7 ms·

Mission Accomplished? Heat pump adoption has a long way to go

22 points by ssuds 2y ago

readthenotes1 2y ago
I was hoping the Inflation Reduction Act Home Electrification and Application Rebate (HEAR) for buying heat pumps would help, but the money, allocated to the States, seems to be gathering dust where I live.
- DFHippie 2y ago
  And now it will most likely be clawed back.
  - DonHopkins 2y ago
    Not just clawed back, but spitefully used to encourage people to burn coal to heat their houses. Residential rolling coal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal
- roughly 2y ago
  One of the more salient critiques of the Democrats is that they need to stop taking victory laps when they pass legislation and short-changing the implementation. Part of the loss in this last election was because of how little of what they’d gotten passed had actually made its way into the world (well, that, and a total inability to get a message out, followed by a total unwillingness to say whether what they did was good or not, but at least if they’d actually implemented some of what they’d passed, it’d be harder for people to ignore what they’d done.)
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago
    Fair criticism. But structurally the Fed Gov is fairly limited in this regard. Where the Fed can exercise power over the States is to withhold funding that the States need/want in order to push through some change (highway speed limits for example). But you can't force States to spend money on something they don't already have, so there isn't much leverage other than making the funding available and hoping that the States will take it the rest of the way. The EV station rollout is similar -- Congress allocated a bunch of money, but they can't force States to come up with plans and the States have taken a long time to do so (of course these things take time anyway). And now the money is being taken away -- missed opportunity. But not sure what else Congress could have done?
    - kelipso 2y ago
      The highway system must have been done somehow. I don't know the details but there has to be lots of ways to ensure these things get done. Maybe it's lack of political will or maybe it's loss of people who know how to get these things done.
      - insane_dreamer 2y ago
        Right. But the highway system was something that greatly benefited the States themselves as it provided them with new roads stimulating their local economy and creating a great number of jobs (to build the roads). But the States weren't forced to do so, and it took 35 years (I didn't know that until I looked it up[0]). Heat pumps benefit consumers, and climate change, but there's probably less incentive for States to push the program, especially if they don't really care about climate change anyway. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System
    - roughly 2y ago
      Yeah, these things are true, but I think that needs to be baked into the calculus on these bills: getting them passed isn't even half the battle - if you don't have an answer for how to get the money down to the ground, the law's just an interesting piece of paper. On the one hand, fixing the dysfunction at the state level is, you're right, outside the purview of the Feds - although when the Democratic governor and Democratic legislature of a state and the Democratic mayors and city councils of the city are where the money's stopped, I think that's still a rock you can throw at the Democratic party. I also think there's still a belief (fading, thank god) among the Democrats that if they do the right thing and the Republicans stymie them, they'll get credit and the Republicans will lose face (call this the Obama theory of polite governance). At the end of the day, passing bills that get blocked by the opposition doesn't show people your virtues, it shows them your inability to get things done.
superkuh 2y ago
I think we'll see a lot larger scale adoption of heat pumps once they are re-engineered for dealing with 15F average winters (where heat pumps break even vs furnaces) that also go down to -25F for a week (where heat pumps use more energy or fail). But it's good to see small progress in using them in places where it only gets cold rarely and briefly. Not being able to handle the full range of average and peak(valley?) temps means a lot more complexity that prevents adoption.
- ssuds 2y ago
  We’re already pretty much there! https://www.energy.gov/eere/buildings/articles/doe-efforts-send-new-and-improved-cold-climate-heat-pumps-market https://www.energy.gov/eere/buildings/articles/doe-efforts-s... “Bosch, Carrier, Daikin, Johnson Controls, Lennox, Midea, Rheem, and Trane Technologies participated in the challenge. They successfully completed prototype testing at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and other facilities in 2022 and 2023, with some units operating at temperatures as low as –15°F (–26°C) while still meeting efficiency requirements. The companies then moved products into field testing in 23 residential sites located across 10 U.S. states and 2 Canadian provinces. In partnership with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, each site gathered a full year of data. U.S. testing sites were in the Northeast, Midwest, and Mountain regions. In the field, the residential CCHPs reliably provided heat with little assistance from auxiliary elements, even during the coldest winter periods.”
