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Good thing the gas price spike has concentrated minds. My parents live in France. They have to replace their 40 year old gas furnace, and were originally plann
by fmajid 5y ago
Good thing the gas price spike has concentrated minds.
My parents live in France. They have to replace their 40 year old gas furnace, and were originally planning on replacing it with a 30% more efficient condensation gas furnace, but the French government gave them subsidies for a heat pump instead. They get heating that is powered by stable French nuclear power and are not exposed to volatile natural gas prices, the French reduce their dependency on gas imports from the distasteful Algerian, Qatari or Russian governments, everyone wins.
- Glench 5y agoThat's great that that happened! I think it's to the point now where we need everyone to do that. Was it hard for them to physically change out their gas system for the heat pump? Was it hard to find installers or units?
- fmajid 5y agoIt's still work in progress. Finding the installers wasn't hard, but my parents are old and the options are complex, so it took them a while to select the vendor and heat pump. Right now they are awaiting government approval for their application (it's been very popular and they are swamped, and even had to increase the budget allocation). They also had to do preliminaries like upgrade their electrical connection and add 3-phase wiring in the home, as well as build a concrete platform outside the house to stand the heat pump on. The heat pump itself should be a drop-in replacement that uses the existing hot water radiators (which means it can't be used as A/C, unfortunately).