Harnessing America's Heat Pump Moment
Key topics
The article discusses the potential for heat pumps to become a mainstream heating solution in the US, but the discussion highlights various challenges and concerns, including high installation costs, performance issues, and regional differences.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
36m
Peak period
87
0-6h
Avg / period
17.8
Based on 160 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Oct 24, 2025 at 4:05 PM EDT
2 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Oct 24, 2025 at 4:41 PM EDT
36m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
87 comments in 0-6h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Oct 27, 2025 at 1:11 AM EDT
2 months ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
Right on. I have a heat pump water heater and a heat pump heating system in my HVAC. Getting those installed felt like swimming upstream. Most contractors would try to dissuade me from them.
Luckily, I found a contractor who was skilled and knowledgeable about heat pumps and rebates (back when govt thought climate change was real). Very happy with my heat pump tech.
In my area, about 75% of the HVAC companies have been swept up. Prices are up 75-150%. I got my gas furnace replaced to to beat the ban, and had a fireman who works a side gig do the job for $15k. The bids from the companies ranged from $25-85k
Edit: (or so you mean mini splits?)
If the furnace is a serviceable natural gas unit, keep it. It makes a better backup than strip heat.
1. They are EXPENSIVE. The equipment itself isn’t that expensive tbh but installation is pretty expensive. The government subsidies have made sure that the contractors jack up their own prices by as much.
2. I end up paying more in utilities because electricity is very expensive and heat pumps aren’t nearly as good at heating in the winters as old fashioned gas furnaces when it comes to the cost.
I made the massive investment because I could and I eventually want my house to run completely on rooftop solar as a way to reduce my carbon footprint. But the cost is nowhere near mass market adoption price range.
That said, I've found that in most cases (assuming you're on the right electric rate plan, that's a whole other conversation, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42763695), most homeowners in california actually see operating cost parity or a slight decrease, even with super expensive electricity. Silicon Valley Clean Energy recently did a study substantiating this: https://svcleanenergy.org/wp-content/uploads/Bill-Impacts-of...
But you’re missing my first point though, installing a heat pump system comes with a price tag of tens of thousands of dollars. I’m not doing that if my operating cost is at parity or a slight decrease. It’s the same reason people are no longer incentivized to install solar. And to add to that, installing heat pumps also come with additional costs that can range anywhere from a few thousand dollars to replace the main electrical panel to tens of thousands of dollars for a full electrical upgrade if your house is on knob and tube wiring to reduce fire risks.
I think there's some nuance to that, though. Even replacing a furnace + AC in California amounts to tens of thousands of dollars! It's not that heat pumps are expensive, it's that construction work in general is expensive.
When you frame it in terms of percentage of home cost, it actually feels a lot more reasonable. Robert Bean is a pretty respected voice in HVAC, and shared this article a few years ago (https://web.archive.org/web/20150210053806/http://www.health...). The gist is (and this is focused a bit on new construction, so not entirely apples to apples) that you should budget 3-5% of the home's cost for a bare minimum code compliant HVAC installation. When you look at it in that lens, $20k to replace the most complicated mechanical system in a $3M home is less than 1%.
I recently read a piece about the "Cost disease in services" that was really enlightening (https://growthecon.com/feed/2017/05/15/What-You-Spend.html).
"Productivity growth in the goods sector raises the wage in that sector, but also raises the output of that sector. So the ratio of wage to output - a measure of the cost of a unit of output - stays constant over time. Higher wages in the goods sector put pressure on wages in the service sector, so wages rise over time there. But (taking the exteme position) productivity is not growing in services, and so output is not growing. The ratio of wages to output in services - a measure of costs - is thus rising over time. This is the “cost disease of services”."
While I don't think that's all of it, it is a helpful framing of the economics around these dynamics.
There are some companies out there that are truly price gouging. But many are just pricing around the true cost of labor and to run a construction business. I've done a little writing around this topic too: https://www.heatpumped.org/p/pricing-transparency-peeking-be...
Ultimately, I would love to see upfront prices & operating costs for heat pumps both fall. But there are a lot of tough realities baked into the cost of these systems. They are still a very logical choice for most homeowners at the time of failure. Especially with rebate & incentive stacks in many places, a heat pump actually works out cheaper than a new furnace + traditional AC for many homeowners.
Even if we changed the number to $1M, the overall point remains the same
Mine cost US$250 for the machine, refrigerant included, and another US$80 for the installation. We've had to have it fixed twice due to factory defects. Its heat output is 3400W, nominally consuming 941 watts of electrical power. It's not a great machine, but you're smoking crack.
