I’ll note that this post is paywalled, but the key facts are outside the paywall.
Are heat pumps goo for your wallet or the environment without also having solar panels?
Please don’t take this as me implying something. It’s a question I’ve had for awhile as I’m in a position where I could get a heat pump, but am unsure if it’s a good decision without solar and solace would be difficult for me because of how often my home is shaded.
Yes, because they move heat instead of creating it by burning stuff. This lets them be more than 100% efficient. You can expect something like 300% efficiency averaged over a year for air-sourced heat pumps in the US which are sized correctly for the house they’re in. This makes them a net benefit, even on the current electrical grid.
People also often choose to add insulation when installing heat pumps, as this has the benefit of lowering overall system cost, which makes the situation even better.
It depends on how much of the grid’s electricity is generated with fossil fuels I think. If the majority of the electricity is being generated with natural gas, a gas furnace can potentially use less gas to heat a home. But installing heat pumps also means that as more of the grid’s electricity comes from renewable sources, there will be an immediate drop in the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere to heat homes.
The one I had installed easily uses half of the power to keep my house the same temperature as the old forced air electric heater did.
Yes…and no. It’s complicated. I moved from one shitty rental to another, that had a heat pump and tbh when it’s not one weather extreme or the other the answer is probably yes. The complicated part is in the rental. You see there are several holes in the home that allow daylight through and thus causes insulation issues. As a result my house heats up every day even with the heat pump running and the heat pump rarely shuts off even during the night (Texas). On the other hand the heat pump consumes roughly 50% the energy my old AC did and unlike my old AC also provides heat which in Texas is enough for 99.5% of the year…though this does mean I have a fairly consistent power bill as a result. The heat pump my rental has isn’t very efficient (16 seer I think) and for a while was undercharged. If this house had solar of at least 3kw I think I could run the heat pump on pure solar and never use the grid…but it doesn’t.
Again it’s complicated, I actually love the heat pump…but it’s in a shitty rental. If this were my house we’d probably be having a completely different discussion on performance. I think part of what should happen is the government subsidizing/rewarding landlords for fixing up inefficient homes with updates and for rewarding proper installation of things like heat pumps. I didn’t mention this before but the heat pump was not properly installed either. It is mated to the previous A/C air handler and probably has a refrigerant leak as a result.
For what it’s worth there’s at least two other appliances in my home that should be heat pumps. My dryer, which has horrible ducting issues and consumes massive amounts of electricity and heats the house and pumps the cold air outside. In addition to the dryer I have an electric water heater in the garage that would be fantastic as a heat pump. It would partially cool the garage and most importantly consume some of the heat in the garage for water heating purposes.
When I installed new equipment, I installed a heat pump instead of an A/C as a future proofing move. The furnace I installed is 98% efficient the heat pump is a 9.7 HSPF unit. With the current prices of gas and electricity it will never be cheaper to run the heat pump. I knew that going in, but decided a dual fuel setup was worth a little additional cost in case fuel prices change or I install solar. That was before the current incentives, I’m not sure what they have done to the pricing. With the previous federal incentives and local incentives I only paid a few hundred dollars over a comparable A/C unit.
Yes, even if your local every supplier is burning coal the heat pump will bring more heat in your house that is you were burning the same amount of coal in your home.
The answer is always yes. Heat pumps produce more energy transfer than they consume, giving you higher performance per input.
If you have a natural source of renewable heat (geothermal, solar, etc) then the heat pump only needs to be installed properly to supplement that primary heat source or leverage the heat source (if it’s not capable of being the primary source)
You could argue that it is less beneficial if you get electricity from a coal plant but could heat directly with natural gas or oil. The long term benefit comes from the heat pump’s ability to use any fuel without you spending a dime on new equipment. For example - a 92% AFUE gas furnace or high efficiency oil furnace will never pollute less than the day it’s installed. An electric heat pump may not be ideal when you are fueling it with coal, but when that source gives way to nuclear, solar, or wind your installed heating device will instantly be better (than the gas or oil fueled system) without spending a single cent on your local equipment.
