The Washington Post takes on one of my favorite questions today: Why don't we use more heat pumps here in the United States?
There are two kinds of heat pumps, and I love them both. The first type should really be called "a cheap air conditioner," because that's what it is: an air conditioner that uses better technology than the one you have now. In summer it pumps heat out of your house and in winter it pumps heat into your house. And it does so for about half the cost of traditional heating and cooling.
The units are more expensive than standard air conditioners—and some climates are more favorable for heat pumps than others—but they don't cost that much more. And they save a lot of money in the long run:
In the United States, about 16,000 air conditioning units are installed daily on average. Researchers from CLASP and Harvard University predicted that if over the remaining decade, all houses installing central air conditioners bought a subsidized heat pump instead, consumers would save approximately $27 billion on heating and cooling bills, while decreasing greenhouse gas emissions by 49 million tons of carbon dioxide by 2032.
Hell, I had to replace our central air conditioner a few years ago and it cost somewhere around $10,000. The heat pump alternative might be a little more expensive than that, but only a little.
The second type of heat pump is geothermal, and it's a practical option only when you're building a new house. It looks like this:
A geothermal heat pump takes advantage of the fact that once you dig down about six or seven feet, the temperature of the soil stays the same all year round, usually around 55° or so. In winter that's hot water that can be used to heat a house. In summer it's cold water that can be used to cool a house. That's super-efficient.
However, it also requires a whole bunch of piping to be installed underground, and that's a lot easier to do when a house is being built. Once the house is finished it's a lot harder to find the space to install the ground loops, though it's usually not impossible.
So this is a no-brainer. If you're building a house in a favorable area, it should include the piping for a geothermal heat pump. If you're replacing a central AC unit, it should be replaced with a heat pump. The Post story, sadly, doesn't really explain why heat pumps aren't more popular in the United States:
Estimates show that 90 percent of Japanese households use heat pumps to heat and cool homes, contributing to a 40 percent drop in the country’s electricity consumption over the past decade. In Italy, the government effectively pays citizens to use the technology; homeowners can get 110 percent of their heat pump cost reimbursed.
But the devices lack popularity in parts of the United States and Europe....Energy experts point to a couple of reasons heat pumps haven’t entered the mainstream. First is the name, which makes it difficult for people to recognize that it heats and cools. “It is confusing,” said Corinne Schneider, the chief communications officer for CLASP, an energy nonprofit. The high price of installation — systems can cost upward of $10,000 to buy and install — is also a hurdle for many users.
Well . . . maybe. But is it really that confusing? And aftermarket heat pumps aren't way more expensive than conventional AC compressors. I honestly don't understand why both of these aren't mandated technologies wherever they can be used.
UPDATE: I was writing sort of casually here and should have been more careful. Heat pumps really are great technology, and Japanese manufacturers have made them even better over the past decade. However, not every American should literally have one. They work better in some climates than others, so there are plenty of places where they don't do a very good job.
Just generally, though, we should use them more than we do. That's especially true for geothermal heat pumps, but their high installation cost keeps them from being more widespread. However, geothermal systems would mostly be installed by home developers, and a government mandate/assistance program aimed at developers could probably go a long way toward making them more popular.
Heat pumps make no sense for me in Miami; I last turned on my heat in 2011, but need air conditioning every month of the year. Add geology to climate here; the aquifer is just below the surface, and oolite limestone is the subsurface rock, with below ground water in the 70 degree range. Traditional air conditioning with emergency heat resistance strips makes more sense.
Heat pumps are air conditioners. When you want heat, they "air condition" the outside and pump the heat inside. They work great as AC.
And, in demonstrating the "yes, it is that confusing" answer, it's Mike M!
We had a heat pump when I lived in the Tidewater area of Virginia. It was fine except for that one week a year where it got really cold and snowed. Then it wasn't up to the job of heating our house. It had a resistive heating assist, but as a friend said, that's like burning dollar bills to heat your house.
I dunno, maybe we just needed a higher capacity model?
They make cold weather heat pumps these days that will work in sub-zero temperatures.
Your friend was being (overly?) dramatic. Resistive heating is what tens of millions of households use in the winter. If your heat pump's any good you only need the supplemental assist a few days a year.
I agree wholeheartedly!
But wanna be depressed? If we make any concerted effort to use or mandate heat pumps in the US, Republicans will turn it into another way to call liberals stupid, and make it a culture war hot button.
“Those commie Democrats are coming for your air conditioners! They want you to use a heat pump, which is a European thing! Unbelievable liberals. God bless the USA, and federally protect the AC units.”
Every political generation needs its Lightbulb Freedom Act.