- sandermvanvliet 2y ago
  What hurts adoption here in NL from what I hear (from installers so grain of salt etc etc) is that there aren’t enough people to do installs and then later maintenance. Having looked at getting a heat pump set up in our house (built in 1902) is that even with the extra insulation we put in, the energy needs of a heat pump are huge which means more electricity is needed and what with congestion happening locally is getting to be a problem to supply all houses with enough oomph to run heat pumps, electric stoves and charging EV’s. Even with people having solar installations this remains a problem because we’ve had almost three consecutive weeks with heavy cloud cover and fog as well as hardly any wind. So renewable power generation was down across the board. Fact of the matter is, we adopted many energy hungry solutions without providing the necessary capacity up front. I worked at a startup (Jedlix) where we built a platform to optimise EV charging specifically to deal with these problems (demand shifting) but there are so many hurdles to get this rolled out at a large enough scale to matter. Car OEMs don’t provide the necessary APIs, (local)grid companies won’t provide usage data necessary to steer on so billing/compensation becomes impossible removing the incentive for consumers. It seems so obvious that this would solve a real problem but even though the technology exists it’s not going anywhere. Maddening
CalRobert 2y ago
Big disclaimer - I work for a heat pump company (Quatt.io). I suspect that in Europe, there could be a real opening for heat pumps when people want to install aircon - which more and more people do. Many air conditioners (mini and multi-split air to air units) are also heaters, and when I lived in Ireland in a well-insulated new build house we simply used the aircon as our only heater, and it worked well. Unfortunately, much of Europe uses radiators, and you can't really pump cold water around the house to cool it due to condensation, but even here I think there could be an opportunity with add-on aircons that use the exterior heat pump to vent heat - https://www.quatt.io/quatt-chill https://www.quatt.io/quatt-chill for instance. Anyway, I know the article is about the US, but I thought some perspective might be interesting.
- ssuds 2y ago
  Yes, it’s a similar situation in the US! Many folks (especially on the west coast, where summers have historically been mild) don’t have an AC, so big motivation to install a heat pump is to add AC! Unfortunately, plenty of one-way ACs are still being installed; each of those is a missed opportunity where a heat pump could have been put in and decarbonized heating at the same time
  - CalRobert 2y ago
    A shame, really, because they're so nice. And in the US you can even DIY the install! (It cost twice as much to get one in Ireland because I needed an F Gas certified tech). Is aircon rare on the west coast? I recall basically everywhere having it when I grew up in Sacramento. But I do remember it being less common in San Diego...
    - vladgur 2y ago
      Sacramento is not “on the coast”, more of Central Valley, so it does get hot. Where I live in the “Peninsula” part of Bay Area, we may “want” rather than need A/C maybe 1 week a year. My heating is provided by a 15 year old forced air gas furnace, but I’m in no hurry to install a heatpump because of our ridiculous electrical costs - thanks PG&E. Our current rates seem to already average at $.5/kwh, probably 5 times more than the rest of the country. I would wager that adoption of heatpumps is related to cost of electricity vs gas
jhj 2y ago
I have some of (possibly the?) cheapest residential electric power in the US, at 5.58 cents per kWh all-in cost here in Wyoming, 90%+ hydropower. Absolute lowest cold here each year will be around -30 F / -34 C (there will be several nights in the winter where it gets below -20 F / -29 C), and absolute hottest it will ever be around 85 F / 29 C, but average annual temperature is about 35 F / 2 C. It can snow any month of the year here, with snow on the ground usually between November and mid May. My house was built in 1968 and I have primarily resistive baseboard heating, with a large Mitsubishi mini-split installed by my home's previous owner mainly for air conditioning purposes in major rooms for a couple of weeks in the summer. I live at 6500 ft / 2000 m altitude, so even on the hottest summer days once the sun goes down it gets quite chilly and can get close to freezing, so it's really just for a few hours in the afternoon for a/c purposes. I otherwise use the heat pumps as baseline heat in the winter. I'd like to put trust in heat pumps more because they are obviously more efficient (also as seen by my already low power bill), but lack of heat on certain days in the winter has serious implications here for home integrity, and while this might just be this one Mitsubishi model (though they are less than 5 years old), I haven't been left with a good opinion of heat pump design and repairability in general and am not tempted much to explore heat pumps further. The heat pumps are rated to work down to -5 F / -21 C in the manual, but in practicality it's more like 15 F / -9 C otherwise they just spend a large part of their time defrosting. The