For anybody in TVA's electricity networks (mostly: Tennessee): they offer an annual promotion to single-family homeowners only to purchase an $1800 AO heatpump waterheater for only $250.
Maths: 85% discount on fancy new waterheater, which also dehumidifies and cools your house (passive result of heatpump).
TVA usually offers this promotion between Thanksgiving and NYE. You can order online from HomeDepot, or walk into a local store [0]. This ends up costing LESS than a new traditional resistive-type heater.
[0] either method: they DO verify SFH (by more than just ZIP code) -- duplexes and contractors not authorized/allowed
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My own $250.00 "TVA homeowner special" (as a licensed electrician):
<https://i.imgur.com/4wCez9u.jpeg> this specific design draws from both bath and bedroom [dual 6" inlets], exhausts into kitchen [single 8" outlet] | utility closet is only 5ft x 4ft (~20sqft)
Don't forget to use a pressure regulator, expansion tank (coldside, only), & (preferably) a sediment filter. Whatever you do: do NOT use a water softener before the tank.
Interestingly, TVA/EPB/Lowes [7] never asked for our swaps (I threw all four oldtanks away).
[7] not Home Depot; AOSmith -eligible, not Rheem (can no longer edit abovepost)
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Didn't know about the gas disqualifier... or the great URL/reference (thanks)!
For future TVA homeowner installers: the website seems to indicate that you MUST use an approved contractor for the rebate — at least December 2025, in EPB/Chatt, this was not required: just had to go to Hixson Lowes and have them look up address and then paid (w/ delivery, not in-stock).
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Less than a decade ago, I helped install a 38kW [•] tankless/instaHot heater (¡¡¡ that's three 240v40a two-pole circuitbreakers !!!) into a beautiful new home. Homeowner is actively doing his part not maintaining the unit in eventual hopes of justify purchasing a new heatpump waterheater.
Godspeed.
[•] I think technically it's 28kW -rated (there's a consumer-installed limit, w/o boilermaker license), but the circuits support more w/o 80% derating applied
> I think technically it's 28kW -rated (there's a consumer-installed limit, w/o boilermaker license), but the circuits support more w/o 80% derating applied
A tankless water heater is not considered a continuous load so there’s no need to apply the 80% rule.
A 60A 2P breaker will have a trip curve that results in a thermal trip for just under 100% of rated current in around 2-3 hours. The fast acting part of the trip curve is magnetic, longer duration trips are thermal.
The trip curve on page 25 of the pdf applies to Square D QO plug-in (residential breakers are usually plug-in, commercial are bolted on) 2-pole breakers rated 120/240V from 45A-60A. Find the 1 (times rated current) at the bottom and follow it up the chart until it intersects with the black area of the trip curve, that is approximately when the breaker will trip at 100% of its rated ampacity. Look at the left hand side to see the time in seconds that it will trip in.
It’s hard to see exactly where it intersects, but it’s somewhere between 7000-10000 seconds, or 2-3 hours.
So, you need to apply the 80% rule to continuous loads because breaker trip curves are adjusted so the thermal overload trips in 3 or fewer hours at 100% of rated ampacity. If you look at .8 times rated load, the line never intersects the trip curve.
Here’s a manual for an A.O. Smith tankless water heater:
On page 10, the 4 element, 7kW per element unit draws 58.33A per 60A breaker, 7000/240 = 29.167A, two elements a piece for 58.33A per 60A breaker.
It’s lot cheaper to wire up a 28kW electric heater if you have 480V three-phase, it’s only 28000/480/1.732 = 33.68A, all you need is a 35A 3P breaker, three #10s and a #10 ground.
240V single phase needs two 60A 2P breakers, four #6s and two #10 grounds, or if it was a single-point connection, one 125A 2P breaker, two #1/0s and a #6 ground.
The 28kW limit is from the Boilermakers Union, not ours [IBEW] =P
As much as I hate AFCI breakers, I do love a well-designed "stupid" heat-response timeout that's in compliance with the NEC. You're correct that residential waterheaters are not "continuous loads" – had slipped my mind.
I used a tankless/instahot heater (and helped install a few hundred in the early 2010s) and am so much happier with my hybrid/heatpump tank-type (it is so much cheaper to operate, requiring a relatively minimal upkeep of: an annual drainage).
Plus: there are no "miminum flow" requirements/bullshit, which results in some tempermental dishwashing among the water-conscientious (sp?).
> The 28kW limit is from the Boilermakers Union, not ours [IBEW] =P
Ahh gotcha, they must’ve pushed for some good ol trade protectionism after electric boilers came out and high-power tankless water heaters are within their wheelhouse or something like that. I wouldn’t consider it a pressure vessel but I don’t blame them for scooping up the work, lol. I’m not in the union myself, but I do manage IBEW electricians and know enough to be dangerous ;)
> As much as I hate AFCI breakers, I do love a well-designed "stupid" heat-response timeout that's in compliance with the NEC. You're correct that residential waterheaters are not "continuous loads" – had slipped my mind.
I believe electric tank style water heaters under a certain size are considered continuous loads, but tankless are not.
> I used a tankless/instahot heater (and helped install a few hundred in the early 2010s) and am so much happier with my hybrid/heatpump tank-type (it is so much cheaper to operate, requiring a relatively minimal upkeep of: an annual drainage).
Plus: there are no "miminum flow" requirements/bullshit, which results in some tempermental dishwashing among the water-conscientious (sp?).
Heat pump water heaters seem amazing, 25% of the power usage of a resistive heater, and especially for $250!
I wasn’t aware of minimum flow requirements for tankless heaters, I suppose it’s necessary to prevent overheating/steam or something? I mostly see tankless water heaters as part of emergency eyewash station installations, most commercial buildings around here either use boiler water for domestic hot water heating or have point-of-use tank water heaters near sinks/bathrooms.
>IBEW electricians and know enough to be dangerous
You definitely sound just like us =P
>minimum flow [for tankless]
Yes, my brother has a kitchen pretty far from his tankless and if you don't have a disrespectful (i.e. anti-environmentalist) flow going, it's going to get cold and then stay that way for quite a while. It is aggravating, even as an occassional guest in his house – the whole damn line has to heat back up, again!.
> . It is aggravating, even as an occassional guest in his house – the whole damn line has to heat back up, again!.
For point sources located far away from the heater, you are supposed to install a return loop. Modern tankless have a tiny (1-3 gallon) superheated tank and recirculation pump designed specifically for this use-case.
You can pry my continuous water heaters from my cold dead hands. What is much more annoying is running out of hot water when you have a peak guest load in your house right before an evening event and everyone is taking showers at the same time after a day out.
Since I use very little hot water otherwise, it pencils out for the environment too! The few times a guest is in a far guestroom and needs to use a small point of use hot water source, the few extra gallons of use to wait for it to kick in is a rounding error.
The two tankless heaters I have installed in my place are by far the single best upgrade I did since buying the house. I often comment on how much better my quality of life is with them vs. before they were installed.
I would never use a water heater with a tank ever again unless forced to. Other than air conditioning it is basically one of the top luxuries I work to provide for myself. My wife can take a bath, 3 other guests can shower all at the same time along with two loads of laundry and a dishwasher cycle going. No worries and no waiting around for an hour for hot water to regenerate. Since it's designed for peak loads and only spins up the second unit on-demand, it's much better in terms of energy use than a boiler designed to support those types of loads it sees 2 or 3 times a year at most.
If I were re-designing my system today I might do a heat pump water heater in-line with a continuous water heater, and the continuous only fires up once the tank runs empty.
In your personal usage preferance (tankless), the only reason you would consider using a tank again is if you wanted a reasonably-efficient backup generator/offgrid/standby (or the free dehumidification/energy savings).
I've used both and from an environmentalist living in a humid subtrop. rainforest, the hybrid tank (heatpump) makes most sense. Thankfully, they also have heating elements (and can run both heat sources, simultaneously).
I have a heat pump hot water heater, and it's been awesome. It's ROI has definitely improved with all the energy price spikes. It's located in my garage (I live in Florida) so there's no shortage of hot air for it to use.
Same — I maintain four (one RHEEM and three AO's).
