About fucking time. I’ve never understood why they weren’t used to begin with.
they used to be expensive.
And so installers were harder to come by, which means fewer people were told about it. Pretty easy to understand why it took a while to catch on.
Mine is air to water, so all you really need is someone who can plonk it there and then plumbers to do their stuff.
Vast majority of the work for mine was replacing the entire central heating system, but that would have been a good idea even if I wanted a gas boiler because of how old and shit it was.
Now my cat can sleep on top of the large double radiators around the house. Tbh that has to be one of the best features of it, flow temperatures low enough that a cat can comfortably sleep on it.
When i was trying to get a heat pump, i had to listen to a family friend hvac guy yell at me for 10 minutes cus he hates those damn things.
Ohhh I heard some of those! Got told that the heat pump alone would cost more than twice as much as I actually paid for a heat pump, all new radiators and replacing all the old pipework.
My other favorite thing was talking to this one hvac company that only did x brand heat pumps(dont remember), but could not provide performance specs on them. The company couldnt either. Aside from “this one is really quiet!”
So i went with carrier, which had perfornance specs for all their equipment, at multiple different ambient and desired temps.
These cheap mini splits can be installed diy.
You vastly overestimate the capabilities of the average modern human being
That’s incredibly short-sighted since they still paid for themselves.
Not for apartment dwellers.
In many areas, fossil fuel energy is much cheaper than electrical energy, so much so that even with heat pumps operating at 300+% efficiency, it was still cheaper to burn fuel than to use a heat pump.
When piped residential gas cost $0.01/cubic foot, and each cubic foot contains 0.3 kWh of energy, that energy price was comparable to 3.3 cents per kWh. So even compared with a electric heat pump that was 300% efficient, that gas would still be cheaper than electricity that cost $0.10/kWh.
Now that gas is more expensive (national average approaching $0.02 per cubic foot), and heat pumps tend to be more efficient, some up to 500%, the simple math starts to favor electric heat pumps, where a 500% efficient heat pump running at even $0.30/kWh is still cheaper than a gas furnace. Basically, the breakeven point has tripled in just over a decade.
Also, as heat pump technology has improved, they are capable of operating efficiently at lower temperatures than before, so that the real world performance more closely matches the simple calculations in those cold climates. Plus because they work better now, the customers are less likely to notice a performance difference in heating.
They are so much quieter and work a million times better than conventional ones.
Because each apart is now heated/cooled independently, so the tenant can pay utility costs. And heating/cooling are one unit and the price of heat pumps has really come down and are easy to install.
I, too, have watched the Technology Connections video.
One thing that is hard about my unemployment was this was an upgrade we were hoping to make.
They’re not really “climate friendly”. Just more efficient than resistive heaters