models I have don't seem well engineered for reliability or maintenance either, there are important fuses hard-soldered to the main board that are not individually replaceable, and true enough in the middle of winter my HVAC technician and I had to bypass the blown fuses with an automotive fuse we had (same stats) attached with alligator clips, as it would take weeks or months to obtain a new $1500 (!) main circuit board from who knows where. On the other hand, resistive heating usually just works assuming you have power, and I also have two fireplaces as emergency backup if there's no power (though power lines are almost all buried here due to snow/ice anyways). I really would like to see more emphasis on reliability and repairability rather than, like, SEER, HSPF, or COP ratings or whatever.
- masterj 2y ago
  Our heat pump (~2 years old) doesn't seem to have much trouble with -21C, though we rarely get down that low. With frequent temperatures that cold, a combo unit with natural gas backup for the coldest temperatures likely makes a lot of sense.
icameron 2y ago
The HVAC trade at least in the US is interesting. I have dealt with quite a few companies, and collected a range of quotes with wild variations in pricing for essentially what is the same exact system. In my anecdotal experience the residential HVAC industry is full of scams. Maybe it's just poorly run companies that need to break even is the reason for such gouging. A quote of 12,000 USD for a 2 head minisplit system installed from one company, was 5,800 USD from another. And a Mr. Cool DIY kit could be shipped to my house for 3,000. I know there is some skill in braising the lines and evacuating the system, weighing the charge, etc... and the industry is gatekept with certifications, permitting and environmental compliance, but I image most any handyperson can handle an install. Especially with the pre-charged lines that are available in many kits. I've had about a dozen residential HVAC technicians do some kind of work over the past year, due to a warranty claim and they had to visit 6 times, never could troubleshoot the problem, and in the end just installed an entirely new outdoor unit. The first technician claimed the problem was a 'dirty blower' and quoted $1,200 for them to come clean the blower fins on my condensers. The second one said it was definitely a board. Then it was the board on the other end. Then it was the same board they already replaced once. They were all wrong. But their troubleshooting was done over the phone with the manufacturer. I was civil and patient with them, but it was hard to watch. I think the residential HVAC industry is the biggest problem with US adoption... The rest of the world seems to be handling it fine.
- moribvndvs 2y ago
  Competency indeed seems like one of the larger challenges for them in the US, especially during the sizing phase. When I had some mini-splits installed, the amount of bad information and outright lying even from established, top rated contractors was staggering. When we finally found someone that wasn’t completely stupid and quoting “fuck you” prices, they completely oversized the units. In the winter, they are reliably toasty warm even below zero, and in the summer they cool the rooms quickly… too quickly. Like, almost instantly. The result is a terrible increase in humidity, because they don’t run long enough to pull water out of the air. If I run them in dehumidification mode, it turns the room into a meat locker. So, I have to run a regular floor dehumidifier in the summer, much to my chagrin. When I look at the other quotes I got, they were all similarly over provisioned. Very frustrating.
fest 2y ago
On this topic I've been wondering why are the air-air heatpumps significantly cheaper than air-water units? As far as I could tell, there's not that much of a difference (different heat-exchanger, circulation pump instead of a fan, maybe a three way valve for hot water)- but I have hard time seeing how they contribute to the price difference of several thousand EUR. There are also quite a few conversion projects (where an air-air unit is converted to air-water), so I'm wondering if it really comes down to just higher demand for air-air?
- Gibbon1 2y ago
  One thing I found out that's a bit infuriating is committee the the sets national code standards has effectively banned R290 (propane) monoblock heat pumps. No residential indoor or outdoor heat pumps with more than 144 grams of propane. You can have a 20lb tank of propane on the BBQ you store in your garage in winter. Trust us this has nothing to do with the representatives of the companies that manufacture refrigerant on the committee. It's infuriating because a R290 monoblock air to water heat pump is something you could install yourself. And R290 is really cheap and environmentally friendly.
daft_pink 2y ago
I found anecdotally that it was fairly difficult to get a heat pump when I replaced my air conditioner last year. Several reputable and carefully vetted companies suggested that retrofitiing it into a midwestern house to replace an air conditioning, because it only worked efficiently on a certain temperature band. I’m not sure why they do it, but replacing my existing system with a heat pump was heavily discouraged by the vendors in my area. We have boiler radiant heat in our older home not forced air.

