Essays like this filled with AI-generated spew are really irritating. I hope these figures aren't hallucinations, but it jives with my own experience:
Ductless systems averaged around $29,000, but quotes ranged from under $20,000 to over $40,000. Ducted systems averaged $38,000, with bids spanning from under $25,000 to over $50,000—an astonishing 100% difference from low to high for both systems.
This is a non-starter for tens of millions of households. Not just the range, but the low end of the range, which approaches the cost of a new car. Lots of people will look at this, and say, "No thanks, I can get 2 or 3 window-mounted ACs at Walmart for a fraction of the price."
Four years ago when we got a heat pump/mini split the cost was at the low end of the range, but sweetened with a state loan program with 0% interest for the life of the loan. No brainer. I doubt those incentives exist in the current rate environment.
I just paid about $12K to install mini-split heat pumps on a main house and ADU.
Two separate systems.
That's about 1/2 of the "minimum" cited above, and it's for 2 buildings.
This is so similar to the EV panic.
I'm not sure if the article is LLM slop, I only scanned it. But I agree with the main point that it's not the tech holding this back, it's the US population.
I also bought a 2 year old used Nissan Leaf (w/ 15K miles) for $15K. I charge it at home.
Neither of these purchases broke the bank. And both of them will pay for themselves over a few years. Maybe American's should learn to multiply. Then the cost of something over time will make it's adoption a clear winner.
The resistance to electrification is one of the US's biggest self inflicted wounds (after actual gunshot wounds of course).
With the car, my back of the napkin calculation, says it will pay for itself in about 5 years. At ~10K miles/year, and San Diego gas prices of ~$5/gal..
It's hard to judge with the mini-split, since the house didn't have A/C at all before, and the ADU is new, so there is no history to compare.
In the next few years though, I intend to install solar and batteries. This takes a little longer to pay off, but it's getting shorter all the time. Utilitys, especially SDG&E here in San Diego, have been raising rates at ~12%/year for quite a while.
I hope to be totally energy self sufficient in another 1-3 years (including operating the car).
I would expect this prospect to be very appealing to conservative rural residents, and yet for some reason there is a huge support for continuing to be dependent on oil companies.
> I would expect this prospect to be very appealing to conservative rural residents
I am in a conservative rural district right now. Here's the math: 20% are at or below the federal poverty line, and of the remainder there are a huge number of people on fixed incomes or sitting on major credit card or vehicle debts (people own trucks or farm equipment, often related to work). They have very little wiggle room on any major investments, not just clean energy.
Yet people understand the value of solar. There are households and even some farms with solar arrays here. They also know utilities are jacking up prices despite huge wind farms and hydro nearby (this is in part due to local crypto mining ventures that sprouted up 10 years ago, which will likely be joined by AI farms in the coming years.)
People aren't staying away solar because there is "huge support" for fossil fuels. They are staying away from solar (and heat pumps) because they simply cannot afford the cost. They don't have the cash on hand, they will never qualify for loans, and in many cases they are dealing with existing debt or emergency costs.
In the long run, it all pays for itself. Every homeowner should pursue it. The sooner the better.
Especially once complete independence from an electric utility is achieved.
I totally agree with you that the time to install this stuff is at time of construction. Unfortunately real estate developers don't really care about how much it costs to _operate_ a building, they only care about building it as cheaply as possible, and selling for as high a price as possible.
The cost to increase insulation, add solar and batteries, all electric appliances, would all pay for itself over a decade or so.
Most homes in the US are occupied for many decades (not all by the same owner) so the savings are substantial over the lifetime of the building.
Of course, the consumer's savings are the electric utilities losses, and we know who has the pull in policy creation...
Original author here. Those figures are from a local study done last year by the Laminar Collective (linked to in the piece). They do not account for state or federal rebates/incentives. They're included to demonstrate the wide range of installation costs, which can feel arbitrary to a homeowner and undermine their confidence, thus making it less likely that they will choose to install a heat pump.
Comparing the cost of a heat pump to window AC units is missing the point since, as you're well aware, a heat pump provides both cooling and heating. A homeowner who is considering a heat pump is almost certainly replacing a gas furnace and/or a central AC system. When you factor in the cost of replacing two systems with one, plus higher effiency gains/lower operating costs, and money back on rebates, heat pumps can be cost competitive.
Massachusetts (where this study was done) is still offering generous incentives as well as 0% financing through the Mass Save program.
I'm not sure if Joseph used AI in his writing process, but I was one of the folks he interviewed for this piece and I helped proofread it (along with others). So I'd just like to chime in and say that he did put a bunch of effort into writing it, researching it, and fact checking; it's not just AI slop.