Skilled labor in the US is expensive! Most of the install costs come from labor, not equipment. Tens of thousands of dollars is pretty typical for a heat pump installation.
(For what it's worth, the person you're quoting is referencing a whole home system, either ducted or multi-zone ductless. I think you're referencing a single-zone ductless. Those are cheaper, but still are typically $5-10k installed from a licensed contractor in the states)
I don't know why it's so expensive here. It shouldn't be, it makes no sense. But it is.
The unit was $1350, I added a line set cover, pad and feet for another $200, and needed about $200 in electrical equipment - it was a long wire run and code requires installing a disconnect box. The only special tool was a hole saw bit for running the coolant lines.
So maybe $1850 all-in, plus 8 hours labor. I’m sure a pro could do it in half the time. But the low end for a pro install is $5k.
I get that they have insurance and warranty or whatever, but that’s a damn juicy margin.
Come to your house to quote, and only land 1/4 quotes maybe.
Schedule the workers
Order the equipment.
Get an electrical permit.
Pay for the truck and all the tools.
Insurance for the company and trucks.
Advertising costs
Warranty and callbacks
I can assure you that this is not the get rich quick scheme you may think it is.
It is in fact a get rich scheme.
Most of the local firms (Dick's local $town hvac/plumbing/electrical) are owned by massive PE firms (Saudi + other billionaires) which pretty much own the entire businesses all over US. They keep the local name to make people believe they are giving business to a local guy.
Another roommate of mine was a plumber.
The guys who do the actual work get paid close to nothing ($20 - $22/hour) and live on day to day basis.
Plumbing company quoted me $3000 to replace a broken water heater in the middle of peak winter. I paid my guy $300 for labor (heaters are $500 - $1000 from lowes depending on how long of warranty you want) and he was super happy for making a lot of money.
I mentioned warranty and insurance.
You don’t need to “schedule workers” if you are owner operating. Maybe you want a (non-skilled) helper to speed up the install, but you absolutely could install solo. That said, you will need a licensed electrician to run the circuit.
In my metro, hvac contractors can get ten-packs of permits for mini-split installs, and at most one out of ten is inspected. It’s a rubber stamp if you’re a pro, and the individual permit is maybe $50.
And that $5k I mentioned is the low bid, which you’ll only see if you know how to find contractors who aren’t private equity fronts. These guys are not advertising, but they stay busy by having the best price. There are shops that will happily charge you double for the same work.
I never said it’s a get rich quick scheme. It is just highly compensated for owners without requiring the level of expertise of something like a plumber or electrician. I’m curious what is happening in the market to support these margins.
Then it took me 2 days between pouring concrete pad for the heat pump, installing the heat pump and bolting it in, running the copper lines, drilling the exit hole, running the drain piping, learning how to use all the tools, running the electric and control cables and installing a new breaker and 220 subpanel, pressure testing, vacuum testing, flaring, releasing vacuum and all the stuff you have to do. I also had to spend several nights watching youtube and get a EPA 608 certification for handling refrigant which took another day.
Wouldn't have been worth it for a single unit, but was worth it for installing 3, and now I can do additional units for basically $0 overhead and of course no one would even have to know if I installed it and now I can order unlimited amount of refrigerants to my doorstep.
Having plumbed my entire house, and done my entire house electrical system, I would say the level of expertise to install a mini split is higher than either alone. You have to do electrical, plumbing, refrigerant handling, pressurized equipment handling, be liable for massive federal/EPA fines if you do something wrong, and on top of that I had to do masonry work.
I know our labour costs are going to be lower, but not that much lower. Glassdoor indicates that salary for a US HVAC installer is about US$60k, and in NZ a local equivalent says NZ$60k, so I’d expect the numbers to be the same.
Oh and that price includes all taxes and excludes rebates (which most of us don’t qualify for anyway)
Suppose we wave a magic wand and everyone in society becomes equally wealthy. That doesn't solve the fundamental problem of a contractor shortage. It just means we no longer have prices as a method for matching contractors with jobs to the same degree as previously. Without prices being bid up as high, there is less incentive to go into contracting, meaning that the shortage is liable to persist for longer.
Hardly anyone wants to do that so we're stuck with the status quo. You're basically stuck either paying through the nose or finding a family/friend with the equipment and expertise or doing it yourself.