22 points by ssuds 2y ago

I was hoping the Inflation Reduction Act Home Electrification and Application Rebate (HEAR) for buying heat pumps would help, but the money, allocated to the States, seems to be gathering dust where I live.

DFHippie 2y ago
And now it will most likely be clawed back.
- DonHopkins 2y ago
  Not just clawed back, but spitefully used to encourage people to burn coal to heat their houses. Residential rolling coal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal
roughly 2y ago
One of the more salient critiques of the Democrats is that they need to stop taking victory laps when they pass legislation and short-changing the implementation. Part of the loss in this last election was because of how little of what they’d gotten passed had actually made its way into the world (well, that, and a total inability to get a message out, followed by a total unwillingness to say whether what they did was good or not, but at least if they’d actually implemented some of what they’d passed, it’d be harder for people to ignore what they’d done.)
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  Fair criticism. But structurally the Fed Gov is fairly limited in this regard. Where the Fed can exercise power over the States is to withhold funding that the States need/want in order to push through some change (highway speed limits for example). But you can't force States to spend money on something they don't already have, so there isn't much leverage other than making the funding available and hoping that the States will take it the rest of the way. The EV station rollout is similar -- Congress allocated a bunch of money, but they can't force States to come up with plans and the States have taken a long time to do so (of course these things take time anyway). And now the money is being taken away -- missed opportunity. But not sure what else Congress could have done?
  - kelipso 2y ago
    The highway system must have been done somehow. I don't know the details but there has to be lots of ways to ensure these things get done. Maybe it's lack of political will or maybe it's loss of people who know how to get these things done.
    - insane_dreamer 2y ago
      Right. But the highway system was something that greatly benefited the States themselves as it provided them with new roads stimulating their local economy and creating a great number of jobs (to build the roads). But the States weren't forced to do so, and it took 35 years (I didn't know that until I looked it up[0]). Heat pumps benefit consumers, and climate change, but there's probably less incentive for States to push the program, especially if they don't really care about climate change anyway. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System
  - roughly 2y ago
    Yeah, these things are true, but I think that needs to be baked into the calculus on these bills: getting them passed isn't even half the battle - if you don't have an answer for how to get the money down to the ground, the law's just an interesting piece of paper. On the one hand, fixing the dysfunction at the state level is, you're right, outside the purview of the Feds - although when the Democratic governor and Democratic legislature of a state and the Democratic mayors and city councils of the city are where the money's stopped, I think that's still a rock you can throw at the Democratic party. I also think there's still a belief (fading, thank god) among the Democrats that if they do the right thing and the Republicans stymie them, they'll get credit and the Republicans will lose face (call this the Obama theory of polite governance). At the end of the day, passing bills that get blocked by the opposition doesn't show people your virtues, it shows them your inability to get things done.

superkuh 2y ago

I think we'll see a lot larger scale adoption of heat pumps once they are re-engineered for dealing with 15F average winters (where heat pumps break even vs furnaces) that also go down to -25F for a week (where heat pumps use more energy or fail). But it's good to see small progress in using them in places where it only gets cold rarely and briefly. Not being able to handle the full range of average and peak(valley?) temps means a lot more complexity that prevents adoption.

ssuds 2y ago
We’re already pretty much there! https://www.energy.gov/eere/buildings/articles/doe-efforts-send-new-and-improved-cold-climate-heat-pumps-market https://www.energy.gov/eere/buildings/articles/doe-efforts-s... “Bosch, Carrier, Daikin, Johnson Controls, Lennox, Midea, Rheem, and Trane Technologies participated in the challenge. They successfully completed prototype testing at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and other facilities in 2022 and 2023, with some units operating at temperatures as low as –15°F (–26°C) while still meeting efficiency requirements. The companies then moved products into field testing in 23 residential sites located across 10 U.S. states and 2 Canadian provinces. In partnership with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, each site gathered a full year of data. U.S. testing sites were in the Northeast, Midwest, and Mountain regions. In the field, the residential CCHPs reliably provided heat with little assistance from auxiliary elements, even during the coldest winter periods.”
sandermvanvliet 2y ago
What hurts adoption here in NL from what I hear (from installers so grain of salt etc etc) is that there aren’t enough people to do installs and then later maintenance. Having looked at getting a heat pump set up in our house (built in 1902) is that even with the extra insulation we put in, the energy needs of a heat pump are huge which means more electricity is needed and what with congestion happening locally is getting to be a problem to supply all houses with enough oomph to run heat pumps, electric stoves and charging EV’s. Even with people having solar installations this remains a problem because we’ve had almost three consecutive weeks with heavy cloud cover and fog as well as hardly any wind. So renewable power generation was down across the board. Fact of the matter is, we adopted many energy hungry solutions without providing the necessary capacity up front. I worked at a startup (Jedlix) where we built a platform to optimise EV charging specifically to deal with these problems (demand shifting) but there are so many hurdles to get this rolled out at a large enough scale to matter. Car OEMs don’t provide the necessary APIs, (local)grid companies won’t provide usage data necessary to steer on so billing/compensation becomes impossible removing the incentive for consumers. It seems so obvious that this would solve a real problem but even though the technology exists it’s not going anywhere. Maddening