Obama was trying to take our essen--... incandescence, prolly to ship it to Kenya or something & boost our rivals while making us weaker. We has to resist this grave injury to US as a world leader.
My 160-year-old home is cooled with a couple of cheapo window units purchased at WalMart for a grand total of under $300 and they tend to last 10-15 years or so. Hard to justify putting in central a/c, and even if we wanted to we don't have the electric service coming into the house to support it. Don't have enough service to support running electric stoves or hot water either. Just to upgrade the home's service starts at $5-$10K, not including rewiring the house. We have natural gas heat, which is far, far cheaper than heating with electric here in the cold Northeast. I have spoken to people with more modern homes who switched to heat pumps and they all report large increases in heating bills. We just don't have the money up front to even begin to consider switching to heat pumps. Maybe if you start from scratch when building a new home that can be very well insulated and you don't have to replace legacy systems it makes sense, but not for many of us.
That's the other big barrier in cold climates. Gas is just way cheaper when it comes to heating than electricity, and that also goes for other appliances that use gas for heating (such as dryers - vented gas dryers usually have the lowest purchase and operating costs of any dryer).
Plus, I forgot to mention, our old home uses forced hot water heat through radiators, so no ducting for central heat pumps. I guess there are units that can circulate hot water, but it doesn't get as hot as with a gas boiler, so you need to add more radiators for the coldest times of the year. It is not unheard of to not get above zero for days at a time, and we have seen 30 below zero at times. Supposedly there are heat pumps that can deal with those temperatures, but not very common.
If you lived in Germany you would not be so confident that you could rely on cheap natural gas. But to switch away from generating more CO2, the government will probably have to subsidize conversions.
It's odd that they have readily available natural gas hookups for heating (with the necessary venting), but vented gas dryers are much less common despite being cheaper and better than their non-vented counterparts.
You shouldn't be buying cheapo window a/c units. They are far less efficient than more expensive ones (of course, check the labels). You'll save way more in electricity than you'll spend on the added cost of the better units.
When I was in high school I took a one-semester course titled "Symposium." It was designed to equip students with techniques for assembling information and presenting it orally and in writing. Every student was required to select a topic that was not widespread common knowledge, to research it, to prepare an expository paper on it, to present the paper to the class, and to answer questions that arose from the information presented.
My dad was an engineer, and he suggested I might be interested to learn about heat pumps, perhaps to select heat pumps as my symposium topic. I did that, and I was glad I had done it. My classmates, a bright group of pre-engineering students, were fascinated with the technical and economic aspects. They had lots of questions, some of which I had to research and get back to them. It was a hoot--one of the best courses I ever took.
Oh, by the way, I graduated in 1959. That Symposium course was 64 years ago. So yes, it is puzzling that heat pumps are not widespread common knowledge these days.
There are some municipalities moving towards banning gas hook-ups, which basically means you need a heat pump for wintertime heating. But otherwise you run into opposition from traditional A/C and gas companies to any mandate, and then just novelty and the slight increase in cost.
The big issue with air-source heat pumps in the past was that they did poorly in cold weather, such as temperatures below 40 degrees Fahrenheit. You had to couple them with electrical resistance heaters in such weather, and those are way more heavy on the power consumption than a gas furnace. There are cold climate air-source heat pumps that should be able to keep things comfortable down to -20 degrees F now, although they require a different refrigerant and are usually more expensive.
I should add that I'm not a fan of banning gas hook-ups altogether. I just think that after a certain date, they should only be allowed to use methane that was produced from green hydrogen and air-captured CO2, making the burning of the gas in question carbon-neutral.
Even now we get weeks of temps below that.
Even more depressing is I was reading an article about the Europe heat wave and they were talking about how few homes in places like Japan or Italy have air conditioners (they even gave the dismal percentages) and there was absolutely no mention that they primarily use heat pumps!
Bought in 1976 a house with electric baseboard heat and AC. Sometime in the 80's the AC went out, so I replaced with a heat pump. Made economic sense. Has worked out well, though in Northern Virginia the "emergency heat" has been useful in winter.
The one problem is the duct work. Since it was designed for AC, the outlets are in the ceilings, but for heat the outlets should be close to the floor. It matters, but not that much when you consider the costs.
Technically, an air conditioner IS a heat pump, as is a refrigerator. The critical difference between the machines usually referred to as "air conditioners" and heat pumps" is that air conditioners are designed to move heat one way, out of the air conditioned space, whereas heat pumps are designed to move heat either way depending on local conditions.
All it takes to turn an air conditioner into a heat pump is a modification to make it reversible.