The AO is a much cleaner/simpler/nicer install. The Rheem stupidly requires duct adapters (for small-space, <700sqft "closet" installations). AO won't last as long, but at $250 who cares?!
This reduces electric infrastructure demand, which is why it's subsidized. Presumably, this saves money (duh) for the company (duh) and possibly the customers (presumable duh). Presumably people who care about the planet understand this.
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Running a single heatpump waterheater is the equivalent of not driving your car, annually, according to TVA (in carbon footprint).
I'm running four [two households, ten people]. What's your question?
> This reduces electric infrastructure demand, which is why it's subsidized. Presumably, this saves money
Short term gain, long term pain. The story of our entire electrical infrastructure the past couple generations. Why invest in capital infrastructure like generation or transmission capacity when you can simply reduce peak demand via stuff like this.
Eventually you run out of cheap tricks and need to actually build things. We are roughly at that inflection point now - brought forward maybe half a decade or so by datacenter demand.
We had it really damn good the past 30-40 years due to investments in all area of the grid our grandparents and great grandparents paid for. Then we decided it was cheaper to let a lot of that stuff age out and deteriorate vs. replacing it via efficiency gains and de-industrialization. We reap what we sow. It was obvious electrical demand was going to increase at some point, and we have run out of the cheap parlor tricks of the past couple decades while we let everything else decay around us.
It's been incredibly frustrating to watch since I was a teenager 30 years ago and figured out why electric companies would pay someone to use less power against the obvious incentives. It's so they didn't have to do their jobs - just sit on capital equipment others paid for and collect rent.
TVA delivers among the least expensive power in the country. This is largely due to substantial nuclear and hydro, albeit with coal and gas-peakers to fill in gaps.
We also have a huge pump-storage facility, and are (foolishly, IMHO) pursuing a second pump facility in Alabama (instead, we should pursue battery electric storage at sub-stations). The currect structure can sink an entire nuclear facility (or deliver, relatively instantaneously by grid standards).
µicronuclear is the next big buzzword in TVA – which I think is smart but question-inducing (e.g. consider the multi-billion dollar Bellafonte facility, which has never generated a single kWH – and has largely been scrapped to lowest-bidding salvagers). I love nuclear energy, but TVA doesn't have the best track-record (despite substantial generation from current facilities).
My personal suggestion for a unified electric america would be to have Texas join the federal grids (i.e. accept national regulation) so that their massive wind and solar can then slosh around the entire continent (similar to how PNW buys most of California's main daytime generator: solar; then offset dips with their own massive hydro). As they operate now, they refuse federal regulation (so don't have any substantial cross-border connections). See: ERCOT (Texas Grid Operator, ideal crony capitalist market IMHO), particularly how they regulate/price MWHs.
Corrosion will destroy the tank's fittings/liner. Quickly.
So quickly, in fact, that it is mentioned multiple times in the installation manual to not do lots of things (no salt-fed softeners in bold/red/all-the-things).
While this may be true (have no knowledge | how does it work w/o salts?), the OEM will immediately void your warranty if you use any sort of homeowner water softener, per both Rheem and AOS installation manuals.
I have both; mine are warranted "platinum|10yrs" — why chance it?
water softeners in general are pretty bad. they're not great for your health, they're terrible for your soil. and the benefits to pipes and appliances are marginal at best. i completely shut down my water softener.
> the benefits to pipes and appliances are marginal at best
It probably depends on how hard your tap water is. My tap water is really hard. because it all comes from a river fed via glacial runoff in the mountains, so a water softener makes a huge difference, to the point where the water even feels different in the shower. But if your water source is naturally softer, then I can see that it would make less of a difference.
The reason the electric utility offers this huge rebate is because they are attempting to reduce their peaking load delivery — a tankless instahot peaks exponentially more than a resistive-heater.
An electric tankless water heater uses around four times more energy than a heat pump water heater.
Natural gas water heaters don’t use electricity.
That’s why the utility is offering rebates on them and not tankless (or tank) electric water heaters. The rebates are incentives to reduce peak electrical demand, which a tankless electric water heater does not do.
Absolutely. Not just because of the heat, but because large parts of Tennessee are subtropical rainforest (~60+" annual rainfall) so dehumidification is absolutely essential. Why not get free dehumidification from heating water?
Installing an air-exchanging heatpump OUTSIDE?!? is absolutely a massive waste of energy in such a climate (and many more).
>isn't noise an issue?
All four of mine are installed in 20sqft utility closets, using insulated ducting to top-wall registers (also, insulated). For my first install, only, I used a solid metal 90° to pierce the wall/inlet (this one is loudest, basically as if the wall weren't there).
Granted, there is definitely a "louder" side (the inlet-sides), but not by much. None of my utility closets are insulated (from surrounding draw rooms), and the entire unit isn't loud enough to justify more than just a layer of sheetrock on both side of the wall/partition.
If this was installed in a garage, it would definitely be known-to-be-on, but not aggressively-so (if you have a workbench outside, e.g.). I don't know the decibel rating, but it's about the same loudness as a stand-alone dehumidifier (same wattage/concept, actually), without walls.
Should you desire the quietest install, insulate the wall (between studs) and use dual 6" insulated ducting, with switchbacks, for both inlet and outlet (that's a lot of hardware). In such an unnecessary installation, it would be whisper-quiet.
I recently had mine installed indoors and regret it.
It's not so much the noise, it's the vibration. The damn thing reverberates through the whole house. In some areas it's quiet, in other areas there's a very disruptive hum.
The worst part though? It has an app which is infuriatingly shit. None of it makes sense, and much of it is silently locked down without informing the user (get used to "Oops! Try again!" messages).
There is no way to shut it up during sleeping hours. I cannot believe there is no option to do so. If I had kids trying to sleep here, I would demand a refund for this reason alone. It is marketed as a super quiet heat pump for indoor installation.
The firmware is cooked. Sometimes the compressor just stays on... I've left it for 36hrs+ and it never turns off. I have to power cycle it.
Fortunately there is an option in the app to use the backup electric heater instead of the heat pump. I'm willing to just use it as a poor electric heater at this point. But... It's broken. It just silently doesn't take effect. Literally as I'm typing this, the room is vibrating due to the compressor while the app reports the electric heater is off.
I've never used a Steibel Eltron tank heater (but have owned their tankless), but neither the AOSmith nor Rheem require an app to use. Both can be placed into "Electric Only" mode via front control buttons == no noise.
The Rheem specifically has a time-of-use relay/powerbox, so you can put a timer onto it which will interrupt ALL heating with a rotary dial/timer. This is entirely mechanical, without computer/app.
Sounds like your unit is cooked (36 hours continues heatpump is very bad for the pump).
A heat pump could win as the best HVAC technology, though a better drilling for ground-sourced ones. Just a shallow drilling (up to 100m) that works in retrofit mode, such as drilling from the basement, would be a great upgrade:
- No outdoor unit that looks awful in many settings
- works well, even in the coldest winter, without a spike in electricity usage, COP 5
- very reliable with long durability
- super quiet, no ambient noise
- 20% more efficient
Currently, drilling is very disruptive in retrofits, but there is progress in compact techniques that might change the equation.
That depends on climate. The longer and colder your winters are, the more you benefit from the reliable efficiency of a ground source. Ground source heat pumps have been the most common choice for heating new single-family homes in Finland for the last ~20 years.
Installation is probably relatively cheaper there due to volume too. In areas where it is less common, there is less competition and fewer options for competent installers.
True but even then there are other criteria too: as I plan to sell the house in 10 years, the extra cost for drilling simply didn't make economical sense (to me). So the "regular" pump had to do, and does it fine.
Yeah, recently saw some numbers for air-to-air vs air-to-groundwater, and it break even after more than 25 years, with more than twice the initial cost
Here in Norway you can get a decent air-to-air minisplit installed for $2k. I've not heard of anyone who paid less than 10x that for an air-to-ground or water-to-ground system, drilling 500-1000 feet is expensive.
The well that you drill will last a 100 years if you don't have bad luck. That is half the cost of installation.
The water/water heatpump unit in my house is 20 years old and has not had any major failures yet. I hope it will run for another ten years before the compressor gives up, but it is indeed approaching its calculated technical lifespan. I estimate it will set me back €10k to have it replaced.
