7 ms·

I recently learned from an NPR piece that only about 13% of US households have a heat pump. This floored me. One because in my mid Atlantic area nearly every

I recently learned from an NPR piece that only about 13% of US households have a heat pump. This floored me. One because in my mid Atlantic area nearly every house has a heat pump. When house shopping many years ago we never saw a listing that didn't have one. The other is that if you have central air then it seems like you should have a heat pump. You're basically just running the heat pump backwards to provide heat instead of air conditioning, but apparently the vast majority of central air installs are only set up to do cooling? This makes no sense to me. Even if you area gets too cold to be efficiently warmed by a heat pump in the winter you can still use it for several months out of the year and switch to gas only when you need to. It's not like gas is especially cheap.

imglorp 4y ago
Misaligned incentives. A traditional furnace is a bunch of sheet metal, a burner, a fan, and a thermostat and that's it. Sold for thousands, it seems like enormous, criminal markup. Of course they'll keep selling that and price it less than heat pumps, which have an actual complex closed loop coolant system in addition to what a furnace has.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  https://www.rewiringamerica.org/ira-fact-sheets https://www.rewiringamerica.org/ira-fact-sheets Progress is being made. > The 25C and 25D tax credits incentivize household electrification by lowering the total cost of qualified electrification upgrades. 25C provides a capped 30 percent tax credit for heat pumps, heat pump water heaters (HPWHs), qualifying electrical panel upgrades, select weatherization measures, and energy audits. For the first time, air source heat pumps for space heating/cooling and HPWHs will be eligible for a tax credit of up to $2,000 per year, and electrical panel upgrades installed in conjunction with a heat pump or HPWH will be eligible for a tax credit of up to $600.
vanilla_nut 4y ago
There are a lot of US households on places like New England and the Midwest where historically very very few houses have central air and most have a furnace running on oil, propane, or natural gas. The upgrade path is hard there: do you accept the multiple thousands of dollars to install a heat pump on top of your existing heating solution? For the couple of fringe months where a heat pump can actually heat your house, and the extra cost of cooling in the summer (money many don't have)? It probably makes a lot of sense to just switch to a heat pump if you live in the south these days and give up any backup heating system entirely. But it is worth noting that only in the past 5 years or so did we finally get heat pumps that didn't totally suck at 0C. Until then, it made sense for even a lot of Southern households to stick with backup furnace + central air, assuming they already sunk money into the backup furnace for the 5 days a year they actually need it.
- jandrese 4y ago
  Heat pumps have always had a built-in resistive heating element as a backup option for when it gets too cold out. This is terribly energy inefficient, but if you're talking about a few days a year at most it is fine, no need to install a second heat source. Besides, 0C is far too conservative an estimate for heat pumps. -10C was no problem even for 30 year old units.
  - michaelt 4y ago
    > Heat pumps have always had a built-in resistive heating element as a backup option for when it gets too cold out. This is terribly energy inefficient, but if you're talking about a few days a year at most it is fine, Won't it be a problem if heating becomes much less efficient across an entire city, just as demand for heat is at its highest?
    - js2 4y ago
      Indeed! In NC this past January, Duke Energy asked everyone to turn their thermostats down. NC has the one of the highest percentages of heat pumps in the country: https://news.duke-energy.com/releases/duke-energy-thanks-customers-for-help-during-cold-snap;-sets-all-time-records-for-winter-energy-use https://news.duke-energy.com/releases/duke-energy-thanks-cus... https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/heat-pumps/chart-which-states-have-the-most-heat-pumps https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/heat-pumps/chart-which-...
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
    Large parts of the country can be consistently below 0C for weeks at a time. Resistive heating cannot beat gas in that scenario.
    - SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
      True, but conversely a decent swath of the US population lives in Texas, where being under 0C for weeks at a time is a near impossibility. For those use cases heat pumps work great (assuming you don’t have a failed state on its own grid that will fall over at the slightest whiff of abnormality, of course).
bbatha 4y ago
Counter anecdote. I just bought a house in the mid atlantic and 0 of the houses I looked at have a heat pump. > The other is that if you have central air then it seems like you should have a heat pump. You're basically just running the heat pump backwards to provide heat instead of air conditioning, These days sure. But the cold weather compatible heat pumps are relatively new, electricity was and still is a whole lot more expensive than gas, running it as both an air conditioner decreases its overall life span, and finally a dedicated air conditioner can be more energy efficient especially on older models.
