Heat Pump Experiences Page

The New York State Energy Research & Development Authority (NYSERDA) manages the NYS Clean Heat program and advertising programs that tout the advantages of heat pumps.  This page consolidates the experiences of heat pump owners to supplement the material on my Electric Heating page.

Personal communications

Reader from Wyoming

I have some experience with air-source heat pumps. I advised a colleague who’d gotten himself into a pickle by installing resistance heat in a new home in Laramie here when he could not get a natural gas line to his property. His winter heating bills were eye-watering. I explained how he could retrofit an air-sourced heat-pump in the house. This dropped his bills to about a third of what they were, but they still exceeded mine even though my home is larger and older.

I owned two homes, one in the Pacific NW and one here in Wyoming (Cheyenne) where I added the hardware needed to run central air as a heat pump. Even when conditions should have allowed the heat pump to operate as well as one could hope for neither really kept the home as comfortable as gas heat. There is the additional issue of an air-sourced heat pump needing to expend energy to defrost its evaporator coils in practically any environment. Mine had to do so even in dry old Cheyenne.

Comment on Is New York State Coming After Our Furnaces?

I  had an air to air unit in Michigan . My home was built to DTE specs and I was given a special rate. As I recall it was about 7 cents per kwh. It could not maintain 65 degrees on a cold day so the electric heating coils kicked in even though I was burning wood in a fireplace insert. My monthly electric bill was over 400 bucks. Used about 12 cord annually. I couldn’t get it ripped out fast enough as soon as gas became available! High efficiency furnace resulted in heating bills below 80 bucks. Remember, I’m talking 1989 dollars.

Heat Pumps Could Quadruple Your Electricity Consumption

A contact of mine here in Ontario had recently informed me he had a heat pump installed to replace his furnace and told me his electricity usage had quadrupled* since having the heat pump installed!  Quiring him about the total costs of installation and the potential rebate he informed me the total, including conversion of his service from 100 amp to 200 amp as well as a new hydro line cost almost $21K and his grant rebate will be $7,100 so his net costs will be almost $14K!**  At a current approximate cost of 18 cents/kWh we should suspect that will add somewhere between $1,200 to $2,000 per year to his electricity bill or perhaps about what he was previously paying for a natural gas supply! 

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