the mid-Atlantic (US) climate zone, where it's certainly not as cold as the north but definitely goes well below freezing regularly for several months of the year. The place I've lived for 15 years had a heat pump and a (oil) boiler with radiators, and when it was below 40°F (~5°C) I had to switch to the radiators. It's because it's old, everybody told me, modern heat pumps are better! So last year when both systems needed repairs at the same time, I not-entirely-willingly switched to a brand-new 2024-model heat pump. It absolutely could not keep up when the temperature was freezing until they came back and installed resistive heat strips for low temperature---these seem to be a fancy version of the heating elements in a space heater or a toaster. They do not seem to be particularly efficient. And to the extent that my "heat pump system" does now more or less keep the house adequately warm, if not as comfortable as the radiators always could, it's not solely due to the heat pump, but the other stuff they had to put in because the heat pump couldn't keep up.
My experience is far from unique. Maybe it's that they only install the good ones in farther-north locations! Maybe it's that the good ones are just way more expensive! I'm perfectly prepared to believe the factual statements about the physics and the tech. But if we're talking about perception and "why aren't more people looking to install heat pumps", it's because lots of people have experiences like the above, and that is what the industry needs to work on.
All this to say: if your pump can't handle +5°c, I wonder if you got scammed or if there are other factors at play? Is your house insulated at all? Do you keep your windows open throughout winter? Your experience is so different from mine it's hard to believe we're even talking about the same technology!
That contrasts quite a bit with Swedish home standards, which have long been built more air-tight and with considerably better insulated even if they're of comparable age. This has been true for decades, became even more stark in the 1980s, and likely remains very different on the balance: https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings/1984/data/papers/SS8...
When was the heat pump manufactured? Mitsubishi, for one, publishes data were they have 100% heating capacity at -15C, which some models being 100% at -20C and -23C:
* https://www.mitsubishielectric.ca/en/hvac/home-owners/zuba
There's a website for cold climate air-source heat pumps (ccASHPs), that has performance data down to (at least) 5F/-15C:
* https://neep.org/heating-electrification/ccashp-specificatio...
* https://ashp.neep.org/#!/
OEMs can optionally have publish data on "Lowest Cataloged Temperature" if it's below 5F/-15C.
Also: how (air) leaky is your house? how much insulation? For a lot of folks dealing with those two things would be more cost effective than anything.
As it stands, even if you are heating with "cheap" methane (née 'natural') gas, propane, or oil, you're throwing money out the window by letting the heat out in winter. (And the heat in / cold out in the summer.)
Heat pumps work, but they aren't nearly as _pleasant_. You can write essays about the efficiency of heat pumps, how lukewarm air works just fine to warm the house, how heat pumps are great _most of the time_ and you can supplement with space heaters or whatever when they fall short... But as long as furnaces are accessible and affordable, an awful lot of people are going to choose to have nice warm heat that is always going to be nice and warm regardless of the outside temperature.
The mistake people make is assuming a heat pump can do everything by itself anywhere in any climate. If you have cold winters, you need a dedicated furnace to supplement the heat pump.
I say supplement because while an electric furnace is near 100% efficient at turning electricity into heat, a heat pump can be far more than 100% efficient. And that's the crucial detail: a heat pump can give you more heat per Watt than a resistive heater when outside temperatures are warm enough.
Im in NY, 6 heads across 3 floors with 2 heads per outdoor unit. 2500sf covered.
Mitsubishi h2i (i think im on my phone). Get plenty warm in the winter as my sole heat source. I could have gotten smaller outdoor units and had resistive backup but I didn’t want that.
(disclosure/transparency I'm the founder of Quilt, a ductless heat pump manufacturer)
It seems to me that you're helping to close the loop on some of the quality concerns that the parent commenter has. Inappropriate sizing/installation and poor product selection seem like common issues from HVAC installers that aren't particularly well versed on heat pumps.