- jandrese 4y ago
  When I was a kid in the 80s my house had an electric heat pump and the aux (resistive) heater coil didn't kick on until about 0F (-18C). You could tell because it smelled a bit when it happened, which was pretty rare. I guess it probably kicked in some more times overnight and I didn't notice, but overall the heat pump did the lion's share of the work. Heat pumps have become much more efficient since then. I replaced an old and rusty unit on my first townhouse and cut the electric bill by $100-$200/month in the middle of summer and dead of winter.
dragontamer 4y ago
Natural Gas heating is surprisingly good in practice, especially in the days where we only had fossil fuels on our electricity grid. If you go fossil fuel, you have only 40% efficiency for Fossil Fuel -> Electricity, then Electricity -> Traditional heat is only 100% efficient. So 100W of chemical energy turns into 40W of electricity, and then turns into 40W of heating. --------- Today, a Heat Pump can be like 200% efficient, so you 100W of chemical energy turns into 40W of electricity, then turns into 80W of heating from the heat pump. Alas, a Gas Furnace is like 90% efficient (10% of the heat escapes in the steam / waste products that needs to be pushed out the chimney, but everything else turns into home heating). So your 100W of chemical energy turns into 90W of heating, and you're done. And that's why our infrastructure in the USA is so much around gas heating, because its better. Especially since we are very rich in domestic natural gas production. Yeah, we're getting to the point where Heat Pumps + Solar Electricity are coming. But... we're not there yet. On today's grid, Natural Gas heating is likely the most efficient option. EDIT: Got my units wrong. It should be 100J of energy, not 100W of energy. Watts are power. Though in USA, we don't use Joules for energy, but instead "BTUs". Whatevs.... I think my point is still clear :-)
- xxpor 4y ago
  >Today, a Heat Pump can be like 200% efficient, so you 100W of chemical energy turns into 40W of electricity, then turns into 80W of heating from the heat pump. This isn't true today. The absolute minimum COP is 3.1 in the US. https://www.pickhvac.com/heat-pump/basics/cop/ https://www.pickhvac.com/heat-pump/basics/cop/
  - ericpauley 4y ago
    This appears to be the minimum for geothermal. The vast majority of heat pump installs would be air source, and while these can often get 3+ it’s highly dependent on climate and local grid efficiency. It also depends on local prices. In Madison, WI our implied (not actual) electric grid efficiency based on prices is under 20%.
    - xxpor 4y ago
kevstev 4y ago
I'm in NJ just west of Manhattan and I could not make the numbers work at all. I have averaged about $1.05 a therm for gas and my heat bills are very low even in Jan/Feb. On the other hand I pay 16.5 cents /kwh for electric. I ran the numbers through a spreadsheet and I would be paying an extra $100 a month for heat and an initial cost of 10k more for the install, and the ac side would have a slightly lower seer than the best ac systems available. I would need a COP of 5 for a heat pump to be more efficient. They don't exist for air source. I live in a brownstone/townhouse and while geothermal is theoretically feasible ( I have a small yard) I called every installer I could find in the tristate and none would attempt it. I was immensely disappointed but I cant be paying more upfront and ongoing. If I had solar it would be a bit better but last time I attempted it I only got 2 bids out of the 30 installers I called and then COVID hit. The numbers weren't especially encouraging. I can't get that many panels on my roof due to firecodes.
- someguydave 4y ago
  To be clear, in your case the heat pump would use less energy, and thus would be more efficient. Your complaint is that it would cost more to use less energy, which is true. As long as natural gas is 3x cheaper than electricity per kWh there isn’t a good incentive to switch to heat pump heating for the part of the country that experiences a cold climate.
mrexroad 4y ago
Yep, grew up in that area in a house w/ a heat pump. However it also had oil furnace (aka diesel) to supplement as it’d get down in the teens during coldest parts of winter. Also stacked, dried, carried in and burned a fair amount of firewood growing up.
- michaelcampbell 4y ago
  > However it also had oil furnace (aka diesel) I've never heard that before; where did you grow up where an oil furnace is also known as a diesel?
funstuff007 4y ago
> This floored me. One because in my mid Atlantic area nearly every house has a heat pump. When house shopping many years ago we never saw a listing that didn't have one. Is this really possible? Is every house in this area less than 20 years old, or occupied by a well-heeled and environmentally conscious homeowner?
- bluGill 4y ago
  That area us probably TVA or.other place near that territory where electric is very cheap. So of course heat pumps are popular, they don't have much gas infrastructure, and evem where it exists heat pumps have been cheaper for decades.
  - jandrese 4y ago