Air/air is the cheaper option over time, even in most of Scandinavia with coldish winters. The main drawback of air/air systems are that they are loud and ugly and therefore annoy both yourself and your neighbours.
Yeah, not worth it in most cases, but when things line up, it is the best.
I've built 3 houses and got a bid on ground source heat for each one. I finally pulled the trigger on the 3rd house because we:
1) Moved where it was quite a bit colder, -20F for a week is common.
2) We have enough land to trench only 6'/2m deep to bury the loops instead of drilling like we would have needed to do on the first 2 houses.
3) There was a tax credit on it
4) No equipment exposed outside
Absolutely love it and it will make it difficult to move away when we want to down size b/c we'll pay more in utilities for half the space.
We also have some air-source on an addition I built, I'd use it anywhere that was slightly warmer than where I'm at.
Bingo. Literally abandonded in Lithuania, air to air is so much cheaper. Some builders even ditch hp altogheter - basic electric underfloor heating + solar panels is so much cheaper.
I'm in New Zealand and my bedroom heater is $20 electric + $20 smart plug + $10 temperature sensor. Winter bill is ~$100 NZD. It would take ~20 years for heat pump to recover install cost alone.
I find that surprising - I'm only slightly north of Lithuania, and the seasonality of solar panels makes them pretty ineffective in the winter, and especially in the pre-dawn when you want to bring the house back up to temperature.
As a Kiwi (now in UK) NZ doesn't get that cold for that long...mostly just wet, unless you're pretty far south.
In UK/other parts of Europe winter gets colder, lasts much longer, humid the entire time (so heat just escapes all over the place). Plus, the buildings here are a lot older - I think upgrading insulation would make a huge difference this side of the world.
I couldn't even imagine Canada. Almost moved there...decided to stay here. No -20c winters for me ty very much.
To jakozaur’s point, there’s plenty of reasons drilling can get cheaper and there’s at least one other company working on it [1]—would love to hear about others! I’m a minimally informed amateur but my intuition is that the way it’s typically done (multiple inch borehole, U-tube geometry) is fairly suboptimal since the diameter is a lot wider than you need it to be just for hydrodynamic resistance and you get losses from the outgoing liquid cooling the incoming liquid. Dropping the diameter should make drilling a lot easier—-you can sink a 5/8”x12’ ground rod with hand tools in the right soil! (you’d still have to figure out how to make the holes meet up but I imagine there are ways of doing this).
The fact that you need to roll out a drilling rig plus crew at all is going to be a large part of that cost. For it to become interesting for the average homeowner the price is probably going to have to drop by something like 75% - but that basically kills any margins for clever new innovations...
What I was trying to get at with the ground rod example is it’s entirely possible that you wouldn’t have to roll out a drilling rig and crew. To zoom about a bit, the main risk for heat pumps is really ugly winter peaks but besides that, ASHPs are perfect 90+% of the time. So the main role I see for GSHPs is backing up ASHPs to shave that peak, and once you scale back their role like that it seems like there’s a lot of ways to cut installation costs significantly.
In some potential future, there is an engineered a plant/fungus in a pot that you place onto the worksite. Months later, with regular sugar-water and hormones, it gives you a root-pipe for pennies a day.
Of course at that point we might not need the cheap pipe in the first place.
Nanobots that manage a plant / fungus / bacteria/‘ / amoeba workforce.
They drill and line boreholes to both anchor the foundations of the building and provide a closed loop system for a reticulated-water ground-sourced heat pump system.
They also use the soil recovered from the boreholes to build the soil-polymer foundation.
In the future, pallets of nutrient-cement are placed on the site and the bio-borg-bot farm also builds the entire building, including all the plumbing and wiring and windows etc etc, with the added benefit that it all looks like some weird alien / xenomorph Gigeresk hive excretion.
That reminds me of a less grey-goo-adjacent idea from a Larry Niven book, in which the base-structure of houses were cheaply made by growing a kind of coral inside a watertight scaffolding.
Given the last few centuries of humans under-estimating nature, I predict that many "nanobots" predictions will turn out to be a kind of optimistic hubris. We'll end up making comparatively minor tweaks to the massive base of existing nanobots called biological life. Especially the multicellular varieties, which have many tested and integrated strategies for building things, such as the towering bipedal mega-fortress my hive mind currently inhabits.
We have a ground-source heat pump for our ADU. We did it because we were curious about just how efficient we could make the house, but I don't expect that it will ever break even financially vs a modern air-source system with resistive backup in our climate (northern New England, typically very few –20˚ nights, –10˚-0˚ more common with daytime highs in the single digits).
It works great, but it's hard to see a way to it making sense for most folks here.
The 'outdoor unit that looks awful' is an interesting quirk especially with US equipment - most Japanese and European residential units actually look fine, I'm not sure why American ones have tended to look especially ugly.
I notice this with electrical stuff too - things like switchboards etc. in residential and light commercial installations we have quite neat stuff that's usually quite streamlined and in light white/grey/cream colours, whereas the switchboards and conduits and thigns I see in videos of US home installations look like grey chunky metal stuff that you'd only see in heavy industrial sites here!
Buying the panel box which is unchanged from the last 70 years and costs $50 less than a nicer new style, but also our houses are big enough the panel is nearly always in a mechanical room so who cares what it looks like.
The ones I think they are referring to a more like industrial control cabinets with DIN mounted breakers, which are indeed (paradoxically) less ‘old industrial’ looking. That Leviton board has a similar look, but with the standard bus bar type mounting in a heavy metal box.
The metal box does serve a useful purpose, which is protecting the flammable wood framing typical in North American construction from fire, where most European and Asian boxes are either much thinner metal, or plastic. Because their construction is often concrete and fire danger is much lower.
Electrical panels are installed in mechanical/electrical rooms or outdoors, there’s zero point in having a cream colored panelboard cover or enclosure. The coating is to protect the metal, not for aesthetics.
Colored conduit is available, but it’s more expensive and specifically used for different low-voltage (under 50V) control wiring, like red for fire alarm wiring, blue for BAS wiring, and so on.
Borehole or the pipe grid they stick under your backyard/garden (if you have a decent sized one) end up way more expensive.
But tbf, AI and robotics are rolling along pretty well. I'm surprised there's not a company that's just build the "this robot installs your borehole/underground pipes in 3 hours by itself" robot.
The solution is of course to get a communal system. As a bonus, drilling one giant loop is significantly cheaper than drilling hundreds of smaller ones.
It doesn't work this way. Dense cities just don't have enough space for geothermal heating. It really works for single-family homes only, or maybe just a slightly more dense areas.
Not to mention that city infrastructure is WAY too expensive to build, anywhere. You'll spend more money on planning than on doing the actual construction.
Granted, this system is being installed on the grounds of a former 112 acre country club that is being redeveloped, so it’s more of a greenfield project than slapping a geothermal loop in a central business district, but it’s a geothermal district heating and cooling system in a city.
Their resulting density (~450 square meters per housing unit) is only a bit more than a dense SFH zone. And they also are able to tap into an aquifer, significantly improving their capacity.
In general, you absolutely can do district-level heating. The former USSR countries are known for doing this on the scale of entire cities. But I don't think it's feasible with geothermal (unless we're talking about Iceland).
>The former USSR countries are known for doing this on the scale of entire cities.
Not today anymore. In my warsaw-pact country, my parents and most of the city residents cut themselves off from district hating since the 2000 and installed natural gas heaters/boilers in their apartments, which is what most people in my city use to this day.
It's because the former commie district heating was incredibly wasteful and inefficient in the post commie era, making it cheaper and more convenient to have you own apartment heating.
Probably the same thing would happen with heat pumps in apartments now, if air-to-air heat pumps could produce enough heat in cold winters.
District heating worked really well with coal/gas power plants because the waste heat was essentially free. But the infrastructure for heat transmission was costly and required constant maintenance. I did calculations for district/distributed heating costs professionally in mid 2000s, and back then they were about even.
The engineering culture in the USSR was also quite poor, so it was easier to build one steam/heat plant rather than hundreds of individual water heaters.