Tuning a heat pump vs resistive heat is a much tougher game than it should be. In a moderate climate, I use my ecobee to ensure aux heat doesn't come on until it's below freezing, and it should only come on if something has gone wrong at that point too. Unfortunately, many thermostats by default will use resistive heat in relatively normal scenarios, of worse, when you've programmed home and away times intended for efficiency but disparate enough to activate resistive heat.
Solar + heat pump will take me 10+ years to come out financially ahead (if not longer) but if you're invested for the long term it does come out ahead (even factoring in opportunity cost). The comfort level is also dramatically better in my house due to more even temperature, so I would argue in many situations it can be worth a premium. I thought for sure I was going to need ductless per room to get this level of comfort but it turned out to not be true. If you didn't have ac before, it's also nice to have the option to use it on hot days.
Here in Bay Area my gas furnace is generally off late March through late october and while gas costs have gone up over the years, electricity easily goes up 10% year over year. We are currently in $0.43 per kwh territory OFF-PEAK. This is nearly 3 times the average rate in the United States.
I wont be investing $$$ in heatpumps until i spend $$$$ on solar panels and that wont happen till i replace my roof in a few years.
PS. this is why buying a hybrid a few years ago instead of buying an electric was a good call. Our gas prices stayed pretty much the same, while our electricity is up 30% since that time.
And for the record, every single natural gas water heater is connected to 120V power for the ignition circuit.
Thanks for catching that :)
Heat pumps have no problem operating at a COP of 3-4, so the 120V 12A (1440kW) HPWH would be equivalent to a 240V 25A EWH (6kW)
The 120v model HPWH's I have seen do not have electric resistive elements and instead have around a 1000W compressor, so they recover faster purely on heat pump and can run off a standard 15 amp circuit while staying well under the NEC 80% rule which would be 12 amps, they are closer to 10 amps.
They do require more airflow and are generally noisier due to larger fans and compressor.
Then you have dedicated split system HPWH's like SANCO that use an outdoor unit like a minisplit and pull around 1800 watts putting well over 6kw into the water, these are probably the future or whole house heat pump systems that heat both water and air(and cool) as combined unit.
kwatts_effective [kJ/s] * heating_time_minutes [min] * 60 [s/min] * COP = 4.184 [kJ/kg/K] * (T₁-T₀) [K] * gallon_capacity [gal] * 3.785 [L/gal] * 1 [kg/L]
6.6 kW, for... COP 4, T₁-T₀ = 30 [K] (lower value for warm climate), allowable 30 minute heating time, 50 gallon capacity. A cold climate could double that power requirement, or alternatively double the heating time.
Mine isn't. During a long power outage, I still had hot water.
I was a bit surprised the water heater was working since I was pretty sure it had an electronic control system. So I went and looked, and sure enough, it was electronic, and somehow the LED was flashing blue like normal!
It turns out the electronics are powered by a thermopile which is heated by the pilot light.
This is incorrect. Multiple homes I've lived in had no electric to the water heater, including my current.
With a standing pilot a thermopile is used to generate the tiny bit of electric required for the control.
My Rheem hybrid 220v heat pump water heater only has a 500w compressor but puts 1500-2000 watts of heat into the water pulling it from the hot garage.
I have the choice to run it in high demand mode which will run both the heat pump and electric 4500w element for around 6kw of heat into the water if I need fast recovery.
But you might also be comparing multi-stage variable load DC heat pumps with single stage air conditioners and not an actually equivalent air conditioner.
Rates for my northeast town increased by ~25% in 2024 and are going up by another ~10% this year. It's a hard sell to spend a large amount of up-front money (even after rebates, which decreased this year) to convert to a system that will cost you more than you pay today, and may not work as well in cold weather (every heat pump company I talked to suggested keeping my existing gas heating in place and automatically switching to it when it gets cold enough).
I was also told that the electrical grid in my area is having difficulty keeping up with the push towards heat pumps, which increase load exactly on the coldest nights of the year, when you need heating most.
And it won't even work during some of the coldest winter weeks when you _really_ need it to work.
Maybe I would consider it if I was in, like, Nevada or somewhere.
(It is more expensive to operate than the natural-gas furnace was, though).
Mine struggles if it gets below 30, and might as well not exist below 10. They're not great at low temps.
Mitsubishi hyper heat is indicative of a contemporary inverter design - 100% efficiency to -5f: https://www.mitsubishicomfort.com/articles/mythbusters-heat-...
At -5°F? Hell no!
At +5°F, they rate their own equipment to have a 2.0 CoP.
https://mylinkdrive.com/viewPdf?srcUrl=http://s3.amazonaws.c...
