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I do not understand why heat pumps are so expensive in the article. In Sweden the hardware cost around $1k - $2.5k and installation $500 - $1000. It's not a co

I do not understand why heat pumps are so expensive in the article. In Sweden the hardware cost around $1k - $2.5k and installation $500 - $1000. It's not a complicated task. Geothermal heating on the other hand cost around $15k - $20k. Most people I know have one of these, direct electricity to heat is not really an option.

rcxdude 3y ago
Heating has strong 'follow the crowd' effects: the cost of different options are heavily influenced by what's already commonly used in the local area, because the supply chain will be optimised, and local workers will be most familiar with what's most popular. Bucking the trend in any way sets you up for higher hardware costs and much higher installations and maintenance costs, even if in a different country the same option would be the most economical. (I have experienced the same pain, in a country where most heating is plumbing and radiator based, having a house set up for central air heating and wanting a replacement for the central unit, it was almost the same cost to replace that central unit as it was to rip out the whole thing and replace it with radiators, which is ridiculous on the face of it but a consequence of the supply of parts and labor for each option).
namdnay 3y ago
I think the costs given in the article are for a whole house (including "ducting" which is more rare in europe)
- gavin_gee 3y ago
  i dont think so. Seattle quotes for a gas to heat pump conversion using existing ducting and refrigerant pipes was 18K. labor costs are absurd
wil421 3y ago
Are you talking about mini splits being 1-1.5k? In the US, it’s more common to have 1 or 2 large units pumping into ducts in every room of the house.
a_humean 3y ago
The big cost is the upfront cost of insulation and removal the existing heating systems. Speaking about the UK (article is mostly about he US which will have their own problems), we have very poor quality housing stock with effectively zero insulation. You hold your hand to the exterior walls of your typical 2-3 bedroom terrace house (the most common type of home in the UK) in the winter and its just ice cold. For these homes the exterior wall are just solid brick and plaster with no air gaps. Many homes still don't have double glazing and their windows bleed even more heat. These homes go cold quickly when you turn off a gas boiler, and a heat pump just cannot keep up with the heat loss. In addition large numbers of households in the UK have migrated to "combiboilers" heating systems that dispensed with hot water tanks for on demand hot water from their gas boiler. In the process many of these properties have converted the space previously designated for hot water storage to loft extensions or other home upgrades. UK homes are pretty small, and going to a heat pump system means going back to hot water storage, which most UK homes have no space for without costly changes to the home layout/structure potentially including sacrificing parts of precious loft conversions. Frankly we might be better off just knocking down and rebuilding some of our housing stock at higher densities such is the cost of retrofitting and our housing shortages, but there is no political appetite in the UK for any radical solutions like that.
- AniseAbyss 3y ago
  In my country builders didn't seriously start to consider "insulation" until the 1990s. Gas was cheap so nobody cared. Just turn up that dial! Modern houses and apartments are marvels of engineering though.
- pastage 3y ago
  What is so special about insulation for heatpumps? You need that insulation anyways. EDIT: ok so the best interpretation I have is that it has just been so cheap with gas that people have not bothered insulating their houses.
  - sandworm101 3y ago
    Heat pumps have a solid max heat output that cannot scale as easily as gas heating. So without insulation they can quickly hit a limit. The upper limit for gas system is limited by how much gas can flow through a pipe, which is a huge amount of energy. The upper limit for a heat pump aystem is set by the compressor capacity, which is in turn set by the electrical circuit, and relative temperatures.
NorwegianDude 3y ago
Good question. Seems unlikely that the prices are correct. If it is then someone has a huge incentive to import from other places. The most popular air-air heat pump in Norway with a SCOP above 5 is less than 2500 USD including installation and tax. But, it's also a fact that the US is far behind when it comes to heat pumps and energy efficient homes. The general knowledge in the US about heat pumps is terrible.
- nkurz 3y ago
  I fear you are wrong. I'm American, and can confirm that heat pumps in the US are still very expensive upfront. There are often grant programs that can offset some of the cost, but for whatever reason they are much more expensive here than Europe. The main issue seems to be that installation is extremely expensive. Less expensive heat pumps are now available here if you are able to do the installation yourself, but installers will only work with the expensive brands they know. They are usually overbooked, and thus have no incentive to lower their prices. The question would be what it would take to get competition in the market at the installer level. Any idea how this was accomplished in Norway?
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    Part of the “for whatever reason” is the grant programs you mentioned.
brabel 3y ago
Are you talking about small units you put on your bedroom or whole house units? I've just bought a big heat pump in Stockholm, this model from Nibe, which the guy installing it told me is one of the best: https://www.nibe.eu/sv-se/produkter/varmepumpar/franluftsvarmepumpar/s735 https://www.nibe.eu/sv-se/produkter/varmepumpar/franluftsvar... It warms the whole house via floor heating (IIUC it's hot water circulating) and also ventilates almost all rooms (but that seems to be only for keeping the air in the house clean - it "pulls" instead of blowing warm air or something like that). It cost me a total of 130,000SEK, which is 12,0000 USD (as I write this). Approx. half for the unit and half for installation costs. I don't have the geothermal option where I live because it's a water reserve, but that would be much more expensive, I expect at least twice as much. I didn't buy a cheap unit, there was a cheaper model that they offered for a total cost of 80,000 SEK... but still, where could've I gotten this for 20,000 SEK :D
- robinwassen 3y ago
  I am thinking of the more basic air/air units rather than this air/water. One well placed air/air can reduce the need for direct electricity heating a lot, even though some might be needed to assist in a bedroom or so. My parents installed a air/air unit in the middle of the house (180kvm) for $2.5k this summer and it keeps the whole house heated except one bedroom that needs some assistance from a radiator.