Ground source heat pump owner here in the US. The original system was installed in 2007, and the loop field was designed to "best knowledge at the time". Well in the 20 years since then, NREL changed guidance on how far apart and how deep loops need to be installed. Rightly so, because our circa-2007 is "short looped", it's not sufficient for the house loads, but there is nothing we do about it other than putting on more expensive pumps, more expensive antifreeze and live with heat pump compressors dying pre-maturely because they are working at their design limits. All this makes it as expensive as traditional system (and if we tried to go net-zero with solar, the amount of solar required (because it runs so inefficiently) is larger than our roof area.
So I'm looking at a backup gas boiler to take load of the heatpump/ground loop (house has radiant heat).
And they are not quiet. 5-Ton water to water compressors are not quiet.
And the control system (HDX) and amount of expertise required to keep the thing running is a major barrier to getting low cost maintenance.
Maybe a 2026-designed system will work better and actually live up to the hype you talk about, but there are decades of poorly designed and discarded ground loop heat pumps that have "poisoned the well" if you will.
Does the ground source heat up (or cool down) over time, making it less effective? The deep ground is very well insulated, which is why after a century of operation the London Underground is 10 degrees warmer. I wonder whether GSHP users need to balance their load by (say) consuming more heating than they actually need in winter so that summer cooling remains effective.
I think there are two types of this, only have experience with 1 so far. Within a single season, absolutely. In deep winter entering water temp (EWT) is around 30degF (this is a pretty accurate measure of bulk ground temp). Typical for where I live is 50degF.
Other type is permanent change that persists year over year. Haven't lived here long enough to measure this. But if you pull more heat from the ground in the winter than you put back into it into summer (we use a water to air compressor for AC in summer), then yes, it can happen and does happen. Don't know if we are in this bucket yet.
I wonder if you could cost effectively store heat during the summer, running a system strictly to do that vs doing it as a side effect of conditioning.
Out of curiosity, has the demand stayed the same? I'm asking because you see the same with electricity grids, designed in a different time with much lower demand.
Sorry to hear this, it seems like a great system to me but you have to have the capacity right. I'm planning on getting one in the next year but the drilling will be more than we need and we opt for no glycol (yet) as that also gives us headroom
I don't think system ever met demand when commissioned (we are 3rd owners). 1st owner largely neglected the system (which I interpret as reaction to it not working well), 2nd owner had local company known for "fixing geothermal" do a lot of retrofits (new higher flow pumps, increasing diameter on plumbing within the utility room to decrease "lift/work" required of the compressors, more feedback sensors / logic boards, added backup electric water tank heating for the radiant system, switch to methanol). These fixes have seamed to limit failure modes to a smaller set of things: mainly compressors dying early.
Currently system is running 20% methanol to combat the 29degF EWT (entering water temp) in deep winter. House is in Zone 6a.
One thing I learned in researching all of this is that use of ground source over many years can move the bulk ground temp permanently. (House also has water-to-air water furnace for AC). If heat pulled from ground in winter is not sufficiently replaced by heat added during summer, can move bulk ground temp over time. (If densely packed residential ground loops ever became a thing, I think this is a real risk.). But I am not sure if we have this issue at our place, still in first year, not enough data points.
If you're an individual with an apartment you don't have the choice to drill.
If you're building the apartment building you have the choice to drill for the entire building, and the number of units that benefit mean this is much more cost efficient than with single family homes.
In DACH, there's not really an alternative for many homes. Heat pumps are by now cheaper, more efficient, more versatile and definitely greener than other means of heating.
If you get one, just make sure to get the dimensioning right. They are WAY more complex to plan, install and maintain than traditional heating.
Because this consortium seemingly has nothing to do with receiving license plate assignments. And the acronym seems to derive from your general vernacular, lending its name to many other things.
>[heatpump waterheaters are] WAY more complex to plan, install
Only if you place them within <700sqft (for a typical indoor residential location). Only in areas smaller will you need to duct them, somewhat similarly to:
<https://i.imgur.com/4wCez9u.jpeg> this specific design draws from both bath and bedroom [dual 6" inlets], exhausts into kitchen [single 8" outlet] | utility closet is only 5ft x 4ft (~20sqft)
As an added bonus it'll passively dehumidify/cool whereever it drafts to/from.
> They are WAY more complex to plan, install and maintain than traditional heating.
I'm curious what about them would be more difficult to plan, install, and maintain. Obviously there are many things to consider when retrofitting a building with a central gas furnace... but otherwise why would they be much more complicated than an air conditioning system?
I've had a lot of mold problems with mine. Because they have to be strong enough to handle the coldest winter days, which makes them way overpowered when running air-conditioning in the summer, which means that when you run them in energy efficient mode, they are actively cooling only a small fraction of the time and all of the condensed water just sits there growing mold all day long. It also leaves the home far more humid than usual because it's not removing nearly as much humidity from the air as a less powerful unit running constantly would.
This isn't a problem with regular air-conditioning that is provisioned correctly for the size of your home, because it winds up actively running a lot of the time so the water is draining as new humidity condenses.
Sounds like you've got a single stage/speed heat pump, the good ones nowadays are variable speed, with pretty significant turndown ratios, so oversizing is less of an issue. I've been idly hacking on this site for comparing heatpump stats, if you're curious to learn more: https://www.heatpushers.com/
>In DACH, there's not really an alternative for many homes.
And yet in Austria, most apartment buildings in big cities are still heated by burning heating oil, gas or even firewood. Worst of the worst for air quality.
Walk through Graz in sub-zero winters and it's like you're breathing in a barbeque bonfire. Even your clothes smell like soot when you get home if you've been out too long. Which is bizarre to me, considering how much posturing and chest thumping Austria is doing about how green and anti-Nuclear they are yet they love burring wood and oil. Male this make sense please.
Sure, rich people in the bacon belt living in single family homes in the suburbs or rural areas, have heat pumps, solar panels on the roof and a Tesla in the garage, but that's a different story compared to those living in the city stuck in the fossil fuel stone age, where they have no choice over their rented building's heating method.
How do you convert the city's apartment buildings to heat pumps? Is it a technological limitation? Money limitation? Bureaucratic and political limitation? All of the above?
Austria has really good subsidies for households. The "subsidy stop" the article refers to was stopping 100% subsidies. Austria has an incredibly progressive and green environmental and energy policy.
>Austria has really good subsidies for households. Austria has an incredibly progressive and green environmental and energy policy.
Then why are most Austrian apartment buildings in cities still burning oil and gas for heating and not all switched to heat pumps if it's so green and progressive? Why is Graz air quality getting worse and worse?
> The "subsidy stop" the article refers to was stopping 100% subsidies.
Which article? What subsidies? What are you talking about? I never mentioned anything like this.
Firewood and heating oil isn't cheaper, it merely has lower upfront cost in exchange for a higher total cost. An efficient governance system (whether that's capitalism and banks with loans or renting out the hearpumps or a centrally planned replacement program or anything else) would figure out the financing and save the system money by updating.
Technology can make the incentives even larger. Excess money can make it easier for the governance system to reach the solution. But it's at the point where without any improvement to either an ideal system would figure out how to make the switch happen.
There is also a minor incentive problem here, mainly that a landlord can/will often offload the running costs, Nebenkosten, to the renters indefinitely.
That means they are sometimes economically incentivized to choose an option with lower initial cost but a higher running cost. Governments can/do bend these incentives via taxes but it can be hard/expensive to renovate old complexes (and that part cannot directly be offloaded by the landlord).
That's not true. A heat pump produces 1.5 to kwH of heat per kwH of electricity consumed, so it's already much more efficient than a diesel generator.
Even in winter, electricity from the grid is greener than burning diesel. I didn't find specific numbers for winter, but wind is about 30% of Germany's (just picking the biggest country out of DACH to support the point, not trying to come up with exact numbers) electricity production year-round, and wind doesn't tank in winter like solar does.
So, in short. Installing a heat pump and just taking electricity from the grid is still better for the environment. Of course, having your own solar is great if you live in a house, but you don't need it.
I'm sure you already made up your mind about heat pumps and that I can't convince you otherwise. But for other readers, let me add some thoughts to your points.
