Electric heat is not always 99.9% efficient, resistive heating is.

Heat pumps are more than 100% efficient(compared to resistive heating)

It’s not bs, because we are moving heat, not creating it. You thinking it is bullshit will not change the laws of thermodynamics. Try to think about it this way.

“Cold” is a made up human concept, it really is a lack of heat energy. The coldest is 0K, but even a Midwest winter is waaaaaay above that. Heat pumps (and all refrigerant-based systems) work by changing the phase of the refrigerant from liquid to gas to cool, or by compressing a gas to a liquid. This phase change takes energy from the surrounding air (think about computer duster, the can gets cold) and then pipes it inside, where it can be compressed to release the heat it just picked up from outside. In the summer you flip the reverse switch to cool your house.

Here is an explanation from someone much more eloquent than myself:https://youtu.be/7J52mDjZzto?si=sYlNlpvGnJs16lwk

I just don’t buy this twice as efficient bullshit.

Do you understand how heat pumps work? The heat you’re drawing on is the the heat of the outside compartment on the outside, therefore the heat moved to the inside can be more than just the heat equivalent of the electric energy you put in. That’s how these achieve more than 100% efficiency, in general. In fact if the outside isn’t so cold outside they can achieve 300%-500%.

Now the trick to moving heat from a cold outside compartment to a warmer inside compartment lies in the compression. If you draw even a moderate amount of heat energy into your medium, then compress it, it will turn quite hot allowing you to dump heat into your warm inside compartment. Then as the medium flows out you let it expand and it turns really cold, cold enough that it can draw in heat from the cold outside. But the lower the difference in temperature of the outside air to your expanded medium gets the less heat you can transport per unit of time, that’s why we’re only looking at 200% here.

So you’d rather trust your feelings? Just loon into it if you’re that skeptical.

Arrogantly uninformed. It’s an impressive combination

“at those temperatures”

well, to a heat pump even -40° is still 230K, which is plenty of energy to move around and work with. It may be cold to you, but to a heat pump it’s not.

Don’t you just love it when people decide things are true because they feel it’s true?

That is absolutely bonkers. I put one in myself for my one room garage that I converted to a place to hang. Cost 720$ after tax for a Pioneer mini split. It’s entering its third year in use and I love it. That being said, I wouldn’t be so risky as to put my own in when its task was heating or cooling my home. Just my garage is my problem, the rest is my family, and so I paid. But I got a whole home solution, two floors, Carrier units, for about $15k.

I believe what you’re looking for is out there and not ridiculous price.

The guy you quoted just want to make his monthly paycheck on you alone, because that’s way over anything reasonable

Also in rural America. How did you get someone not to laugh at you when you asked? God I fucking hate the small mindedness around me, but I couldn’t stand the city either. I cannot find someone to put one in my house so I’m going to have to install it myself next summer.

And this is why the comments here miss the point- sure, heat pumps nowadays can work that low but in a lot of places the payoff period is well outside what anyone is looking at.

You’re just repeating what all the gas installers keeep repeating so they don’t lose business.
Every House built after 1990 or houses that have had insulation makovers in the past 20 years are perfectly fine to heat with a heatpump.

I suspect it’s mostly a function of mass availability. Even here in the states ground source heatpumps are rare, even though the systems are more reliable (since there is no equipment exposed to weather) and a shallow borehole isn’t excessively expensive.

I’d forgotten about heat pump clothes dryers. Those are fascinating, and really interesting for older buildings or locations without close access to exterior venting.

Shallow geothermal is basically dead in most of the world because it’s too much hit and miss, the geology is simply too complex and involved (and underground) to predict. There’s also a fuckton of issues with water ingress, minerals that like to expand when getting wet and such. You can’t really take Iceland as an example for countries not straddling a continental rift.

Deep geothermal is utterly reliable but for the longest time drilling that deep was just too expensive. Plasma deep drilling is a solution but it’s still in its infancy.

The US has some of the lowest electricity prices in the world though. Only a couple pennies per kWh higher than Canada. And MUCH lower than pretty much all of Europe.

In 2020 (last year I could find from Canada specifically) Canada averaged 11.25¢ per kWh. The US averaged 13.04¢. The UK averaged 21.91¢, France averaged 19.91¢, Finland 20.56¢, Spain 28.77¢, and Germany 33.39¢.

https://www.electricity.ca/knowledge-centre/the-grid/customer/electricity-rates/

It’s more that Canada uses a LOT of hydro power which is cheap.

The Mitsubishi Hyper heat can work down to -13F, The absolutely best resource I’ve found for heat pump research is the NEEP database which will you give you actual BTU outputs at various ambient temperature readings: https://ashp.neep.org/#!/product_list/
 Also worth considering a geothermal heat pump depending on your geography, as then you have a guarantee of efficiency all year round

Housing, food, car insurance and alcohol are all pretty expensive in Canada

Cellphone plans, internet plans, seriously look into the cost of living in Canada.

Wine and cheese, damn it’s expensive compared to Europe!!!

Electricity is also pretty expensive everywhere in Canada other than quebec

Tim Horton. It’s cheap, but not cheap.

When the context is involving climate, electricity rates, and money, there is little overlap between all of the Americas. It makes sense to tighten it down to the top half (more similar climates, etc) or bottom half (electricity rates for example). Canada has the wealth and the electricity rates to make heat pumps extremely viable, and for the most part climate too. The USA shares a lot of this. The Central/South Americas do not overlap like this with Canada.

But that wouldn’t be accurate because there are South American countries with even cheaper electricity than here, so it’s only the cheapest in North America.

Also not to be too pedantic but central America isn’t technically a continent, and it all falls under North America anyways.

They theoretically could, but the coefficient of performance would go below 1 long before you get close to zero Kelvin. That means it would cost more energy to pump the heat than is pumped, so you’d be better off using an electric heater.

But that’s not sufficient. As the temperature gets colder, it’s not just less efficient but produces much less heat. At the lower temperatures, it may not be able to keep up. Since it would be wasteful most of the year, heat pumps aren’t sized for that

How much did it cost and what rebates are available? I’d love to say fuck Enbridge.

Which is why you have a backup system. I have a net zero house in Saskatchewan, Canada. My Carrier heat pump will operate to -15C, and switches to electric heating coils in the air handler if it’s colder outside. It’s a rather extreme climate here, but in most other places, you’d be fine with some baseboard heaters as backup.