CalRobert 2y ago

Big disclaimer - I work for a heat pump company (Quatt.io). I suspect that in Europe, there could be a real opening for heat pumps when people want to install aircon - which more and more people do. Many air conditioners (mini and multi-split air to air units) are also heaters, and when I lived in Ireland in a well-insulated new build house we simply used the aircon as our only heater, and it worked well. Unfortunately, much of Europe uses radiators, and you can't really pump cold water around the house to cool it due to condensation, but even here I think there could be an opportunity with add-on aircons that use the exterior heat pump to vent heat - https://www.quatt.io/quatt-chill https://www.quatt.io/quatt-chill for instance. Anyway, I know the article is about the US, but I thought some perspective might be interesting.

ssuds 2y ago
Yes, it’s a similar situation in the US! Many folks (especially on the west coast, where summers have historically been mild) don’t have an AC, so big motivation to install a heat pump is to add AC! Unfortunately, plenty of one-way ACs are still being installed; each of those is a missed opportunity where a heat pump could have been put in and decarbonized heating at the same time
- CalRobert 2y ago
  A shame, really, because they're so nice. And in the US you can even DIY the install! (It cost twice as much to get one in Ireland because I needed an F Gas certified tech). Is aircon rare on the west coast? I recall basically everywhere having it when I grew up in Sacramento. But I do remember it being less common in San Diego...
  - vladgur 2y ago
    Sacramento is not “on the coast”, more of Central Valley, so it does get hot. Where I live in the “Peninsula” part of Bay Area, we may “want” rather than need A/C maybe 1 week a year. My heating is provided by a 15 year old forced air gas furnace, but I’m in no hurry to install a heatpump because of our ridiculous electrical costs - thanks PG&E. Our current rates seem to already average at $.5/kwh, probably 5 times more than the rest of the country. I would wager that adoption of heatpumps is related to cost of electricity vs gas

jhj 2y ago

I have some of (possibly the?) cheapest residential electric power in the US, at 5.58 cents per kWh all-in cost here in Wyoming, 90%+ hydropower. Absolute lowest cold here each year will be around -30 F / -34 C (there will be several nights in the winter where it gets below -20 F / -29 C), and absolute hottest it will ever be around 85 F / 29 C, but average annual temperature is about 35 F / 2 C. It can snow any month of the year here, with snow on the ground usually between November and mid May. My house was built in 1968 and I have primarily resistive baseboard heating, with a large Mitsubishi mini-split installed by my home's previous owner mainly for air conditioning purposes in major rooms for a couple of weeks in the summer. I live at 6500 ft / 2000 m altitude, so even on the hottest summer days once the sun goes down it gets quite chilly and can get close to freezing, so it's really just for a few hours in the afternoon for a/c purposes. I otherwise use the heat pumps as baseline heat in the winter. I'd like to put trust in heat pumps more because they are obviously more efficient (also as seen by my already low power bill), but lack of heat on certain days in the winter has serious implications here for home integrity, and while this might just be this one Mitsubishi model (though they are less than 5 years old), I haven't been left with a good opinion of heat pump design and repairability in general and am not tempted much to explore heat pumps further. The heat pumps are rated to work down to -5 F / -21 C in the manual, but in practicality it's more like 15 F / -9 C otherwise they just spend a large part of their time defrosting. The models I have don't seem well engineered for reliability or maintenance either, there are important fuses hard-soldered to the main board that are not individually replaceable, and true enough in the middle of winter my HVAC technician and I had to bypass the blown fuses with an automotive fuse we had (same stats) attached with alligator clips, as it would take weeks or months to obtain a new $1500 (!) main circuit board from who knows where. On the other hand, resistive heating usually just works assuming you have power, and I also have two fireplaces as emergency backup if there's no power (though power lines are almost all buried here due to snow/ice anyways). I really would like to see more emphasis on reliability and repairability rather than, like, SEER, HSPF, or COP ratings or whatever.