When I was growing up in East Tennessee, we had a heat pump. The house was always cold in the winter and hot in the summer. Maybe it wasn't *quite* as bad indoors as out, but there wasn't much difference.
My dad, an engineer, was proud of the money he saved with the heat pump. Of course, you could save the same amount of money with an air conditioner and resistance heating by just leaving them off most of the time and it would have the same effect.
IIRC the efficiency of the heat pumps I've bought has almost doubled (at least the SEER? rating has) over 30-35 years.
Just did some research. I bought my last heat pump in 2009, it's 12 SEER IIRC. New ones are 18-20 SEER. https://www.carrier.com/residential/en/us/products/heat-pumps/heat-pump-efficiency/#:~:text=High%20cooling%20efficiency%20heat%20pumps,at%20up%20to%2020.5%20SEER.
In the cold climate of Michigan, they are not as efficient in heating on the cold days. But south of about I-70, they should be used almost exclusively. No more natural gas for heating, can make everything in the house electric, and hence very easy to transition to renewable energy.
Newport Folk Festival Regulars Neoconfederates in the Sunbelt
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Hatred of things going electric
My parents remodeled their summer home, winterizing it by adding a basement space, insulation, and heat. In the process they had to redig the well.
My father was the only one there to choose the heating system. He chose....off-peak electric and a traditional air conditioner?! We could not figure out why he didn't just get a heat pump with lines down the brand new well. It must have been politics. He's super conservative and heat pumps scream lefty to him.
The off peak electric is fine as long as you are always there. They keep the place at 50 all winter when they are not there, which means when you arrive for a winter vacation you have to wait until the next morning to actually have a warm house.
Have you considered getting him declared mentally incompetent?
Couldn't you handle the underground piping needed for geothermal as a municipal utility like gas/electricity/water? The idea being that multiple houses could take advantage of the same pipes and achieve economies of scale.
Heat pumps work like shit in Minnesota winters. Think please.
The overwhelming majority of Americans do not live in Minnesota and thus KD's point is still a reasonable one. Think please.
Yep. newtons.third is bang on too. And when you come in and tell us we don't think, you deprecate your opinion. We know we do.
Besides gas being cheaper in the northeast (for now) and the problems and expense of retrofitting houses without ductwork, there's a marketing issue that needs to be rethought. Yes heat pumps are basically 2-way a/c, but they're generally positioned as some kind of mysterious and expensive technology thing only effete snobby yuppies could want. Rather than being pitched at the vast bulk of the home-owning and renting population, as far as I've seen, they're being sold to an upscale niche market. They're several years behind solar panels that way. But solar panels can be a good example of how it's done.
We've had a heat pump for 7 years since we moved to Western Washington. It's okay. We hardly ever use it for air conditioning. As for heat, I think you feel colder because when it's running the air blows really hard, and that air is only a degree or 2 warmer than the room.
The "emergency heat" comes on, for us, below 30° which does happen a couple times per season. Boy that is expensive.
I live in southwest Ohio, in a duplex house converted into a single residence. needed to replace a gas-fired furnace/central air unit last fall (the house has two, and the other one is only 41 years old).
I really wanted the numbers to work out for a heat pump with gas-fired emergency heat, thinking I would do more with Solar later. But the numbers just would not work out. I would be tripling my heating costs. Both gas and electricity rates have gone up dramatically since then.
If you live where you need heat for several months, and snow is not uncommon, and gas lines are already in place, heat pumps are still much more expensive to run than a gas-fired furnace. And until the electric grid is much greener, it isn't obvious that gas heat produces more greenhouse gasses than a heat pump driven by the electric utilities.
Your fallacy is that gas heat basically locks in gas over the lifetime of the furnace whereas electric heat becomes cleaner every year over the lifetime of the furnace.
And, yes, until we stop using gas to produce a big chunk of our electricity, electric rates will rise when natural gas rates rise.
Totally agree that these technologies should be mandated where feasible as part of the building code.
IMHO, a problem is that when you do a websearch to compare a heat pump with a furnace (in Redwood City, aka, Weather Best by Government Test, I don't *really* need an air conditioner), the heat pump is consistently denigrated as the more expensive alternative.
And this is exactly what you were referring to a day or two ago. American consumers refuse to do anything that would cost them money to mitigate climate change even if it would save them money (in non-climate change mitigation costs) over the long term.
I had a heat pump of the first kind in my Savannah house about 12 years ago. We were supposed to use it to heat the house in winter. In that capacity, it was atrocious.
They're ubiquitous in China. In the south of the country, that's all anybody has for heating (per national code, I think). Here in Beijing, I use it for AC from April into the fall. District heating (hot water circulated through multiple homes from a single, large boiler in the neighborhood) is how I get my heat. But it typically doesn't get activated until almost the beginning of November, so if it gets chilly in October, I'll use the heat pump.