In Switzerland there is some neat established method for finding out the needed heating power. Consumption/year x Efficiency / 2000h/year = Max heating power. This should work for most moderate climates, although you should consult your local climate table. https://pubdb.bfe.admin.ch/de/publication/download/2781
Further even if you undersize your heat pump to only 70% of the max heating power, then you still will get out 99% from your heating from the heat pump on average.
We're not replacing our central, forced-air propane furnace because of unreliable electricity. We have stretches where our electricity is out for 1-10 days at a time. That tends to correlate with times when our daily high temperatures are below freezing. The outages are typically caused by trees falling after several feet of snow fall on them before a windstorm finishes them off. We're in rural mountains in Northern California.
We have whole-house backup batteries, which we can charge with a generator for longer outages (we also have solar in summer, but the sun doesn't get above the trees in the winter). The batteries/generator would have to be much bigger to replace that furnace with a heat pump. They will power the propane furnace (mainly the forced-air part). About 1/3 of our heating is firewood, but during deep cold spells, it's hard to keep it above ~55°F in rooms other than the one with the fireplace without help from the furnace.
We do plan to install a mini-split system before too long, and use that when we do have electricity, relegating the central propane furnace to power outages. We already use an evaporative cooler for cooling, which uses far less electricity than AC. We'll only use the AC function of the mini-splits when we have a lot of smoke from wildfires in the area (evaporative coolers blow in lots of outside air).
The pros for heat pumps are numerous. There is the issue of resilience to extreme weather. ASHRAE is funding a project, just getting underway, to create a map, first of the USA but anticipated to be expanded to worldwide, of heat pump resilience in the face of an expected change in the frequency of extreme events. Those wanting to learn more:
Nothing. I have an 8 unit building that is relying on heat pumps in New England. Tomorrow workers will start installing a solar thermal array to complement an existing solar PV array.
I'm doing it to minimize the growth of utility cost in the future. The only reason it's not wide spread is inertia and poorly informed consumers.
This only reason this works for me is a large investment in insulation.
Investing in insulation, renewable energy, and heat pumps. That is all it takes.
FWIW I have a heat pump with natural gas backup installed in Washington state in 2016 and it's been great. As I recall even in 2016 there was no huge argument against it when you have to replace an existing natural gas furnace. Even in Washington it's nice to have AC and with a heat pump you get a more efficient furnace AND AC in one package.
The only part needed to make an AC condensing unit a heat pump is a reversing valve (which can change coolant flow direction based on thermostat input). The cost for this valve is $100-$300. There is no reason to not make every unit a heat pump by default, considering the minimal cost and that you're amortizing the cost of the system over 10-20 years.
With that said, depending on your latitude and climate, non electric backup heat might be necessary (to your point, a fossil gas furnace). Depends on your home envelope thermal efficiency (how long can it maintain heat without additional input or solely with solar input during the day), electrical utility reliability, etc.
Two things combined: uncertainty if the heat pump can handle cold regions making purchasing decisions much more difficult than with normal heating solutions which just work everywhere all the time. And that combined with the huge initial capital cost of in ground heat pump loops required in much of the country due to the cold winters.
This second, the large capital cost from ground excavation or drilling, etc, means heat pumps really only make sense and will see adoption in new houses, not existing houses. At least in places where it actually gets cold regularly. I expect much stronger adoption where simple above ground units are feasible.
I'm not. The problem with air-source heat pumps is that they don't work when it gets really cold (ie, a typical -15F minnesota average low for months at a time). They freeze up and stop working and cannot provide heat.
So for heat pumps to work in the northern parts of the USA (say, Minnesota/Wisconsin/etc) they cannot just be pumping heat from the air. They require geothermal loops.
So that's the two problems I described: weather a heat pump will work for your region of the USA is a complex issue. It's safer and easier to just pick a normal heating system. This uncertainty makes choosing heat pumps less likely in marginal climates like, say, Iowa. Of course this doesn't apply to places, like, say, Texas, which only get brief minor cold. Adoption of heat pumps there is straightforwards.
The follow on is that if you still want a heat pump in the cold parts of the USA you need a ground loop heat pump. And that has a very high initial capital cost, which means they basically only get put in during initial construction, not as add-ons to existing houses.
95% of US population are in temperate climate zones.
Saying "it's a complex issue" is the same kind of ignorant self-induced panic as worrying about EV range for a single digit percentage of long trips.
> The follow on is that if you still want a heat pump in the cold parts of the USA you need a ground loop heat pump.