* https://ashp.neep.org/#!/product/156605/7/25000/95/7500/0///...
An LG unit with 2.4 at -4F/-20C:
* https://ashp.neep.org/#!/product/29688/7/25000/95/7500/0///0
Searchable database of cold climate air source heat pumps (ccASHPs):
* https://ashp.neep.org/#!/product_list/
Though it’s worth noting that that first 2 ton rated unit is putting out 0.5 tons (6k BTU/hr) at that temp and rating.
That’s not going to be particularly helpful for a structure that needed 24k BTU/hr during warmer temps, meaning the owner of the unit is likely mixing in a lot of 1.0 BTUs to meet the heat loss at -13°F.
What percentage of the (US) population gets temperatures like that? That's generally mostly IECC Zone 7 (though cold snaps in Zone 6) can happen:
* https://basc.pnnl.gov/images/iecc-climate-zone-map
ASHRAE—an HVAC organization—has data on the coldest and hottest days for areas so that you can design things for the coldest or hottest 1% of the year (4 hottest/coldest days):
* https://ashrae-meteo.info/v2.0/
I think that if you have an older, leaky/ier, less-insulated house you may need to 'brute force' heating your (probably older) domicile. But if you have a <4 ACH@50 air tightness, and reasonable insulation levels, a good portion of the US population could make do with a heat pump.
Mitsubishi publishes data were they have 100% heating capacity at -15C, which some models being 100% at -20C and -23C:
* https://www.mitsubishielectric.ca/en/hvac/home-owners/zuba
At -25C they have 80% capacity:
* https://www.mitsair.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/MEM-20240...
A lot? e.g. Chicago gets it every year
>> > What percentage of the (US) population gets temperatures like that? That's generally mostly IECC Zone 7 (though cold snaps in Zone 6) can happen:
> A lot? e.g. Chicago gets it every year
[citation needed]
Per historical weather data:
https://ashrae-meteo.info/v2.0/index.php?lat=41.960&lng=-87....
It is warmer than -16C/3F at Chicago (O'Hare) for 99% of the time (i.e., except for 4 days a year), and warmer than -18.7C/-2F for 99.6% of the time (2 days).
ASHRAE are the folks that publish the heating/cooling standards that are used in building codes for estimate heating/cooling equipment capacities (Manual J) and selecting the right equipment (Manual S).
Here's a PDF with a lot of locations in the US and CA (and other countries further down), and if you look under the "Heating DB" column, you'll find very few US locations that have -30F under the 99% (or even 99.6%) sub-columns:
* https://www.captiveaire.com/catalogcontent/fans/sup_mpu/doc/...
So unless you're in AK, MN, or ND, long runs of temperatures colder than -20F/-30C don't happen too often. Of course if you have a leaky house with little insulation, you're throwing money out the window/door, so the first consideration for a good ROI is better air sealing and insulation.
Also..
> It is warmer than -16C/3F at Chicago (O'Hare) for 99% of the time (i.e., except for 4 days a year), and warmer than -18.7C/-2F for 99.6% of the time (2 days).
If my heat doesn't work for those days, I'm kind of boned. Four days per year without a working heat pump? That's a mess.
Which is, of course, very expensive to use -- but it's only expensive for those 4 days. Resistive heat can be avoided for the other 361.2425 days in a year.
In the US (as of August of 2025), the average price of residential electricity per delivered kWh is $0.1762 [1].
If using resistive heat averages 4kW during each of those 4 days (it's probably either more than that, or less than that, but ballparks are ballparks), then that's about $16.92 for each of those days. Or: $67.66, per year.
Not so bad, right? Or at least, not "boned."
[1]: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
The design philosophy for using 1% is that you may end up having to run your heating (or cooling) 24/7 to keep up with temperature delta between outside and desired inside, but it will keep up with the demand.
The rest of the time (99%) the mechanicals only run intermittently. Also note that the 1% would not necessarily occur every year: it is just the historical average. The charts also have the 0.4% extremes if you want to be extra conservative, but most building codes specify 1% because that is what experience has shown is a good trade-off.
Part of the process (in the US) is to use what is called the Manual J to determine/estimate/calculate how much energy is needed to maintain a particular temperature (typically ≥70F/21C in winter, ≤75F/24C in summer):
* https://www.acca.org/standards/technical-manuals/manual-j
* https://www.youtube.com/@HomePerformance/search?query=Manual...