    It is the Northern Virginia suburbs. The homes I was looking at were mostly built in the 80s-90s because that's roughly the band of growth where I could afford to buy. Interestingly enough, gas was something of a premium feature. It was generally just used for the water heater and range. The homes with gas were out of my price range.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
Technically, if you own a fridge, you actually do have a heat pump. And it is heating your house slightly. But using heat pumps for heating has not been that common until fairly recently. So 13% is actually pretty good. Using fossil fuels for heating has historically been quite cheap until that started changing a few years ago. For the same reason, building codes in the US are kind of sloppy when it comes to e.g. insulating houses properly. You can save quite a bit of energy if you fix that but until recently energy was cheap enough that a lot of people could not be bothered to care about that. Running the AC in a leaky house with single pane glass is kind of insane if you think about it. Yet, that seems to be standard practice in a lot of places in the US.
- themeiguoren 4y ago
  Only if you stick your fridge in your doorframe and vent it outside. Otherwise it’s just a resistive heater. :)
labcomputer 4y ago
> This floored me. One because in my mid Atlantic area nearly every house has a heat pump. When house shopping many years ago we never saw a listing that didn't have one. In California, especially Southern California, many homes still have wall-mounted natural-convention gas heaters. Mainly because natural gas is plentiful (LA is basically sitting on top of an oil and gas reservoir) and heating isn't needed much of the year. Often they are placed in/on a wall between the two largest rooms, so that both are heated. The technology is actually pretty neat: A thermopile sits in the pilot light's flame, which provides electricity to hold open the main shutoff solenoid valve and run a thermostat, so it needs no external electricity.
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  I have childhood memories of shivering in front of a gas wall heater during cold winter days in Palo Alto. I was visiting from Vermont (which was much colder, but houses were equipped for it) and those days gave me a new appreciation for the cold.
tiffanyh 4y ago
> I recently learned from an NPR piece that only about 13% of US households have a heat pump. I wonder what the % of US population even needs a good heater. There’s a lot of people who live in TX, SoCal, Florida etc that minimally use their heater.
- rainsford 4y ago
  Some quick Googling fails to find a good answer, but I'd venture to say that a significant majority of the US population lives in places with mild enough winter weather for heat pumps to be practical even without good cold weather heat pump technology. The northern interior US, where the coldest winters tend to be, covers a lot of area but is pretty sparsely populated compared to the coasts and the south, probably in part because most people don't like frigid winters. Arguably human temperature preference is actually ideally suited to favorable heat pump conditions.
mikewarot 4y ago
Here in the Chicago area, natural gas is piped in underground, and for the most part, the electrical infrastructure is above ground, and thus vulnerable to ice and the errant vehicle taking out a pole. Thus, the risk of losing electric power is the highest at the time you would need it the most if you relied solely on a heat pump to keep your house warm, and your water pipes from freezing and then damaging everything. This is a very strong incentive to have natural gas heat, and a small generator to be able to run the fans to operate it. (Or perhaps a large UPS rated for inductive loads) I think a gas operated backup generator that could then exhaust it's waste heat as input to a heat pump would be the best of all worlds. Most of the time, it serves as insurance. On really cold days (it has gotten down to -40 in my lifetime), or when power is out, it could both run the heat pump, and serve as the "emergency heat" sometimes required for an air-source heat pump. Of course it would be better to have a ground loop heat pump, but that's not always an option.
firstlink 4y ago
> You're basically just running the heat pump backwards to provide heat instead of air conditioning It is absolutely not that simple. Even a passing knowledge of heat pump technology as actually implemented would dispel that simplistic idea. For example, one of the biggest issues to contend with is condensation. Making your outside fan unit cold instead of hot will quickly destroy it due to moisture accumulating in ways that were not expected.
- jandrese 4y ago
  Which is why every heat pump has a defrost cycle. Also why every heat pump has the resistive heater backup. If you lose power for a long time when it has been very cold the system has to be very careful when it starts back up, using the resistive heater to warm the refrigerant and coils to make sure they have not frozen up. But this is all software and is a solved problem.
fundad 4y ago
The people mining fossil fuels are very well connected and shaped US History to sell you hydrocarbons.
noveltyaccount 4y ago
A/C without a heat pump is insanity. It's literally the exact same appliance with an added reversing valve and associated piping. A few extra dollars and your air conditioner can also heat. Mind blowing that anyone wouldn't choose heat pump. Poor education/awareness I guess.