1) well, there's a grid. So as long as someone somewhere on your continent produces green energy it is viable and green.
2) arguable. Depends on your legislation.
3) Again, there's a grid. And even considering the worst case of no renewable sources at all: A heat pump (which uses 1kWh of electricity to provide 3-6kWh of heat) powered by a diesel generator is still more efficient than burning the diesel directly. Now add efficient combined cycle power plants, wind, biomass, hydro and battery storage systems...
We are 40 years in back when it comes to grid infrastructure investmets. Grid is not some magical thing that has infinite capacity and transfer speed and costs.
The reason why powerplants have to be strategically distributed around the country and have to consist of multiple different power geration sources.
Cyting Germany’s cancelor „Going full green was a strategic mistake”
Ps. Heat pump is as effective as the heat source it can use..
> [it] become[s] cheaper than gas heating within 11 to 14 years
This a no-brainer for buildings with high energy use. But we looked into getting a heat pump last year but it doesn't pan out because our house (15 years old) has a very low energy use and we would not recover the costs (about 20K euros after subsidies) for 20+ years.
It did for me. 40-year old furnace was starting to sound bad and subsidies locally were excellent; I now have a 3-ton heat pump and my house is fine in winter or summer for far less money than gas. It might have been harder to justify without subsidy, but we do need people to make this shift and a lot of homeowners will not consider things with 20-year ROI.
Yes. It also depends on the age of your gas heating as in Germany you get 20% subsidies when your system is 20 years or older, unfortunately this subsidy decreases 3 percentage points every year so when we are due it will be about 5%.
in my case: 3k at most for a replacement gas furnace, and heat pumps would require new wirings as well. Many things would need to break at once to make it worth considering when you have older homes
New homes with mandated PV and battery, that's another story.
Where I live every house has the wiring for AC anyway, so a heat pump only needs a different valve in the system you will always have (this is about $50 in parts, but they charge thousands extra for it)
I paid for it anyway - my furnace was 50 years old (probably 60% efficient when new), and I have no idea how bad the AC was. That said, for less money I added more insulation to my house and that has a better ROI. (unfortunately the design of the house doesn't allow for even more insulation even though I could save a lot more if it could be done)
> [it] become[s] cheaper than gas heating within 11 to 14 years
They also always stop the savings estimates right before the expected lifespan of the heatpump, at which point you have to buy a new unit which destroys the actual savings
At the moment, heat pumps are mostly retrofitted to homes not designed for heat pumps, which adds to the cost. You can't compare that work to a future heat pump swap which is a much smaller job.
I'm building a house right now, it's much cheaper to invest in insulation, well designed window placement and passive cooling (ground/air or ground/water exchangers) than heat pumps and other high tech solutions.
Heat pumps are like pellet stoves in Europe a few years ago, the day the subsidies go away nobody wants them anymore.
1. EV sales are skyrocketing in most of the world.
2. EV sales going down does not contradict what that person said, unless you have data about people who already own EVs are suddenly switching back to combustion, which is not observed.
If you have any data contradicting those, I'd love to see them, otherwise I think you're just spouting rot.
... They didn't. Globally, and in the EU and China, they're rising fairly healthily (the EU did have a ~flat year in 2024, but 2025 and so far '26 have resumed growth). They're down a little in the US, but the US is a particularly awkward market for them (preference for large cars, and domestic manufacturers are rather behind the curve).
... Where are you getting that figure? BEV sales grew by about 30% in Europe last year.
> And those will be removed as EU is going through energy and resources crisis.
... Which is making petrol cars more expensive to run. Right as EVs are starting to get cheaper than petrol cars. In Ireland, say, an id.Polo starts at at 20k EUR, after a 3500 euro subsidy. A _normal_ Polo starts at 25k. Even without the subsidy, the EV version is still cheaper.
And petrol is 1.90eur/litre right now and rising. A Polo does about 20km/l, so 950eur/10,000km. The id.Polo does 13.3 kWh/100km, that is 0.133kWh per km. On a normal 24 hour tariff of 30c/kwh, that's 399eur/10,000km. If you're okay with charging it between 2am and 4am, and are on a smart meter plan with cheap early-morning energy (you probably should be if you have a BEV) it's more like 100eur/10,000km. If you have solar panels, it's likely approximately free.
(If you want to get a bit weird, some providers offer free electricity on weekends in exchange for more expensive energy during the week, so if that fits your usage pattern... Some European countries, though not Ireland, have providers who'll offer tariffs based on spot price plus a margin, so in some cases you can even get paid for charging it, as spot prices can go negative! That said, if you want to do any of the seriously esoteric stuff, you're probably looking for something with more range than the base id.Polo.)
So given that, if you have space for a charger at home... why are you buying the petrol version? I think 2026 will actually be a bit of a bumper year for EVs; they're finally beginning to get to the price level where they're cheaper than the equiv petrol car _even if you ignore running costs_.
And this is Ireland, which has about the highest electricity costs in Europe.
(This isn't just the Polo, btw; VW EVs generally come in a bit cheaper than the equivalent petrol version after subsidies, though the id.Polo may be the only one that's cheaper even _without_ subsidies right now. Which broadly makes sense as it's the newest.)
As a PSA, mini splits are pretty easy to self-install, and it can save you a bundle, even when buying all the equipment new. Lots of youtube videos on how to do it, though I'd add that most of them show using a manifold with analog gauges to do a vacuum test. You should really get a digital micron gauge and pull a deep vacuum.
Good point, though you generally don’t really have to handle coolant for mini splits, they come precharged. You mainly have to add more if you have a longer lineset.
I’ve heard the online EPA course/test for coolant cert is pretty easy, though.
The main thing is just making sure you test the lineset well, including deep vacuum decay, and ideally a nitrogen high pressure test.
I run daily comparisons between a gas boiler and a heat pump in the UK. Given that gas is cheaper than electricity, a well-installed and well-controlled gas boiler can still be cheaper to run. Heat pump running costs can drop drastically when combined with solar and battery storage, but that requires a much greater upfront investment.
I'm no expert on UK energy pricing, but the main difference between a boiler and heat pump is that heatpump can be, eg "500% efficient" - a COP of 5. So even if a KWH of energy is 2x the price for electricity a heatpump often comes out ahead.
Electricity in the UK is often 3x or more expensive than electricity for the same energy content. We have some of the most expensive electricity in the world.
Yeah a COP of 5 is very good. 3 is much more typical.
And OP is right. When I've looked into it you aren't going to save any money going to a heat pump; in fact it will likely increase costs slightly.
So it really only makes sense to do when you need a new boiler. If you don't, it makes way more sense to get solar because that's also good for the environment but actually saves you money.
COP of 5 when running in perfect conditions (load, EWT temps, variable stage compressor, infinite heat sink/source). You might want to research how realistic constant COP of 5 really is.
I've ended up with a "hybrid" system, which (claims to) automatically choose which of gas and electricity is cheaper on a minute by minute based on COP derived from temperature. I have solar panels but not a battery. On net, it's ended up as roughly the same price as the old gas boiler. Better CO2 emissions but not that much cheaper.
It's not automatically linked to rate updates. There's probably a way of automating that for Vaillant systems?
(Shoutout to ProllyInfamous, who's been making the great point that in many climates HW systems that also cool and dehumidify are a great benefit. Not here at 56N, though)
On one of your graphs you have the CO2 per day of gas and heat pumps but the two use different scales on the same graph.
Another graph in a footnote table shows the heat pump is delivering 6x the heat of the gas boiler, which feels like it should be mentioned in the text when you say it costs 3x more.
And actually that makes the previously mentioned CO2 graph even more misleading.
Seems like a decent place to point out that there are good savings to be had on heat pump running costs with a smart controller designed for heat pumps which can learn the dynamics of your building then preheat when tariffs are low or outdoor conditions are favourable.
I work for homely energy which has such an offering, but fwiw I genuinely think it's a good product. It's been studied by Salford uni in their energy house lab, so if anyone's interested maybe dig into that for a more neutral verdict.
I have always wondered if a heat pump is even worth it if you don't have solar, all well and good the government giving massive discounts on heatpumps but not for a combined heatpump/solar install which would probably actually push most people towards it
IMO we don’t place enough emphasis on the gain in comfort: my home is a solid 21°C at all times since we replaced our aging gas boiler. The larger radiators, lower water temperature and “always on” operation have removed the temperature swings.