  - brabel 3y ago
    That's about the same size as my house... I also have a air-to-air heater but don't even use it because the central heating is more than enough. But interesting to know it could actually manage almost the whole house if I need it!
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  Retrofitting floor heating might be very expensive though? Especially in some older houses
  - Lutger 3y ago
quickthrowman 3y ago
> In Sweden the hardware cost around $1k - $2.5k and installation $500 - $1000. It's not a complicated task. These numbers must be for an air to air mini-split unit with one air handler with nearby electricity, $500-$1000 is 4-8 hours of labor. That’s not nearly enough for an entire home. A whole house heat pump with heat exchanger costs substantially more, both in equipment and labor.
soco 3y ago
In Switzerland I was quoted about 25k for an air-water and about 10k more for geothermal. And I mean with it only the hardware and installation - as the house doesn't need piping or whatever. So for some reason you Nordics are quite privileged, and I wasn't able to find out why.
tsss 3y ago
If your Samsung heat pump costs 1-2k you can expect the same product from a German company to cost 7-15k for no appreciable difference. Why buy the German product then? Because the builders who install it will get a cut of course. They don't need your business and will simply refuse the job if you don't buy the most expensive materials. You can add to that cost all the subsidies of the German government, which, as everyone knows, simply increase prices when there is a supply shortage. But these subsidies are tied to other requirements to make your house more energy efficient, like installing a solar power system with batteries (30k€ easily). Heat pumps are a gimmick for rich people that already have well insulated modern homes. For everyone else it is vastly more expensive than gas or oil and in addition, we have to pay taxes for all the subsidies going to those rich people.
- _whiteCaps_ 3y ago
  If the Samsung heat pump works as well as my Samsung fridge does, I'll definitely look into a German product!
msh 3y ago
You are comparing prices of air2air heat pumps with air to water. The latter is much more expensive and you cannot get them for 1k$ in Sweden.
- Glawen 3y ago
  indeed, was going to say the same. It cost me around 15k€ to upgrade my house to a air 2 water heat pump in France. time will tell if I will get a return on my investment, the big question will be how long my heat pump is going to last
altacc 3y ago
Depends upon the heating system. A cheap air to air, single unit heat pump does not cost much but if you want anything more then it costs more. A lot of houses with a basic heat pump use it to reduce the amount of other heating used and pump hot air into a single area of the house, with additional electric heaters in other rooms and a water heater for hot water. However to totally replace your entire heating needs with an all-in-one system is much more complicated than that. The heat pump I have alone in Scandinavia costs roughly $6-10k. That's powering water heating in every room plus hot water in the taps, zero additonal heating of air or water required. It's the size of bulky floor to ceiling fridge and does wonders for my electricity bill!
pjc50 3y ago
Could you put some capacity numbers next to those costs? My 5kW air->water system was about £15,000 installed (before government grants).
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
c2h5oh 3y ago
I was quoted around $80k (in central EU) all in for 50KW heating unit. About a third was drilling of silly number of holes (water-water heat pump). Price didn't include updating radiators / installing underfloor heating in the house itself. If I replaced wood pellet boiler I use right now with a heat pump I'd break even in about 20 years, which is longer than the expected service life of the pump..
- nagisa 3y ago
  Out of curiosity, why did they think 50kW was a necessary amount of energy to heat? Is the building old and poorly insulated? An A/A+ energy class 150m² home barely needs 1/10th that amount. If it was indeed a question of insulation or airtightness, then perhaps spending a part of that money for renovations in that area and only then a fraction of the price for a reasonably-sized heating unit might be sensible. You could also do just the renovations and thus reduce your wood pellet usage substantially as well – already a big win for the environment.
  - c2h5oh 3y ago
    Almost 800 m^2, 55cm thick red brick walls with OK, but not great insulation, casement windows. That aside what I wanted to point out is that because of heat pump pricing they are currently not the best choice, economically speaking. It is 6-10x more expensive upfront and won't break even over it's lifetime. By comparison solar panels break even is 6-8 years and after that they are expected to last 20 more years bringing you 2-3x installation costs in savings over their lifetime.
nagisa 3y ago
I got “away” paying almost exactly €10k for fancier ground-source setup using a 6kW Thermia (i.e. Swedish) heat pump (itself about €6k.) IIRC there were definitely cheaper geothermal options back when I was investigating, but I got sold on the ecology aspects of that particular solution as well. I can make some comparisons between the two too – ground-source maintains great COP even if its -20°C or less outside (as it was a couple days ago.) The incoming carrier liquid remains comfortably around 5°C, no matter the season. This also enables passive floor-based cooling. With an air-source heat-pump one would need some sort of a reversible cycle setup, I suspect, or perhaps a separate AC, which would likely bring the total cost of an air-source implementation up a little bit further. It is also no-louder than your modern fridge. My neighbours’ air-source heat pumps’ exterior units were going at it so hard one could have been excused if they mistook there was a busy airport within an earshot. On the other hand if there's already an airport, what does it change if there’re N planes or N+1 planes in it :)
- frankus 3y ago
  You can do radiant cooling with an air-to-water heat pump just as you can with an air-to-air or water-to-water heat pump. The main issue is managing humidity so that the dewpoint stays below the emitter temperature.
  - nagisa 3y ago
    I did not say otherwise :) My point is that with a ground-source the cooling can be “passive” – you don’t actually need to turn on anything but a circulation pump or two once in a while. The downside of course is that its not going to make your already +40°C room into a flu-inducing +18°C one. Its more of a tool to offset a 2°C, maybe 4°C in extreme cases indoor temperature rise. Which is likely more than plenty for many airtight & insulated houses. And indeed, managing humidity is hard. If this sounds at all interesting to the reader, definitely research whether this is applicable in your situation/area at all.

