• Because we live in Canada and our design day heating energy requirement is typically far greater than our design day cooling energy requirement. Add in the fact that best pump efficiency falls way off at design day heating (to half or less of design day cooling) and you end up with equipment that may be able to do heating and cooling but is way oversized for cooling, so lots of people opt to save capital (and potentially maintenance) money by relying on gas heat for the coldest days.

    Because water heating with heat pumps is currently garbage on the residential scale… the heat pump capacity on residential water heaters is quit low, which is fine for keeping the tank warm but not for dealing with a half decent draw, so they all include full electric capacity which means you need the service size and associated operating costs to go along with it. Commercial heat pump water heating isn’t much better, it may get better once CO2 or propane take off as a refrigerant here.

    Because more and more buildings are putting in emergency generators, which require either natural gas, propane or fuel oil. One of those is significantly easisr to install and maintain than the other two.

    •  phx   ( @phx@lemmy.ca ) 
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      23 months ago

      Because water heating with heat pumps is currently garbage on the residential scale.

      Also because we’re already stressing electric infrastructure with what we use now, and few plans to add capacity in any reasonable amount to deal with the massive increase in population, plus electric cars, AC during heat waves etc let alone home heating.

      Gas is efficient for heating, and there’s plenty of other stuff we can and need to look at before we replace that.

      • Also because we’re already stressing electric infrastructure with what we use now

        This is propaganda.

        On the hottest day last week Ontario hyrdo demand was ~24000MW, last night it went as low as 12000MW. There is room to almost double the baseload in Ontario, with actually smart appliances and controls (not SmartTM shit) a ton of fossil fuel heating loads could be replaced with electric without needing any grid level upgrades.