No, you don't. You just need to accept that your payback period on a system will be longer than in a more temperate climate. It might pay back for itself in 7 years instead of 5, for example.
Spoken like someone with no lived experience of winter. But yes, the vast majority of people do live in temperate regions on the coasts. And for them heat pumps are a great idea. I'm not anti-heat pump. It's great technology.
But saying, "It's not a complex issue at all." is an extremely provincial mindset. For California? Yes. But there's more to the USA than the coasts and south.
And re: capital cost, because of the required in-ground loops the payback is much, much longer than air units which require no excavation. Still, a great choice for new construction if there's a normal heating backup and you can roll in the extra cost to the bank loan. Not so attractive for existing houses.
The "heat pumps don't work in cold climates" myth has not been true for years. Modern cold-climate systems are rated down to -20F. In some regions, for some households, it may make sense to install a "dual-fuel" or hybrid system that retains the gas/propane/oil furnace for backup. The heat pump switches over to the furnace at a designated temperature threshold. The homeowner gets to keep their FF backup while still reducing carbon footprint by 80-90+%.
Anyone saying "heat pumps don't work in the cold" is perpetuating unfortunate misinformation that will slow the adoption curve.
You're assuming I have no lived experience and am just making stuff up. But I live here in the cold and I rented a house heated by a heat pump in my cold region of the USA. The winter experience was quite bad as it struggled with colder snaps and it was an in-ground loop!. And I can't be the only one with this bad experience with heat pumps in their past.
I'm getting sick of people extrapolating their temperate climate experiences to cold climates and painting me as an ignorant at best spreader of misinformation. It's the other way around. I actually live here. I actually have direct experience. Do you? Or are you just repeating the hopeful beliefs that support your opinion you read somewhere? I want heat pumps to work too. They're great tech and save energy. It just doesn't match reality.
You also literally just explained that having two heating systems is sometimes required while saying that heat pumps work by themselves. I'm not sure how to take such a contradictory statement.
New builds here in Ireland for the last few years have been financially incentivised to use heat pumps to the point they basically all are, and there’s talk of making it mandated over fuel based heating systems
Not sure if it’s the fact that I live in the rust belt, but pretty much every provider tried to dissaude me and said they would have to refer me to someone else when I tried to get one quoted last year. They said it’s not an ideal solution for the area, which seems to contradict everyone online that claims heat pumps are awesome.
Just an assumption here, but it's likely that many of the contractors you spoke to are misinformed and/or have had bad experiences installing them in the past. It has nothing to do with the capabilities of the equipment. Check out "The Current State of HVAC" and the following sections in the research piece for more context on this point. The average HVAC contracting business is simply not in a good position to recommend or install a heat pump system.
I thought that might be true, but I interviewed 3-4 different companies and asked them all about this and told them I wanted the tax credit and they all told me the same story. My experience essentially parallels the article, but I would add one additional thing.
When you are making repairs on your house over $10k, and you interview the top contractors in your area with great reviews, very few 0 star reviews. They all say this technology is not really practical.
It’s really hard knowing that everyone is having a great experience having their home fixed by these contractors that all advise you not to do something, to turn around and hire someone who is registered as a Daikin reseller and has an unacceptable number of 1 star reviews.
Heat pump companies have to have decent partners in the field willing to sell their product before consumers are really going to risk spending so much money on their product.
More practical to insulate and just paint your siding and roof white than replace your already existing/working AC. Immediate cooling benefits and no loan hanging over you for X years. Most people have not budgeted or saved for any infrastructure improvements though, so either is a hard sell.
No homeowner is going to replace a functioning system. No one is arguing for that. But furnaces and central ACs don't last forever, so when one of them goes, there's an opportunity for the homeowner to consider a more comfortable, efficient, safer, and healthier alternative (that is also better for the planet).
I sure wish heat pumps were higher in my awareness when I had to replace an old AC/Gas central air stack - though that was many years ago before the efficiencies of heat pumps were quite as nice as the current generation.
Ductless systems averaged around $29,000, but quotes ranged from under $20,000 to over $40,000. Ducted systems averaged $38,000, with bids spanning from under $25,000 to over $50,000—an astonishing 100% difference from low to high for both systems.
This is a non-starter for tens of millions of households. Not just the range, but the low end of the range, which approaches the cost of a new car. Lots of people will look at this, and say, "No thanks, I can get 2 or 3 window-mounted ACs at Walmart for a fraction of the price."
Four years ago when we got a heat pump/mini split the cost was at the low end of the range, but sweetened with a state loan program with 0% interest for the life of the loan. No brainer. I doubt those incentives exist in the current rate environment.