Wishing you continued success, and that hopefully it'll be available in Canada at some point! And also I remember you from the Scala meetup in Vancouver :)
In this case, contractor should have advised the heat pump would not keep up and recommended a different solution.
This is why contractor & homeowner education are so so so important to get this energy transition right! I always hate to see reviews like this from folks that have installed a heat pump.
It’s almost always a combo of poorly communicated expectations & installer issues.
A few thoughts…
1) “Air doesn’t come out hot” is a common complaint. It’s by design! You don’t need scalding hot air to have a comfortable space. If you’re targeting a 70 degree setpoint, even 80 degree air will get you there eventually. Heat pumps work best when you let them run - they soak the space with heat.
Your furniture, walls, floors all equalize in temp and radiate heat. A totally different form of comfort than standing in front of a vent that blows hot air at you for 5 minutes and then shuts off!
2) AC doesn’t reduce humidity as well. Unfortunately, this is a classic problem with oversized heat pumps. The key to dehumidification is runtime. A well sized system will run for longer, which will pull the humidity out of the space. If the system is too big, it’ll cycle on and off & not dehumidify.
Your contractor should be do load sizing calculations to determine the size of your heat pump, not using rules of thumb or matching the size of the existing equipment! The very best contractors use performance based load calcs, where they look at your past energy bills to size your new system.
3) Supplemental heat runs a lot - this SUCKS. Electric resistance heat is really expensive to run. It really should be something that comes on for emergencies, if ever. Definitely not regularly.
Many contractors set the temperature where the supplemental heat kicks on way too high. You could be running the heat pump (which is way more efficient) to a much lower temperature, but it’ll switch to expensive aux heat instead. Fortunately, the fix to this is simple - just a thermostat setting.
In other cases, they’ll install a cheaper mild climate heat pump in a truly cold climate. This might save money up front, but it’ll kill you in operating costs when you’re paying 4x as much as you could be in the middle of winter to heat your home. The lowest bid could cost you in the long run!
PS - this homeowner later chimed in that swapping the thermostat helped reduce their electricity bill roughly $30/month! A lot of heat pump issues actually boil down to a poorly configured system. Choosing the right contractor is probably the single most important decision you'll make when you get a heat pump installed.
I went with a vendor who did the math and sized accordingly and my system works great - great comfort year round and very low energy usage.
What if I want more humidity?
(The traditional way with a furnace would be with a bypass humidifier, where ultimately, the energy to vaporize the water comes from whatever the heat source of the furnace is.)
“It’s a feature, not a bug. Just put on a hoodie and get under the blanket!”
Mitsubishi sells heat pumps that produce 14kw of heat output all the way down to 5f at a COP of 2.3.
Resistive heat has a COP of 1, by definition.
Do you know the size of your oil burner? It's likely over 20kw output.
It's not that pumping heat cannot work sufficiently at cold temperatures, it's that you are expecting the electric car rated 100 horsepower to go as fast as the gas car rated at 300 horsepower.
An oil burner sized to the same output as the heat pump also would not keep up.
If you installed two of those Mitsubishi heat pumps (which would require two independent 240v circuits), you would be at 28kw output and would not need resistive heat strips. These units also claim 75% rated capacity at -13f so that would be about 21kw of heat output even when very very cold.
If your resistive heat strips activate at any point other than extreme weather events or emergencies, your "system" is not sized properly. They are a massive waste of power and money.
A big part of the problem is that the contractors who are essentially the point of sale for these systems are just obscenely dumb about them. They will sell you utterly undersized units or sell units that aren't rated for cold, as well as just install things so poorly that they drain condensate into your walls and cause mold issues. They had similar problems with Oil burners, but at least those they tended to upsell bigger systems so their ignorance didn't matter. They seem very bad at doing the planning or design required to actually spec out a system, so you have to be your own engineer.
>and that is what the industry needs to work on.
I don't know how the industry is supposed to force contractors to read their very very clear documentation, or follow the very clear instructions (of boiler manufacturers no less) of "You must measure heat load to accurately size a heat appliance".