Heat loss in our home is high (single skin brick), but our bills over the course of the year are on a par with having the heating running for 12h a day. They are substantially more expensive during the winter when temperatures drop below 5°C, but that isn’t noticeable when averaging the bills out over the year.
Got to do our roof in the next couple of years so solar is a natural next step for us.
I think there's one big issue for massive electrification and insulation of buildings: renting.
As a renter, I have no incentives to invest thousands in my home's betterment because I will have lost those when I am gone. As an owner, I have no incentives to make my apartment/house better because I don't live in it and I don't pay the energy bills.
Something has to be done about that if we want to combat climate change. I know in France it is now forbidden to rent again or sale when the renter leaves if the home's energy grade is F or G (A is best) but it is probably loosely enforced/easy to circumvent. And it is too damn slow ! This is for regulation but maybe there are other levers ?
As a renter I would basically have to wait for energy prices to skyrocket for it to make economic sense. I hate this situation.
Another big problem is NIMBYism and ideological opposition to air conditioners.
Installing a heat pump can require (city) permits, permission from your landlord (if renting) or HOA/condo association (if you own a flat in a shared building) which can either be or feel impossible to get.
Some cities have either actually or de facto (through requirements/regulations that are impossible or unaffordable to meet) banned air conditioners, resulting in people buying inefficient monoblock units that can't be used for heating.
Edit: Other regulatory hurdles come from rules about refrigerant handling. Refrigerant must only be handled by experts who are certified in proper handling and recovery (and who, of course, are now in high demand and charging princely prices for their work). This made a lot of sense in the times where 1 kg of refrigerant had 10 tons CO2e in global warming potential, ozone depletion potential or other dangers.
Nowadays, a skilled layperson can probably set up an air conditioner with quick-connect couplings by themselves, but they aren't legally allowed to. These cost something like 500 EUR, contain less than 1 kg of R32 with a GWP of 675, so let's say 500 kg CO2e of harm if it leaks. If you passed a law that landlords cannot prohibit installation, and any electrician that passes a quick online training can install them, you could have them all over the place very quickly.
These could then be used for covering some or all of the heating load in winter, but they'd also alleviate suffering in summer, and that's luxury, and we can't have that (especially as it uses energy to provide the "needless" luxury!)
> As an owner, I have no incentives to make my apartment/house better because I don't live in it and I don't pay the energy bills.
In a rental market with more supply than demand, having more efficient / cheaper heating is an advantage to attract tenants - but this kind of market in residential housing is typically rare these days.
Which is why governments need to enforce this by regulation, e.g., in my country landlords are required to meet insulation / heating / ventilation standards that often end up with their rental housing being better insulated and heated than the homes that the landlords live in themselves.
If you own an older home and are renting it out, you'll often find that the heating capacity is too low for the modern standards, and in that case, a heat-pump is usually the most cost effective solution.
Well, there are heatpumps made to slot into a window frame (ex: https://www.mideacomfort.us/packaged.html ). The ones I'm familiar with are made for double hung windows, which are more common in the US, though. But might be worth a look?
“ A total of around 575,000 residential heat pump units were sold across 11 European countries from January to March 2026, up from 494,000 in the same period in 2025”
Not a big increase on a relatively small base. What is the takeaway here?
2.3 million a year for something with a 20-30 year lifetime is a lot. It's not quite enough for "in 20 year everyone will have one", but you only need another 5 or 10 years of similar 15% growth to get there.
Do the places you are referring to not require heat? If so I don't see why having a separate heating and cooling system would be cheaper to maintain than a single system. Come to think of it I don't see why a heatpump would be more expensive to maintain than split AC. I guess there is some extra circuitry to make sure it doesn't ice up in the winter and maybe backup resistance heating builtin.
"Heat pump" can mean many things, from essentially "split A/C" (air-air heat pumps) to ground-source heat pumps, using floor heating for the output, warm water production from the heat pump, etc.
But not all electric motors are paired such. Which is the point: a heat pump and an AC are "the same thing" at the gross level, but that doesn't mean all ACs have all the bits and bobs necessary for them to act as heat pumps.
I think they mean "air exchange" (split AC) vs "heat pump" (dig into the earth to draw/eliminate heat). Not saying that's the right definition though. I am guessing at an auto-correction of what they meant.
Dug into the ground, we usually call a "ground source heat pump", or less accurately, "geothermal". The normal split systems are "air source heat pumps". AC is a heat pump without a reversing valve.
A heat pump is not necessarily dug into the earth. Rather, the flow of the heat pump is moving heat (thermal energy) from outdoors to indoors or the other way around in an air conditioner.
Depending on the direction of the coolant flow, you get either a indoor heating or cooling unit. This is best demonstrated by going in front of the outdoor unit of a heat pump, when they are cooling, the outdoor unit generates heat because it's compressing gas, which then is then expanded when it reaches the indoor unit, generating cold. Exactly like a refridgerator.
it makes sense combined with solar, I think. Hot weather usually means a lot of solar energy you can ideally use to cool your home. I still wonder why there isn't as much PV activity in Greece. I see solar water heaters on nearly every roof, but not solar energy.
imagine the President of the US and his "braintrust" accidentally making the world much more green and efficient by forcing a radical reduction in oil dependency
while they purposely end climate-change research including destroying billions in observation satellites by deorbiting them
the history written about this decade is going to be wild, if we survive it
EU severely reducing its fossil fuel imports from Russia in 2022 cut down natural gas usage by 17% and overall energy consumption by 3%. So yeah, increased price due to scarcity help a lot in shifting around the energy mix.
It's a bit shit that hits poorer people relatively more than richer people. Governments can reduce this impact by subsidizing sustainable alternatives (like heat pumps). It's still leading to inequality (unless you give more subsidy to the poor), but at least overall people will hopefully benefit.
Governments should have been full bore pushing subsidies and cost breaks for phevs, home solar, evs,and hear pumps for the last decade.
Covid was the wakeup call that globalization was dying a slow death, and the first trump that world cop America was also on the way out.
Oil dependence in a top level national security concern of the last 150 years (hey, what really triggered WW1?), yet the primary means for independence has been politically suppressed for 50 years.
How soon would we have has better PV, better batteries, better heat pumps with proper subsidies and research starting with the 70s oil shocks?
A significant proportion of the European population will only ever talk about heat pumps when they are in a social setting which allows for free conversation. And they haven't shut up about it for about 20 years now. It used to bore me to death.
Shame on The Netherlands: ~89% of homes still use natural gas in some way for heating [1], and their government are now "scrapping the obligation to purchase a heat pump in 2026" [2].
Yeah big surprise that the populist government didn’t achieve anything and rolled back green initiatives. Good thing that they fell, sad that it took so long.
Stupid symbolic politics to own the greens. Good thing is that heatpumps are the most rational choice for new homes, so I don’t think much damage was done.
If governments would get their act together and build nuclear power…
End users could have simple resistive heating.
But no, in the name of invitation and net zero, end user are forced to bear the cost and maintenance burden of much more complicated equipment systems.
The latest nuclear reactor built in Europe was in France and took 17 years and its costs were 23 billion euro (roughly 27 billion $) with this amount of money you can basically install around 750000 heat pumps costing 30000€. So no it is probably not arse-backwards. (Germany alone would need 20-25 of them and it is unlikely that we can build more than 3-4 at the same time and even that is unlikely…)
Now pick the best (least costly / swiftest build) new power reactor build in the last ten years anywhere in the world.
And anyway, your numbers are disingenuous, because it ignores the fact that heat pumps need electricity to power them, and that nuclear power reactors can provide district heating and that, and that the mean time between failures for the average split system heat pump is 7 to 10 years and that heat pumps sometimes fail in ways that the ozone depleting refrigerant to escape.
It’s evident the average commenter on this subject hasn’t run the numbers on a full cost benefit of the various options.
A mix of nuclear / hydroelectric / combined cycle gas turbine power plants provided ample electricity for end-users to make use of cheap to manufacture heating technology (resistive), low maintenance, low replacement costs.