> The Cooling Design Day is effectively the "worst case" day for your air conditioning loads. The "worst case" hour of this day determines equipment capacity, fan sizes, and subsequently duct sizes. This largely impacts first cost. The Design Hour also impacts peak KW demand which often has a huge impact on the utility bill.
* https://energy-models.com/blog/hvac-what-cooling-design-day
* https://hvac-blog.acca.org/sizing-selecting-hvac-equipment-p...
* https://www.airequipmentcompany.com/2021/what-does-design-da...
Here's an overview of the design process for one particular municipal jurisdiction:
* https://www.suffolkva.us/DocumentCenter/View/7362/Understand...
I’ve had a gas furnace keep me and the water heated multiple times in a cold weather power outage.
If you have a backup generator, is it too small for your AC in the summer?
I would never use the generator in the summer though, doesn’t get that hot in the Pacific Northwest.
The major manufacturers have systems that will use the heat pump when the temperatures are not 'crazy', and kick in fossil at a certain point:
* https://www.trane.com/residential/en/resources/glossary/dual...
* https://www.carrier.com/residential/en/ca/homeowner-resource...
* https://www.lennox.com/residential/buyers-guide/guide-to-hva...
Depending on the cost of power and fossil fuels, you can program it to switch over once the COP becomes too low to justify running up kWh on your meter.
But whereas in the past heat pumps would have their COP drop around 40F/5C, modern systems can be fairly efficient at much lower temperature nowadays:
* https://neep.org/heating-electrification/ccashp-specificatio...
You have heat pumps running in Alaska:
* https://www.adn.com/business-economy/energy/2024/09/01/energ...
* https://alaskarenewableenergy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10...
Mitsubishi's maintain 200%+ efficiency down to -4℉ (-20℃) and 150% down to -22℉ (-30℃) [1]. Only a few towns in the continental US get below that, and even those aren't going to get cold enough long enough to make it worth it an an all electric home to switch to your emergency electrical resistance heating.
Their capacity doesn't start dropping until you get down to 23℉ (-5℃), dropping to 76% at -13℉ (-25℃).
[1] https://www.coolingpost.com/world-news/study-proves-heat-pum...
It's fine. The only difference when it's super-cold is that the air coming out of it isn't as warm, so the heating cycle stays on for a longer proportion of the time. But it keeps it 70°F inside no problem at all.
Also the winters are mild here so basically everyone has either a heat pump or the further south you go it's just heat strips because heat is rarely used so not worth the cost.
So any kind of blanket statement about heat pumps vs gas heat would be folly, but due to improvements in cold weather heat pumps and solar power are allowing them to make much more sense in more places.
There are many advantages to decoupling fuel combustion from its energy use, burning NG at a power plant relatively efficiently with much better emission controls, then distributing on electric grid for use more than just heating, while allowing the home to heat from many different energy sources and allow for grid down backup as well.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/ng_pri_sum_a_EPG0_PRS_DMcf_m.htm
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
The CoP is often around 2.0 at those very low temps, though (and of course the heat energy demanded is higher).
Regarding cost, in most of the countries I've lived in a large fraction of the cost in the gas bill was the distribution cost. So once you switch to a heat pump, you also switch to electric cooking and even if heating with electricity would be significantly more expensive you would still win. Is that different in the US?
For September, $12.31 of my $27.01 gas bill was variable based on my consumption.
In December, $84.82 out of my $99.65 total was consumption driven.
I've run numbers on whether it'd make financial sense to go electric for heating, and the break even point is in the 30-40 degree vicinity. With temperatures 20 and under a healthy chunk of the year, unfortunately the added expense doesn't make financial sense.
Until it gets under 30. Then you can watch the power meter crank when auxiliary heat kicks on. And we only keep it 65 in the house in the winter.
Luckily I live in the upper Midwest, so it's only that cold for like 4 months. . . Pretty cool. P.r.e.t.t.y. cool
Most cold climate heat pumps run a defrost cycle to melt ice off the outdoor unit. that's different from auxiliary heat.
Cold weather heat pumps help because they stay above 1x for longer, but you also wind up needing to oversize a bit.
There would be an increase only if people were supplementing the heat pump with electric heat, which to be fair is a possibility.
There’s a lot of misinformation about heat pumps, especially by HVAC people who don’t have a lot of experience with them, so they tend to recommend what they’re more familiar with.
But yes, understanding the electricity cost is essential when considering one.
This is completely wrong. The amount of power depends on the temperature delta. When cooling, you are typically not cooling your home to 30 degrees Celsius below the outdoor temperature. However, when heating, you are typically heating your home to around 20 degrees above outdoor temperature. Heating consumes more power than cooling.