Heat Pumps are great where appropriate, but the reasons they are popular in JP but not US are technical and economic.
First, Heat Pumps aren't "more efficient" than ACs- Heat Pumps *are* ACs, just ones that can operate in reverse.
Second, Though they do *now* make models which work below freezing, they have very limited efficiency and capacity.
Third, Natural gas heating is *very* cheap compared to electricity. Natural gas has historical cost about $0.02/KWH equivalent (that's resistive equivalent).
Given that in most of CA, the marginal KWh costs > $0.20, a Heat Pump needs to be ~10x more efficient than resistive electric heating. This is not realistic, esp not when it gets cold. Below freezing, Heat Pumps are maybe 2.5-3x more efficient.
Even at warmer temps they are only 5-6x - not nearly enough to compensate for how expensive a KWH is in CA.
In terms of JP. Most of JP pop is located in a temperate band. In Jan- Tokyo avg Low is 35F- compare that to 26F for NYC. That makes a big difference in terms of efficiency and capacity. It's also the case that JP has almost no Natural Gas, imported LNG is much more expensive, making heat pumps more reasonable choices.
When I started learning about heat exchangers, the sources I found tried to deal with the confusion by referring to heat pumps, which they defined as usually one direction operation, and heat exchangers, which were two-way. (With appropriate warnings that some people would refer to both types as heat pumps and to ask explicitly if it was two-way if in doubt.)
Heat Pumps isn’t just “cheap air conditioner “ they are effective for warming houses in cold conditions in a sustainable way.
60% of single family houses in Sweden has one.
I’ve have already read the article in WaPo (I’m subscribing) and was shocked over the price many of the Americans commenting had paid.
In Sweden is it $2000-2500 with installation for a set that is sufficient for slightly over 1000 sq.ft (100 kvm) and that’s sufficient to warm a house of that size down to a temperature of 5F (-15C) . One can find more effective ones for bigger homes as well but it’s hard to find prices, one usually needs to have a technician to check the house to get an offer.
My son is having one and a small wood stove as the only heating in his house and we are living at latitude 62,2
Note , the heat pump must be marked with “For Nordic Conditions “
Greetings from your Swedish friend
Ha! My business recently installed a small mini-split type of heat pump in a house we own, mainly for a/c in the summer, but it can supply heat, and the cost installed was about $5,000. There's no way that thing could approach heating the home in the winter in a relatively mild place. The thing is even in places where the average winter temperature is closer to freezing, you still need the capability of surviving and protecting the house for the occasional period where it drops to 20 below zero at night and maybe stays near 0F for a few days. It's no good if it is only rated for 5F unless you have another powerful heat source. The median single family home size here in the USA is around 2,500 square feet and there are many that are much larger.
As I said it’s quite possible to use these ones in bigger homes but it’s hard to estimate the price that’s why I chose a simple example.
How cold is it in the city of Kiruna , latitude 68,17 ?
In January, the coldest month of the year, the weather in Kiruna is usually freezing cold. The average temperature is of -11.6 °C (11 °F), with a minimum of -15.9 °C (3.3 °F) and a maximum of -7.2 °C (19.1 °F). On the coldest nights of the month, the temperature usually drops to around -29 °C (-20 °F). They are still using heat pumps . Humans are living in colder places ..but not that many meaning it’s a usable technique for more or less all humans if it can be used in Kiruna
A wood stove is an excellent extra heater
They ripped you of if that heater you bought isn’t working , probably a cheap one not meant to be used in cold conditions
… by the way, when climate is going rough is big houses not that smart
For historical reasons the US has very large stocks of housing with almost no insulation in walls or roofs, which doesn't sound like the state of things in your part of the world. In fact I'd guess that effective insulation was rarely used in houses built before the 1970s in most parts of the US-- before the 1950s, if there was anything at all in the walls it was probably cotton wool without any vapor barrier (cotton doesn't insulate when it gets wet), and until fairly recently I think the best you could count on was fiberglass batting with what would now be considered a low R value. Windows were invariably single-pane that might have had seasonal storm windows added on. New construction now is a whole different world, of course.
My house is pretty typical for the northeast, balloon-frame construction with absolutely no insulation, and hard and very expensive to put any in because of the firestops in the walls. Also few contractors can do it.
This is all a relic of the days when fuels were really cheap and easily available.
Maybe. But it's probably still cheaper up front to install ductless multizone mini-split heat pumps if you're building a new house. No insulated ducts and no drilling, so much cheaper on labor and materials.