rcxdude 3y ago

Heating has strong 'follow the crowd' effects: the cost of different options are heavily influenced by what's already commonly used in the local area, because the supply chain will be optimised, and local workers will be most familiar with what's most popular. Bucking the trend in any way sets you up for higher hardware costs and much higher installations and maintenance costs, even if in a different country the same option would be the most economical. (I have experienced the same pain, in a country where most heating is plumbing and radiator based, having a house set up for central air heating and wanting a replacement for the central unit, it was almost the same cost to replace that central unit as it was to rip out the whole thing and replace it with radiators, which is ridiculous on the face of it but a consequence of the supply of parts and labor for each option).

namdnay 3y ago

I think the costs given in the article are for a whole house (including "ducting" which is more rare in europe)

gavin_gee 3y ago
i dont think so. Seattle quotes for a gas to heat pump conversion using existing ducting and refrigerant pipes was 18K. labor costs are absurd

wil421 3y ago

Are you talking about mini splits being 1-1.5k? In the US, it’s more common to have 1 or 2 large units pumping into ducts in every room of the house.

a_humean 3y ago

The big cost is the upfront cost of insulation and removal the existing heating systems. Speaking about the UK (article is mostly about he US which will have their own problems), we have very poor quality housing stock with effectively zero insulation. You hold your hand to the exterior walls of your typical 2-3 bedroom terrace house (the most common type of home in the UK) in the winter and its just ice cold. For these homes the exterior wall are just solid brick and plaster with no air gaps. Many homes still don't have double glazing and their windows bleed even more heat. These homes go cold quickly when you turn off a gas boiler, and a heat pump just cannot keep up with the heat loss. In addition large numbers of households in the UK have migrated to "combiboilers" heating systems that dispensed with hot water tanks for on demand hot water from their gas boiler. In the process many of these properties have converted the space previously designated for hot water storage to loft extensions or other home upgrades. UK homes are pretty small, and going to a heat pump system means going back to hot water storage, which most UK homes have no space for without costly changes to the home layout/structure potentially including sacrificing parts of precious loft conversions. Frankly we might be better off just knocking down and rebuilding some of our housing stock at higher densities such is the cost of retrofitting and our housing shortages, but there is no political appetite in the UK for any radical solutions like that.