imglorp 4y ago

Misaligned incentives. A traditional furnace is a bunch of sheet metal, a burner, a fan, and a thermostat and that's it. Sold for thousands, it seems like enormous, criminal markup. Of course they'll keep selling that and price it less than heat pumps, which have an actual complex closed loop coolant system in addition to what a furnace has.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
https://www.rewiringamerica.org/ira-fact-sheets https://www.rewiringamerica.org/ira-fact-sheets Progress is being made. > The 25C and 25D tax credits incentivize household electrification by lowering the total cost of qualified electrification upgrades. 25C provides a capped 30 percent tax credit for heat pumps, heat pump water heaters (HPWHs), qualifying electrical panel upgrades, select weatherization measures, and energy audits. For the first time, air source heat pumps for space heating/cooling and HPWHs will be eligible for a tax credit of up to $2,000 per year, and electrical panel upgrades installed in conjunction with a heat pump or HPWH will be eligible for a tax credit of up to $600.

vanilla_nut 4y ago

There are a lot of US households on places like New England and the Midwest where historically very very few houses have central air and most have a furnace running on oil, propane, or natural gas. The upgrade path is hard there: do you accept the multiple thousands of dollars to install a heat pump on top of your existing heating solution? For the couple of fringe months where a heat pump can actually heat your house, and the extra cost of cooling in the summer (money many don't have)? It probably makes a lot of sense to just switch to a heat pump if you live in the south these days and give up any backup heating system entirely. But it is worth noting that only in the past 5 years or so did we finally get heat pumps that didn't totally suck at 0C. Until then, it made sense for even a lot of Southern households to stick with backup furnace + central air, assuming they already sunk money into the backup furnace for the 5 days a year they actually need it.

jandrese 4y ago
Heat pumps have always had a built-in resistive heating element as a backup option for when it gets too cold out. This is terribly energy inefficient, but if you're talking about a few days a year at most it is fine, no need to install a second heat source. Besides, 0C is far too conservative an estimate for heat pumps. -10C was no problem even for 30 year old units.
- michaelt 4y ago
  > Heat pumps have always had a built-in resistive heating element as a backup option for when it gets too cold out. This is terribly energy inefficient, but if you're talking about a few days a year at most it is fine, Won't it be a problem if heating becomes much less efficient across an entire city, just as demand for heat is at its highest?
  - js2 4y ago
    Indeed! In NC this past January, Duke Energy asked everyone to turn their thermostats down. NC has the one of the highest percentages of heat pumps in the country: https://news.duke-energy.com/releases/duke-energy-thanks-customers-for-help-during-cold-snap;-sets-all-time-records-for-winter-energy-use https://news.duke-energy.com/releases/duke-energy-thanks-cus... https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/heat-pumps/chart-which-states-have-the-most-heat-pumps https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/heat-pumps/chart-which-...
- 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
  Large parts of the country can be consistently below 0C for weeks at a time. Resistive heating cannot beat gas in that scenario.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
    True, but conversely a decent swath of the US population lives in Texas, where being under 0C for weeks at a time is a near impossibility. For those use cases heat pumps work great (assuming you don’t have a failed state on its own grid that will fall over at the slightest whiff of abnormality, of course).

bbatha 4y ago

Counter anecdote. I just bought a house in the mid atlantic and 0 of the houses I looked at have a heat pump. > The other is that if you have central air then it seems like you should have a heat pump. You're basically just running the heat pump backwards to provide heat instead of air conditioning, These days sure. But the cold weather compatible heat pumps are relatively new, electricity was and still is a whole lot more expensive than gas, running it as both an air conditioner decreases its overall life span, and finally a dedicated air conditioner can be more energy efficient especially on older models.

jandrese 4y ago
When I was a kid in the 80s my house had an electric heat pump and the aux (resistive) heater coil didn't kick on until about 0F (-18C). You could tell because it smelled a bit when it happened, which was pretty rare. I guess it probably kicked in some more times overnight and I didn't notice, but overall the heat pump did the lion's share of the work. Heat pumps have become much more efficient since then. I replaced an old and rusty unit on my first townhouse and cut the electric bill by $100-$200/month in the middle of summer and dead of winter.