(And as long as we're dispelling generalizations: Those deltas do vary wildly based on local climate, such that they're impossible to generalize and typify.
For instance: The city of Saint Paul, Minnesota [USA] has a very different climate compared to the city of São Paulo in Brazil, with accordingly-different heating/cooling deltas.
https://weatherspark.com/h/y/10422/2025/Historical-Weather-d...
https://weatherspark.com/h/y/30268/2024/Historical-Weather-d... )
The real advantage of heat pumps is in displacing high cost fuels.
I'm aware that both my boiler and a natural gas furnace have electric blower motors. It's a lot easier to power them from a generator than it is to have a generator than can power a house worth of heat pumps.
Please remember that traditional aircon is also literally a heat pump. It's perfectly acceptable to have a ducted heat pump and a ducted natural gas furnace both sharing the same ductwork.
In this use, the heat pump and the furnace are just installed series with eachother, with one singular blower motor that is used for both roles. This arrangement is very similar (identical, really) to the layout that combined (heat+aircon) systems have used for many decades.
Power out, or simply very cold outside? Your house still has a natural gas furnace (which can be made work with a fairly small generator), and your rig doesn't require expensive-to-use heat strips for the coldest days either.
I have a house where the first floor is served by a gas/ac combo unit, and the second floor with a heat pump.
I literally see no advantage to the heat pump and wish I didn't have it. It takes forever to heat and cool, comparitively, and likes to ice over when it gets too cold in the winter while running 24/7 doing nothing. The emergency heat eventually kicks in and fixes it, so I'm considering just running emergency heat all winter.
A heat pump in cooling mode works exactly like an AC unit, because that's exactly what it is. So if your AC unit on the first floor cools more quickly than you AC unit (i.e. heat pump) on your second floor, it's because A) your floors are different sizes or insulated differently or something else is different about their construction, B) your units are sized differently, or C) your heat pump has some mechanical problem. But the fact that it's a heat pump should make no difference to its cooling performance.
Don't forget that those costs are going up in large part because heat pump subsidies are being rolled into electricity prices.
Imagine being a ~$100k HHI household and paying $300+/mo for electricity so that $200+k HHI doctor/lawyer/HN households can have subsidized heat pumps and our sleazy contractors, and the dealers, and everyone else upstream) can over-charge us for the privilege (thereby getting their cut of the subsidy).
It's a miracle we haven't all caught hot lead yet.
I live in the mid-Atlantic (US) climate zone, where it's certainly not as cold as the north but definitely goes well below freezing regularly for several months of the year. The place I've lived for 15 years had a heat pump and a (oil) boiler with radiators, and when it was below 40°F (~5°C) I had to switch to the radiators. It's because it's old, everybody told me, modern heat pumps are better! So last year when both systems needed repairs at the same time, I not-entirely-willingly switched to a brand-new 2024-model heat pump. It absolutely could not keep up when the temperature was freezing until they came back and installed resistive heat strips for low temperature---these seem to be a fancy version of the heating elements in a space heater or a toaster. They do not seem to be particularly efficient. And to the extent that my "heat pump system" does now more or less keep the house adequately warm, if not as comfortable as the radiators always could, it's not solely due to the heat pump, but the other stuff they had to put in because the heat pump couldn't keep up.
My experience is far from unique. Maybe it's that they only install the good ones in farther-north locations! Maybe it's that the good ones are just way more expensive! I'm perfectly prepared to believe the factual statements about the physics and the tech. But if we're talking about perception and "why aren't more people looking to install heat pumps", it's because lots of people have experiences like the above, and that is what the industry needs to work on.
That they came back and added resistive heating suggests your contractor may not have been too worried about sizing the system correctly in the first place.
(disclosure/transparency I'm the founder of Quilt, a ductless heat pump manufacturer)
It seems to me that you're helping to close the loop on some of the quality concerns that the parent commenter has. Inappropriate sizing/installation and poor product selection seem like common issues from HVAC installers that aren't particularly well versed on heat pumps.
Wishing you continued success, and that hopefully it'll be available in Canada at some point! And also I remember you from the Scala meetup in Vancouver :)
We'll have a partner in Nanaimo very soon as well.
Im in NY, 6 heads across 3 floors with 2 heads per outdoor unit. 2500sf covered.
Mitsubishi h2i (i think im on my phone). Get plenty warm in the winter as my sole heat source. I could have gotten smaller outdoor units and had resistive backup but I didn’t want that.
395 more comments available on Hacker News