AniseAbyss 3y ago
In my country builders didn't seriously start to consider "insulation" until the 1990s. Gas was cheap so nobody cared. Just turn up that dial! Modern houses and apartments are marvels of engineering though.
pastage 3y ago
What is so special about insulation for heatpumps? You need that insulation anyways. EDIT: ok so the best interpretation I have is that it has just been so cheap with gas that people have not bothered insulating their houses.
- sandworm101 3y ago
  Heat pumps have a solid max heat output that cannot scale as easily as gas heating. So without insulation they can quickly hit a limit. The upper limit for gas system is limited by how much gas can flow through a pipe, which is a huge amount of energy. The upper limit for a heat pump aystem is set by the compressor capacity, which is in turn set by the electrical circuit, and relative temperatures.

NorwegianDude 3y ago

Good question. Seems unlikely that the prices are correct. If it is then someone has a huge incentive to import from other places. The most popular air-air heat pump in Norway with a SCOP above 5 is less than 2500 USD including installation and tax. But, it's also a fact that the US is far behind when it comes to heat pumps and energy efficient homes. The general knowledge in the US about heat pumps is terrible.

nkurz 3y ago
I fear you are wrong. I'm American, and can confirm that heat pumps in the US are still very expensive upfront. There are often grant programs that can offset some of the cost, but for whatever reason they are much more expensive here than Europe. The main issue seems to be that installation is extremely expensive. Less expensive heat pumps are now available here if you are able to do the installation yourself, but installers will only work with the expensive brands they know. They are usually overbooked, and thus have no incentive to lower their prices. The question would be what it would take to get competition in the market at the installer level. Any idea how this was accomplished in Norway?
- sokoloff 3y ago
  Part of the “for whatever reason” is the grant programs you mentioned.

brabel 3y ago

Are you talking about small units you put on your bedroom or whole house units? I've just bought a big heat pump in Stockholm, this model from Nibe, which the guy installing it told me is one of the best: https://www.nibe.eu/sv-se/produkter/varmepumpar/franluftsvarmepumpar/s735 https://www.nibe.eu/sv-se/produkter/varmepumpar/franluftsvar... It warms the whole house via floor heating (IIUC it's hot water circulating) and also ventilates almost all rooms (but that seems to be only for keeping the air in the house clean - it "pulls" instead of blowing warm air or something like that). It cost me a total of 130,000SEK, which is 12,0000 USD (as I write this). Approx. half for the unit and half for installation costs. I don't have the geothermal option where I live because it's a water reserve, but that would be much more expensive, I expect at least twice as much. I didn't buy a cheap unit, there was a cheaper model that they offered for a total cost of 80,000 SEK... but still, where could've I gotten this for 20,000 SEK :D

robinwassen 3y ago
I am thinking of the more basic air/air units rather than this air/water. One well placed air/air can reduce the need for direct electricity heating a lot, even though some might be needed to assist in a bedroom or so. My parents installed a air/air unit in the middle of the house (180kvm) for $2.5k this summer and it keeps the whole house heated except one bedroom that needs some assistance from a radiator.
- brabel 3y ago
  That's about the same size as my house... I also have a air-to-air heater but don't even use it because the central heating is more than enough. But interesting to know it could actually manage almost the whole house if I need it!
ffgjgf1 3y ago
Retrofitting floor heating might be very expensive though? Especially in some older houses
- Lutger 3y ago

quickthrowman 3y ago

> In Sweden the hardware cost around $1k - $2.5k and installation $500 - $1000. It's not a complicated task. These numbers must be for an air to air mini-split unit with one air handler with nearby electricity, $500-$1000 is 4-8 hours of labor. That’s not nearly enough for an entire home. A whole house heat pump with heat exchanger costs substantially more, both in equipment and labor.

soco 3y ago

In Switzerland I was quoted about 25k for an air-water and about 10k more for geothermal. And I mean with it only the hardware and installation - as the house doesn't need piping or whatever. So for some reason you Nordics are quite privileged, and I wasn't able to find out why.

tsss 3y ago

If your Samsung heat pump costs 1-2k you can expect the same product from a German company to cost 7-15k for no appreciable difference. Why buy the German product then? Because the builders who install it will get a cut of course. They don't need your business and will simply refuse the job if you don't buy the most expensive materials. You can add to that cost all the subsidies of the German government, which, as everyone knows, simply increase prices when there is a supply shortage. But these subsidies are tied to other requirements to make your house more energy efficient, like installing a solar power system with batteries (30k€ easily). Heat pumps are a gimmick for rich people that already have well insulated modern homes. For everyone else it is vastly more expensive than gas or oil and in addition, we have to pay taxes for all the subsidies going to those rich people.