dragontamer 4y ago

Natural Gas heating is surprisingly good in practice, especially in the days where we only had fossil fuels on our electricity grid. If you go fossil fuel, you have only 40% efficiency for Fossil Fuel -> Electricity, then Electricity -> Traditional heat is only 100% efficient. So 100W of chemical energy turns into 40W of electricity, and then turns into 40W of heating. --------- Today, a Heat Pump can be like 200% efficient, so you 100W of chemical energy turns into 40W of electricity, then turns into 80W of heating from the heat pump. Alas, a Gas Furnace is like 90% efficient (10% of the heat escapes in the steam / waste products that needs to be pushed out the chimney, but everything else turns into home heating). So your 100W of chemical energy turns into 90W of heating, and you're done. And that's why our infrastructure in the USA is so much around gas heating, because its better. Especially since we are very rich in domestic natural gas production. Yeah, we're getting to the point where Heat Pumps + Solar Electricity are coming. But... we're not there yet. On today's grid, Natural Gas heating is likely the most efficient option. EDIT: Got my units wrong. It should be 100J of energy, not 100W of energy. Watts are power. Though in USA, we don't use Joules for energy, but instead "BTUs". Whatevs.... I think my point is still clear :-)

xxpor 4y ago
>Today, a Heat Pump can be like 200% efficient, so you 100W of chemical energy turns into 40W of electricity, then turns into 80W of heating from the heat pump. This isn't true today. The absolute minimum COP is 3.1 in the US. https://www.pickhvac.com/heat-pump/basics/cop/ https://www.pickhvac.com/heat-pump/basics/cop/
- ericpauley 4y ago
  This appears to be the minimum for geothermal. The vast majority of heat pump installs would be air source, and while these can often get 3+ it’s highly dependent on climate and local grid efficiency. It also depends on local prices. In Madison, WI our implied (not actual) electric grid efficiency based on prices is under 20%.
  - xxpor 4y ago

kevstev 4y ago

I'm in NJ just west of Manhattan and I could not make the numbers work at all. I have averaged about $1.05 a therm for gas and my heat bills are very low even in Jan/Feb. On the other hand I pay 16.5 cents /kwh for electric. I ran the numbers through a spreadsheet and I would be paying an extra $100 a month for heat and an initial cost of 10k more for the install, and the ac side would have a slightly lower seer than the best ac systems available. I would need a COP of 5 for a heat pump to be more efficient. They don't exist for air source. I live in a brownstone/townhouse and while geothermal is theoretically feasible ( I have a small yard) I called every installer I could find in the tristate and none would attempt it. I was immensely disappointed but I cant be paying more upfront and ongoing. If I had solar it would be a bit better but last time I attempted it I only got 2 bids out of the 30 installers I called and then COVID hit. The numbers weren't especially encouraging. I can't get that many panels on my roof due to firecodes.

someguydave 4y ago
To be clear, in your case the heat pump would use less energy, and thus would be more efficient. Your complaint is that it would cost more to use less energy, which is true. As long as natural gas is 3x cheaper than electricity per kWh there isn’t a good incentive to switch to heat pump heating for the part of the country that experiences a cold climate.

mrexroad 4y ago

Yep, grew up in that area in a house w/ a heat pump. However it also had oil furnace (aka diesel) to supplement as it’d get down in the teens during coldest parts of winter. Also stacked, dried, carried in and burned a fair amount of firewood growing up.

michaelcampbell 4y ago
> However it also had oil furnace (aka diesel) I've never heard that before; where did you grow up where an oil furnace is also known as a diesel?

funstuff007 4y ago

> This floored me. One because in my mid Atlantic area nearly every house has a heat pump. When house shopping many years ago we never saw a listing that didn't have one. Is this really possible? Is every house in this area less than 20 years old, or occupied by a well-heeled and environmentally conscious homeowner?

bluGill 4y ago
That area us probably TVA or.other place near that territory where electric is very cheap. So of course heat pumps are popular, they don't have much gas infrastructure, and evem where it exists heat pumps have been cheaper for decades.
- jandrese 4y ago
  It is the Northern Virginia suburbs. The homes I was looking at were mostly built in the 80s-90s because that's roughly the band of growth where I could afford to buy. Interestingly enough, gas was something of a premium feature. It was generally just used for the water heater and range. The homes with gas were out of my price range.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