> Now pick the best (least costly / swiftest build) new power reactor build in the last ten years anywhere in the world.
Unless you can pay the workers the same rates, and it's politically acceptable to the electorate to use the same standards, this is as irrelevant as the fact (yes, I have done the maths on this) that it's *technically* possible for China to divert an affordable percentage of its aluminium output over a decade to build a genuine planet-spanning power grid with 1Ω electrical resistance so you can have your mid-winter midnight electricity supplied by the mid-summer midday on the opposite side of the planet.
> and that nuclear power reactors can provide district heating and that
I have a heat pump. It works both ways, which means that unlike district heating, it also cools down the building in summer.
> that heat pumps sometimes fail in ways that the ozone depleting refrigerant to escape.
"Can" is also doing a lot of heavy lifting even if such things hadn't been banned.
> A mix of nuclear / hydroelectric / combined cycle gas turbine power plants provided ample electricity for end-users to make use of cheap to manufacture heating technology (resistive), low maintenance, low replacement costs.
Hydro is cheap, but nuclear isn't. Hydro also works as a buffer (and pumped hydro as storage), so if you're combining it with stuff anyway, may as well combine with PV. Even small-scale domestic rooftop PV (which is the most expensive PV) is cheaper than nuclear at this point, so cheap that it makes sense to use as a fencing material even if you never get around to using it for power generation.
For anybody in TVA's electricity networks (mostly: Tennessee): they offer an annual promotion to single-family homeowners only to purchase an $1800 AO heatpump waterheater for only $250.
Maths: 85% discount on fancy new waterheater, which also dehumidifies and cools your house (passive result of heatpump).
TVA usually offers this promotion between Thanksgiving and NYE. You can order online from HomeDepot, or walk into a local store [0]. This ends up costing LESS than a new traditional resistive-type heater.
[0] either method: they DO verify SFH (by more than just ZIP code) -- duplexes and contractors not authorized/allowed
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My own $250.00 "TVA homeowner special" (as a licensed electrician):
<https://i.imgur.com/4wCez9u.jpeg> this specific design draws from both bath and bedroom [dual 6" inlets], exhausts into kitchen [single 8" outlet] | utility closet is only 5ft x 4ft (~20sqft)
Don't forget to use a pressure regulator, expansion tank (coldside, only), & (preferably) a sediment filter. Whatever you do: do NOT use a water softener before the tank.
Important caveat:
> You must swap out an old electric unit; switching from gas to electric doesn't qualify.[0]
That’s a bummer; totally would have done this otherwise
[0] https://www.hotwater.com/water-heater-rebates/tva-heat-pump-...
Interestingly, TVA/EPB/Lowes [7] never asked for our swaps (I threw all four oldtanks away).
[7] not Home Depot; AOSmith -eligible, not Rheem (can no longer edit abovepost)
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Didn't know about the gas disqualifier... or the great URL/reference (thanks)!
For future TVA homeowner installers: the website seems to indicate that you MUST use an approved contractor for the rebate — at least December 2025, in EPB/Chatt, this was not required: just had to go to Hixson Lowes and have them look up address and then paid (w/ delivery, not in-stock).
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Less than a decade ago, I helped install a 38kW [•] tankless/instaHot heater (¡¡¡ that's three 240v40a two-pole circuitbreakers !!!) into a beautiful new home. Homeowner is actively doing his part not maintaining the unit in eventual hopes of justify purchasing a new heatpump waterheater.
Godspeed.
[•] I think technically it's 28kW -rated (there's a consumer-installed limit, w/o boilermaker license), but the circuits support more w/o 80% derating applied
> I think technically it's 28kW -rated (there's a consumer-installed limit, w/o boilermaker license), but the circuits support more w/o 80% derating applied
A tankless water heater is not considered a continuous load so there’s no need to apply the 80% rule.
A 60A 2P breaker will have a trip curve that results in a thermal trip for just under 100% of rated current in around 2-3 hours. The fast acting part of the trip curve is magnetic, longer duration trips are thermal.
Here’s a link to a Square D breaker guide: https://ressupply.com/documents/square_d/QO_and_QOB_Circuit_...
The trip curve on page 25 of the pdf applies to Square D QO plug-in (residential breakers are usually plug-in, commercial are bolted on) 2-pole breakers rated 120/240V from 45A-60A. Find the 1 (times rated current) at the bottom and follow it up the chart until it intersects with the black area of the trip curve, that is approximately when the breaker will trip at 100% of its rated ampacity. Look at the left hand side to see the time in seconds that it will trip in.
It’s hard to see exactly where it intersects, but it’s somewhere between 7000-10000 seconds, or 2-3 hours.
So, you need to apply the 80% rule to continuous loads because breaker trip curves are adjusted so the thermal overload trips in 3 or fewer hours at 100% of rated ampacity. If you look at .8 times rated load, the line never intersects the trip curve.
Here’s a manual for an A.O. Smith tankless water heater:
> https://assets.hotwater.com/damroot/Original/1000/100306523....
On page 10, the 4 element, 7kW per element unit draws 58.33A per 60A breaker, 7000/240 = 29.167A, two elements a piece for 58.33A per 60A breaker.
It’s lot cheaper to wire up a 28kW electric heater if you have 480V three-phase, it’s only 28000/480/1.732 = 33.68A, all you need is a 35A 3P breaker, three #10s and a #10 ground.
240V single phase needs two 60A 2P breakers, four #6s and two #10 grounds, or if it was a single-point connection, one 125A 2P breaker, two #1/0s and a #6 ground.
The 28kW limit is from the Boilermakers Union, not ours [IBEW] =P
As much as I hate AFCI breakers, I do love a well-designed "stupid" heat-response timeout that's in compliance with the NEC. You're correct that residential waterheaters are not "continuous loads" – had slipped my mind.
I used a tankless/instahot heater (and helped install a few hundred in the early 2010s) and am so much happier with my hybrid/heatpump tank-type (it is so much cheaper to operate, requiring a relatively minimal upkeep of: an annual drainage).
Plus: there are no "miminum flow" requirements/bullshit, which results in some tempermental dishwashing among the water-conscientious (sp?).
> The 28kW limit is from the Boilermakers Union, not ours [IBEW] =P
Ahh gotcha, they must’ve pushed for some good ol trade protectionism after electric boilers came out and high-power tankless water heaters are within their wheelhouse or something like that. I wouldn’t consider it a pressure vessel but I don’t blame them for scooping up the work, lol. I’m not in the union myself, but I do manage IBEW electricians and know enough to be dangerous ;)
> As much as I hate AFCI breakers, I do love a well-designed "stupid" heat-response timeout that's in compliance with the NEC. You're correct that residential waterheaters are not "continuous loads" – had slipped my mind.
I believe electric tank style water heaters under a certain size are considered continuous loads, but tankless are not.
> I used a tankless/instahot heater (and helped install a few hundred in the early 2010s) and am so much happier with my hybrid/heatpump tank-type (it is so much cheaper to operate, requiring a relatively minimal upkeep of: an annual drainage). Plus: there are no "miminum flow" requirements/bullshit, which results in some tempermental dishwashing among the water-conscientious (sp?).
Heat pump water heaters seem amazing, 25% of the power usage of a resistive heater, and especially for $250!
I wasn’t aware of minimum flow requirements for tankless heaters, I suppose it’s necessary to prevent overheating/steam or something? I mostly see tankless water heaters as part of emergency eyewash station installations, most commercial buildings around here either use boiler water for domestic hot water heating or have point-of-use tank water heaters near sinks/bathrooms.
>IBEW electricians and know enough to be dangerous
You definitely sound just like us =P
>minimum flow [for tankless]
Yes, my brother has a kitchen pretty far from his tankless and if you don't have a disrespectful (i.e. anti-environmentalist) flow going, it's going to get cold and then stay that way for quite a while. It is aggravating, even as an occassional guest in his house – the whole damn line has to heat back up, again!.
> . It is aggravating, even as an occassional guest in his house – the whole damn line has to heat back up, again!.
For point sources located far away from the heater, you are supposed to install a return loop. Modern tankless have a tiny (1-3 gallon) superheated tank and recirculation pump designed specifically for this use-case.