I don't think latitude is a factor in how efficient a heat pump you can find, I think the type geography under you feet is (probably where "interior" regions probably have more luck than coastal regions), combined with how well regulated or unregulated your area's aquifer generally is (things like nearby wells and industrial water dumping will effect aquifer levels and temperatures). (Maybe not enough heat pump proponents realize that you only have good, cheap heat pumps if you have a powerful EPA and other Water protection groups fighting the good fight in your region.)
These are entirely disjoint concepts.
I think it cost about $13k for heat pump and furnace and labor, maybe a bit more with tax, and I got ~1.7k rebate/refund of some sorts? Or 1.3k? I don't fully recall why but it must have been government sponsored.
My ongoing energy costs are about the same, but the mix completely switched from gas to electricity. I cook with gas so there is just a bit every month, but virtually no heating with it, the gas hardly ever starts except in the height of winter. If I only had solar to feed it with sun, but the house location with shade, hill and trees isn't suited for it. Instead I pay a little extra to energy company to presumably source my electricity from solar. Works.
In Asia, manufacturers sell direct or through highly competitive retail channels and the installers really only have to know minisplits.
Minisplits in the US get sold by the brand -> distributor -> dealer (contractor) -> homeowner with each step being a 20% market up. Sometimes there is even a master distributor in there AND usually there is a “rep group” taking points too.
That is fundamentally what drives up costs. That and the fact that the US housing marketing is very heterogeneous so contractors have to know boilers, ducted heatpumps, furnaces, packaged units, ductless, etc.
There's a few parts to this. Everything has to be carefully sized - power, pipe sizes, unit locations. You need to put a house's thermal profile (how much heat loss, how much air leak, how much thermal mass) along with the regional thermal profile into an engineering calculation which computes what you need.
Thermographic inspections are a thing.[1] Usual price is around $400. They're not very standardized. You get IR images of a house, which is good for finding leaks but not quantitative enough to size a heating and cooling plant.
This would be a great drone application. Fly over and around the house. Build a 3D model of the house and paint heat loss on top of it. Crunch on data to get the engineering info needed to correctly size HVAC. Also discover big heat leak points. Turn this from experienced guessing into measurement.
Then submit that data sheet to multiple sites that offer heat pumps.
Startup opportunity here.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/thermographic-inspections
Unlike gas furnaces which basically can only do ON or OFF, heat pumps can regulate the heat with much higher granularity.
What certainly calls for innovation is managing the labor costs. In my case installation involved way too many people and way too many visits.
For commercial applications, modular/off-site builds are a way to reduce labor costs. Yet, homes design are so fragmented that it's hard to build something plug-n-play.
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Forced air is a terrible way to heat a building yet thats how most homes are heated, and it is good enough for most people.
If you perfectly size a furnace for the coldest days of the year, it is now oversized for the other 90% of days.
The cheapest way is to install a multi stage heating/cooling system that works on first stage most of the time, and second when it needs to, like having 2 small furnaces. This passes the ‘good enough’ test for the vast majority of homeowners.
There are several other factors like air tightness which requires a blower door to measure and even the number of elbows in the duct system could have an effect. It's a surprisingly complex field. You wouldn't gain anything over a traditional home energy auditor.
The real opportunity is to scrap everything and rethink the system from scratch.
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No. Not even in the slightest. A two bit could make conservative guesses or work off a conservatively spec'd sizing table and then deal with the resulting excess capacity with controls/distribution.
Whether it's a sewer line or a hvac system or retaining wall it's the same stupid situation. The only reason that we do calculated minimum-ish sizing for all this stuff is because if you're being screwed by law into paying to make work for a credentialed professional you might as well make them save you money on the rest of it so that you're only getting screwed out of $0.95 on the dollar instead of $1 on the dollar instead.
I did this myself and insisted on a unit half the capacity that the contractors wanted. Several flat-out refused. But it works perfectly! Approximately one day ever two years it can't keep up. Which means that all the other time it doesn't short-cycle. Perfect.