This is dependent on the jurisdiction. In general, you have multiple ways to meet compliance with energy efficiency HVAC units. Not every home needs heating and cooling. Some use passive heating and cooling strategies.
I live in a coldlish climate (DC suburb) and have a heat pump. It does fine down to ~0F.
I think the issue of why people don't replace their central A/C units with heat pumps when they break misses 2 important points:
1) For central HVAC systems, the A/C and gas furnace usually share an interior piece (fan unit). If you replace your A/C, you buy a different unit when combining it with a gas furnace. So, if you replace with a heat pump, you lose your gas furnace entirely.
2) Reversing how the condenser and evaporator work is probably a small part of the cost difference between heat pumps and A/C units. The main difference is that heat pumps come with a auxiliary heat mode, with resistive heating. For mine, this takes up to 10kW. No standard A/C unit would be wired for this. To install a heat pump, you would need to put in new wiring to the main breaker box for most people.
Finally, most people in the US that use gas for heating also use it for heating water, so to ditch natural gas completely you need to replace both those units.
Finally finally... typical home furnaces run 80,000 - 100,000 BTU, which is ~25kW. This is much more heating than you are going to get from an electrical system in a normal house with a 150A service. Gas just heats faster. There is no way around it.
People are not going to pay more for a system that nominally does not work as well, even if total cost of ownership is lower. We really need subsidies to make this happen.
I'll agree with we need more subsidies, but a heat pump and a gas forced air furnace are completely compatible -- the heat pump just connects to the ac heat exchanger. You need a smart enough thermostat to know when to run the heat pump and when to run the gas furnace based on which is cheaper and can do the job.
Mandating better passive heating and cooling architectural standards and (of course) better insulation along with strong incentives for heat pumps and pre-installation of underground piping would certianly help new housing a lot but, retrofitting existing housing (including multi-unit housing) will need different and more flexable policies.
I live in New England, and needed to replace an aging oil burner / central air unit a few years ago. At the time the town I live in was promoting the use of air-source minisplit systems as alternatives to oil and gas heat, but the economics just didn't work out.
My home would have needed 5 minisplit systems, but at 6K each the cost of $30,000 was prohibitively higher than the cost of a new burner + bare-bones A/C unit, which was around $7000. It would have taken nearly 30 years to recoup the added investment through lower heating costs. (Cooling costs are less than 10% of heating costs where I live.) Making that deal look worse:
- The heat pumps would stop working around 0ºF, but it regularly gets that cold in the winter around here, with the coldest I've ever experienced around -15ºF. Thus it would have been necessary to purchase a backup heating system. I.e. I would have had to buy an oil or propane furnace anyway. (There's no natural gas line in my neighborhood.)
- The heat pumps had a warranty of less than 10 years. Given the poor reliability of modern appliances (e.g. refrigerators), it seemed incredibly unlikely the investment would pay for itself before the pumps broke down.
But in warmer climates where cooling costs dominate heating and the temperature never gets anywhere near 0ºF I suspect they make a lot more sense.
Just a reminder that the House passed a fantastic climate bill which would have made the upfront costs to install energy efficient appliances far more affordable/tolerable. Some of those proposals made it into Build Back Better which, last seen, suffered from multiple stab wounds in the back with a Sen. Manchin's fingerprints on the knife.
Has there been any study of hardiness in tectonically active areas ? We had a heat pump for a large garage deck that lost a whole loop of three the winter after installation (built during construction). The maintenance division never pulled the trigger on repair because of cost and the entire rear yard would have to be overturned to effect repair. But a warm deck is nice.
My parents built a house with a heat pump in Atlanta around 1971. They, my brother and I have used heat pumps ever since. Most of the costs I see quoted seem high; around the Southeast heat pumps are very, very common and there's plenty of competition amongst installers. It's true that heat pumps are better air conditioners than heaters. The smaller the difference between indoor and outdoor temperatures, the more efficient they are. When cooling to 76F when it's 90F outside the difference it only 14F. If it's 30 outside and 66 inside, it's a 36F difference; at low temps the air source heat pump is no better than a resistance heater and more resistance heat is needed to do the job.
In 2010 I took advantage of Obama credits and credits from my rural co-op to replace my old air-source heat pump with a geothermal heat pump using 3 x 200' deep wells to recirculate water. It also makes my hot water. It's been wonderful: we keep the house at a more comfortable temperature, we use less power, & there's no noisy compressor behind the house. Total cost was $19K, after tax break and Co-op about $13k. Love it. The underground ground temp here is about 65F, so the delta T is much reduced.
I have to admit that drilling 200' deep wells is not an inexpensive thing to do everywhere.