Technically, if you own a fridge, you actually do have a heat pump. And it is heating your house slightly. But using heat pumps for heating has not been that common until fairly recently. So 13% is actually pretty good. Using fossil fuels for heating has historically been quite cheap until that started changing a few years ago. For the same reason, building codes in the US are kind of sloppy when it comes to e.g. insulating houses properly. You can save quite a bit of energy if you fix that but until recently energy was cheap enough that a lot of people could not be bothered to care about that. Running the AC in a leaky house with single pane glass is kind of insane if you think about it. Yet, that seems to be standard practice in a lot of places in the US.

themeiguoren 4y ago
Only if you stick your fridge in your doorframe and vent it outside. Otherwise it’s just a resistive heater. :)

labcomputer 4y ago

> This floored me. One because in my mid Atlantic area nearly every house has a heat pump. When house shopping many years ago we never saw a listing that didn't have one. In California, especially Southern California, many homes still have wall-mounted natural-convention gas heaters. Mainly because natural gas is plentiful (LA is basically sitting on top of an oil and gas reservoir) and heating isn't needed much of the year. Often they are placed in/on a wall between the two largest rooms, so that both are heated. The technology is actually pretty neat: A thermopile sits in the pilot light's flame, which provides electricity to hold open the main shutoff solenoid valve and run a thermostat, so it needs no external electricity.

matthewdgreen 4y ago
I have childhood memories of shivering in front of a gas wall heater during cold winter days in Palo Alto. I was visiting from Vermont (which was much colder, but houses were equipped for it) and those days gave me a new appreciation for the cold.

tiffanyh 4y ago

> I recently learned from an NPR piece that only about 13% of US households have a heat pump. I wonder what the % of US population even needs a good heater. There’s a lot of people who live in TX, SoCal, Florida etc that minimally use their heater.

rainsford 4y ago
Some quick Googling fails to find a good answer, but I'd venture to say that a significant majority of the US population lives in places with mild enough winter weather for heat pumps to be practical even without good cold weather heat pump technology. The northern interior US, where the coldest winters tend to be, covers a lot of area but is pretty sparsely populated compared to the coasts and the south, probably in part because most people don't like frigid winters. Arguably human temperature preference is actually ideally suited to favorable heat pump conditions.

mikewarot 4y ago

Here in the Chicago area, natural gas is piped in underground, and for the most part, the electrical infrastructure is above ground, and thus vulnerable to ice and the errant vehicle taking out a pole. Thus, the risk of losing electric power is the highest at the time you would need it the most if you relied solely on a heat pump to keep your house warm, and your water pipes from freezing and then damaging everything. This is a very strong incentive to have natural gas heat, and a small generator to be able to run the fans to operate it. (Or perhaps a large UPS rated for inductive loads) I think a gas operated backup generator that could then exhaust it's waste heat as input to a heat pump would be the best of all worlds. Most of the time, it serves as insurance. On really cold days (it has gotten down to -40 in my lifetime), or when power is out, it could both run the heat pump, and serve as the "emergency heat" sometimes required for an air-source heat pump. Of course it would be better to have a ground loop heat pump, but that's not always an option.

firstlink 4y ago

> You're basically just running the heat pump backwards to provide heat instead of air conditioning It is absolutely not that simple. Even a passing knowledge of heat pump technology as actually implemented would dispel that simplistic idea. For example, one of the biggest issues to contend with is condensation. Making your outside fan unit cold instead of hot will quickly destroy it due to moisture accumulating in ways that were not expected.

jandrese 4y ago
Which is why every heat pump has a defrost cycle. Also why every heat pump has the resistive heater backup. If you lose power for a long time when it has been very cold the system has to be very careful when it starts back up, using the resistive heater to warm the refrigerant and coils to make sure they have not frozen up. But this is all software and is a solved problem.

fundad 4y ago

The people mining fossil fuels are very well connected and shaped US History to sell you hydrocarbons.

noveltyaccount 4y ago

A/C without a heat pump is insanity. It's literally the exact same appliance with an added reversing valve and associated piping. A few extra dollars and your air conditioner can also heat. Mind blowing that anyone wouldn't choose heat pump. Poor education/awareness I guess.