(doesn’t help that most HVAC installers in the US are of a relatively conservative bent, no problems trash-talking heat pumps while they try to up-sell you on the latest forced-air system)
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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Oh man, totally. Local HVAC peeps try to claim heat pumps are super expensive and omg stay away...even though it's just an AC that goes both ways. Probably scared of the cut into their gas furnace maintenance revenue.
HOA has banned solar and Gas heat is still way, way cheaper here. I could go heat pump, but I'd be paying 4-5x higher just to stick to my principals.
So glad my state banned the ability for HOAs to do that.
HOA has banned solar How is that legal???
It's 'ugly'. Also the rules were set in the 80s and I guess people didn't care then. And it's not like a law has been passed removing their authority to do so.
Each state is varying levels of stupid. One of the few times where the existence of the Federal government makes sense. They should ban the bans at the Federal level.
I'm in the same boat. The cost to run it would be comparable to what we pay now for heat + AC, but with a $22500-ish installation cost up front, and no chance of recouping any of that through ongoing savings. That's hard to stomach, as much as I'd like to.
How big of a house do you have?!?
Not unreasonably big, but my state started offering rebates on heat pumps some time ago, and the price of installation mysteriously went up by about the same amount as the rebate shortly thereafter. Quite a coincidence, that...
My state has been offering rebates for years and for a 1200 sq ft house installation and the heat pump was about $3k. Going from an old forced air furnace to that just about halved my winter electric bill!
The down sides would be the outer rooms can get a bit chilly, but for me at least it's far from a deal breaker.
Not gonna lie: it's my own fault on this one.
Switching my furnace and hot water heater to heat pump models is 100% on my to-do list for my house. There are even federal rebates / tax incentives I could have taken advantage of this year (hopefully they'll be available next year). I just...haven't. Mostly it's just due to having to schedule work for ancillary parts of the process like removing the flues and replacing the metal panels on the roof where those are now. Those steps aren't strictly required, but I'd like to have them done at the same time.
Easy ban sale of fossil fuel based heating systems.
My gas heater still has at least 10 years of life in it. I don't think there's a market for used central heat systems. And I'd need a panel upgrade.
Those are pretty big roadblocks.
You might be able to use the breaker that the gas furnace fan is using!
The compressors on full house-scale non-split heat pumps are same power draw as AC units, which is many amps more than the peanuts a furnace fan uses, but if OP has an AC unit, the heat pump also replaces it.
I get the complexity though. If I want to upgrade my home to have service for charging electric cars, and all electric heat/cool, the amperage draw is high enough that it would require an upgrade from "consumer"-level to "business"-level power input.
If you've got 100 amp service, as is typical for US homes, it's in theory possible to do things like set up your EV charger to pause when the dryer or oven is running, and end up without the need for a new breaker box.
I would think a full house forced air furnace would have a 60ish amp breaker which can run a herfy heat pump. I could be wrong though.
Where I live there's a likely chance for it to get cold enough for the heat pump to stop working. Now they make special ones that can work down to -15F but those are also more expensive.
I'd like geothermal but that is an upfront cost of $10-25 thousand and a several month lead time for installation. Meaning I'm out that money without any chance of it being recouped for quite a long time, it's going to take 10+y for the savings to make it up in the first place and I'm not sure I'll be in the house long enough for that.
In practice, I see people in your situation spend their additional budget on insulation and an air-source heat pump, rather than go to geothermal.