_whiteCaps_ 3y ago
If the Samsung heat pump works as well as my Samsung fridge does, I'll definitely look into a German product!

msh 3y ago

You are comparing prices of air2air heat pumps with air to water. The latter is much more expensive and you cannot get them for 1k$ in Sweden.

Glawen 3y ago
indeed, was going to say the same. It cost me around 15k€ to upgrade my house to a air 2 water heat pump in France. time will tell if I will get a return on my investment, the big question will be how long my heat pump is going to last

altacc 3y ago

Depends upon the heating system. A cheap air to air, single unit heat pump does not cost much but if you want anything more then it costs more. A lot of houses with a basic heat pump use it to reduce the amount of other heating used and pump hot air into a single area of the house, with additional electric heaters in other rooms and a water heater for hot water. However to totally replace your entire heating needs with an all-in-one system is much more complicated than that. The heat pump I have alone in Scandinavia costs roughly $6-10k. That's powering water heating in every room plus hot water in the taps, zero additonal heating of air or water required. It's the size of bulky floor to ceiling fridge and does wonders for my electricity bill!

pjc50 3y ago

Could you put some capacity numbers next to those costs? My 5kW air->water system was about £15,000 installed (before government grants).

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

c2h5oh 3y ago

I was quoted around $80k (in central EU) all in for 50KW heating unit. About a third was drilling of silly number of holes (water-water heat pump). Price didn't include updating radiators / installing underfloor heating in the house itself. If I replaced wood pellet boiler I use right now with a heat pump I'd break even in about 20 years, which is longer than the expected service life of the pump..

nagisa 3y ago
Out of curiosity, why did they think 50kW was a necessary amount of energy to heat? Is the building old and poorly insulated? An A/A+ energy class 150m² home barely needs 1/10th that amount. If it was indeed a question of insulation or airtightness, then perhaps spending a part of that money for renovations in that area and only then a fraction of the price for a reasonably-sized heating unit might be sensible. You could also do just the renovations and thus reduce your wood pellet usage substantially as well – already a big win for the environment.
- c2h5oh 3y ago
  Almost 800 m^2, 55cm thick red brick walls with OK, but not great insulation, casement windows. That aside what I wanted to point out is that because of heat pump pricing they are currently not the best choice, economically speaking. It is 6-10x more expensive upfront and won't break even over it's lifetime. By comparison solar panels break even is 6-8 years and after that they are expected to last 20 more years bringing you 2-3x installation costs in savings over their lifetime.

nagisa 3y ago

I got “away” paying almost exactly €10k for fancier ground-source setup using a 6kW Thermia (i.e. Swedish) heat pump (itself about €6k.) IIRC there were definitely cheaper geothermal options back when I was investigating, but I got sold on the ecology aspects of that particular solution as well. I can make some comparisons between the two too – ground-source maintains great COP even if its -20°C or less outside (as it was a couple days ago.) The incoming carrier liquid remains comfortably around 5°C, no matter the season. This also enables passive floor-based cooling. With an air-source heat-pump one would need some sort of a reversible cycle setup, I suspect, or perhaps a separate AC, which would likely bring the total cost of an air-source implementation up a little bit further. It is also no-louder than your modern fridge. My neighbours’ air-source heat pumps’ exterior units were going at it so hard one could have been excused if they mistook there was a busy airport within an earshot. On the other hand if there's already an airport, what does it change if there’re N planes or N+1 planes in it :)

frankus 3y ago
You can do radiant cooling with an air-to-water heat pump just as you can with an air-to-air or water-to-water heat pump. The main issue is managing humidity so that the dewpoint stays below the emitter temperature.
- nagisa 3y ago
  I did not say otherwise :) My point is that with a ground-source the cooling can be “passive” – you don’t actually need to turn on anything but a circulation pump or two once in a while. The downside of course is that its not going to make your already +40°C room into a flu-inducing +18°C one. Its more of a tool to offset a 2°C, maybe 4°C in extreme cases indoor temperature rise. Which is likely more than plenty for many airtight & insulated houses. And indeed, managing humidity is hard. If this sounds at all interesting to the reader, definitely research whether this is applicable in your situation/area at all.