masterj 2y ago
Our heat pump (~2 years old) doesn't seem to have much trouble with -21C, though we rarely get down that low. With frequent temperatures that cold, a combo unit with natural gas backup for the coldest temperatures likely makes a lot of sense.

icameron 2y ago

The HVAC trade at least in the US is interesting. I have dealt with quite a few companies, and collected a range of quotes with wild variations in pricing for essentially what is the same exact system. In my anecdotal experience the residential HVAC industry is full of scams. Maybe it's just poorly run companies that need to break even is the reason for such gouging. A quote of 12,000 USD for a 2 head minisplit system installed from one company, was 5,800 USD from another. And a Mr. Cool DIY kit could be shipped to my house for 3,000. I know there is some skill in braising the lines and evacuating the system, weighing the charge, etc... and the industry is gatekept with certifications, permitting and environmental compliance, but I image most any handyperson can handle an install. Especially with the pre-charged lines that are available in many kits. I've had about a dozen residential HVAC technicians do some kind of work over the past year, due to a warranty claim and they had to visit 6 times, never could troubleshoot the problem, and in the end just installed an entirely new outdoor unit. The first technician claimed the problem was a 'dirty blower' and quoted $1,200 for them to come clean the blower fins on my condensers. The second one said it was definitely a board. Then it was the board on the other end. Then it was the same board they already replaced once. They were all wrong. But their troubleshooting was done over the phone with the manufacturer. I was civil and patient with them, but it was hard to watch. I think the residential HVAC industry is the biggest problem with US adoption... The rest of the world seems to be handling it fine.

moribvndvs 2y ago
Competency indeed seems like one of the larger challenges for them in the US, especially during the sizing phase. When I had some mini-splits installed, the amount of bad information and outright lying even from established, top rated contractors was staggering. When we finally found someone that wasn’t completely stupid and quoting “fuck you” prices, they completely oversized the units. In the winter, they are reliably toasty warm even below zero, and in the summer they cool the rooms quickly… too quickly. Like, almost instantly. The result is a terrible increase in humidity, because they don’t run long enough to pull water out of the air. If I run them in dehumidification mode, it turns the room into a meat locker. So, I have to run a regular floor dehumidifier in the summer, much to my chagrin. When I look at the other quotes I got, they were all similarly over provisioned. Very frustrating.

fest 2y ago

On this topic I've been wondering why are the air-air heatpumps significantly cheaper than air-water units? As far as I could tell, there's not that much of a difference (different heat-exchanger, circulation pump instead of a fan, maybe a three way valve for hot water)- but I have hard time seeing how they contribute to the price difference of several thousand EUR. There are also quite a few conversion projects (where an air-air unit is converted to air-water), so I'm wondering if it really comes down to just higher demand for air-air?

Gibbon1 2y ago
One thing I found out that's a bit infuriating is committee the the sets national code standards has effectively banned R290 (propane) monoblock heat pumps. No residential indoor or outdoor heat pumps with more than 144 grams of propane. You can have a 20lb tank of propane on the BBQ you store in your garage in winter. Trust us this has nothing to do with the representatives of the companies that manufacture refrigerant on the committee. It's infuriating because a R290 monoblock air to water heat pump is something you could install yourself. And R290 is really cheap and environmentally friendly.

daft_pink 2y ago

I found anecdotally that it was fairly difficult to get a heat pump when I replaced my air conditioner last year. Several reputable and carefully vetted companies suggested that retrofitiing it into a midwestern house to replace an air conditioning, because it only worked efficiently on a certain temperature band. I’m not sure why they do it, but replacing my existing system with a heat pump was heavily discouraged by the vendors in my area. We have boiler radiant heat in our older home not forced air.