You can pry my continuous water heaters from my cold dead hands. What is much more annoying is running out of hot water when you have a peak guest load in your house right before an evening event and everyone is taking showers at the same time after a day out.
Since I use very little hot water otherwise, it pencils out for the environment too! The few times a guest is in a far guestroom and needs to use a small point of use hot water source, the few extra gallons of use to wait for it to kick in is a rounding error.
The two tankless heaters I have installed in my place are by far the single best upgrade I did since buying the house. I often comment on how much better my quality of life is with them vs. before they were installed.
I would never use a water heater with a tank ever again unless forced to. Other than air conditioning it is basically one of the top luxuries I work to provide for myself. My wife can take a bath, 3 other guests can shower all at the same time along with two loads of laundry and a dishwasher cycle going. No worries and no waiting around for an hour for hot water to regenerate. Since it's designed for peak loads and only spins up the second unit on-demand, it's much better in terms of energy use than a boiler designed to support those types of loads it sees 2 or 3 times a year at most.
If I were re-designing my system today I might do a heat pump water heater in-line with a continuous water heater, and the continuous only fires up once the tank runs empty.
In your personal usage preferance (tankless), the only reason you would consider using a tank again is if you wanted a reasonably-efficient backup generator/offgrid/standby (or the free dehumidification/energy savings).
I've used both and from an environmentalist living in a humid subtrop. rainforest, the hybrid tank (heatpump) makes most sense. Thankfully, they also have heating elements (and can run both heat sources, simultaneously).
Go to the dump and find an old electric unit, slap it in the corner of your garage?
There is small chance of this working. The address lookup (when ordering) verifies through public records how your waterheating occurs.
So would only work if no public records of your house is available (and then would probably become much more complicated with paperwork).
Using Zillow/Trulia, you can verify if your house's information is publicly available (under features/amenities).
I have a heat pump hot water heater, and it's been awesome. It's ROI has definitely improved with all the energy price spikes. It's located in my garage (I live in Florida) so there's no shortage of hot air for it to use.
>>Florida>> "no shortage of hot air"
hot HUMID air – which heatpumps love!
Draw your inlet from [at least one] humid bathroom source, if you can. Always use insulated ducting to lessen local condensation.
----
I always smile knowing that using hot water doesn't cost any more than cold, at least when the AC would otherwise be cooling (offset).
Same — I maintain four (one RHEEM and three AO's).
The AO is a much cleaner/simpler/nicer install. The Rheem stupidly requires duct adapters (for small-space, <700sqft "closet" installations). AO won't last as long, but at $250 who cares?!
>at $250
after subsidy
>who cares?!
fellow taxpayers, fellow ratepayers, people who care about the planet, etc. etc.
>fellow ratepayers
This reduces electric infrastructure demand, which is why it's subsidized. Presumably, this saves money (duh) for the company (duh) and possibly the customers (presumable duh). Presumably people who care about the planet understand this.
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Running a single heatpump waterheater is the equivalent of not driving your car, annually, according to TVA (in carbon footprint).
I'm running four [two households, ten people]. What's your question?
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edit/tone (educatable moments): <https://www.hotwater.com/water-heater-rebates/tva-heat-pump-...>
> This reduces electric infrastructure demand, which is why it's subsidized. Presumably, this saves money
Short term gain, long term pain. The story of our entire electrical infrastructure the past couple generations. Why invest in capital infrastructure like generation or transmission capacity when you can simply reduce peak demand via stuff like this.
Eventually you run out of cheap tricks and need to actually build things. We are roughly at that inflection point now - brought forward maybe half a decade or so by datacenter demand.
We had it really damn good the past 30-40 years due to investments in all area of the grid our grandparents and great grandparents paid for. Then we decided it was cheaper to let a lot of that stuff age out and deteriorate vs. replacing it via efficiency gains and de-industrialization. We reap what we sow. It was obvious electrical demand was going to increase at some point, and we have run out of the cheap parlor tricks of the past couple decades while we let everything else decay around us.
It's been incredibly frustrating to watch since I was a teenager 30 years ago and figured out why electric companies would pay someone to use less power against the obvious incentives. It's so they didn't have to do their jobs - just sit on capital equipment others paid for and collect rent.
TVA delivers among the least expensive power in the country. This is largely due to substantial nuclear and hydro, albeit with coal and gas-peakers to fill in gaps.
We also have a huge pump-storage facility, and are (foolishly, IMHO) pursuing a second pump facility in Alabama (instead, we should pursue battery electric storage at sub-stations). The currect structure can sink an entire nuclear facility (or deliver, relatively instantaneously by grid standards).
µicronuclear is the next big buzzword in TVA – which I think is smart but question-inducing (e.g. consider the multi-billion dollar Bellafonte facility, which has never generated a single kWH – and has largely been scrapped to lowest-bidding salvagers). I love nuclear energy, but TVA doesn't have the best track-record (despite substantial generation from current facilities).
My personal suggestion for a unified electric america would be to have Texas join the federal grids (i.e. accept national regulation) so that their massive wind and solar can then slosh around the entire continent (similar to how PNW buys most of California's main daytime generator: solar; then offset dips with their own massive hydro). As they operate now, they refuse federal regulation (so don't have any substantial cross-border connections). See: ERCOT (Texas Grid Operator, ideal crony capitalist market IMHO), particularly how they regulate/price MWHs.
> Running a single heatpump waterheater is the equivalent of not driving your car, annually, according to TVA (in carbon footprint).
This seems a lot but for utilities which still have coal plants it seems accurate if the reduced demand allows them to close the coal plant down.
A typical car emits 4.6 tonnes CO2 per year. https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...
Heat pump saves around 3,760 kWh per year. https://www.energystar.gov/products/heat_pump_water_heaters/...
Coal emits 1.02 tonne CO2/MWh = 3.8 tonnes CO2 per year savings from the heat pump. Natural gas emits 0.44 tonne CO2/MWh = 1.65 tonne CO2. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=48296
That's a pretty substantial saving which will kick in when the next administration reverses Trump's absurd orders to keep existing coal plants open.
/r/ TheyDidTheMath [thanks!], cited, too
You mean "clean coal" isn't clean?!?
[•] <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwP2mSZpe0Q> ClimateTown
> Whatever you do: do NOT use a water softener before the tank.
I'm curious why not? I can't immediately think of a reason why that would be bad, but I admittedly know hardly anything about plumbing.
Corrosion will destroy the tank's fittings/liner. Quickly.
So quickly, in fact, that it is mentioned multiple times in the installation manual to not do lots of things (no salt-fed softeners in bold/red/all-the-things).
Possibly obvious point, water softeners add salt to the water.
Not all water softeners add salt to the water. nuvoh2o sells a water softener that does not use salt.
While this may be true (have no knowledge | how does it work w/o salts?), the OEM will immediately void your warranty if you use any sort of homeowner water softener, per both Rheem and AOS installation manuals.
I have both; mine are warranted "platinum|10yrs" — why chance it?
and then you heat the salt, which is even better!
Correct. This is the reason.
water softeners in general are pretty bad. they're not great for your health, they're terrible for your soil. and the benefits to pipes and appliances are marginal at best. i completely shut down my water softener.
> the benefits to pipes and appliances are marginal at best
It probably depends on how hard your tap water is. My tap water is really hard. because it all comes from a river fed via glacial runoff in the mountains, so a water softener makes a huge difference, to the point where the water even feels different in the shower. But if your water source is naturally softer, then I can see that it would make less of a difference.
In MD, they had rebates for gas-fired instant hot water heaters and tanked heat pump water heaters, but not electric instant water heaters.
Makes no sense...
>not electric instant water heaters
The reason the electric utility offers this huge rebate is because they are attempting to reduce their peaking load delivery — a tankless instahot peaks exponentially more than a resistive-heater.
An electric tankless water heater uses around four times more energy than a heat pump water heater.
Natural gas water heaters don’t use electricity.
That’s why the utility is offering rebates on them and not tankless (or tank) electric water heaters. The rebates are incentives to reduce peak electrical demand, which a tankless electric water heater does not do.
> which also dehumidifies and cools your house (passive result of heatpump).
Wait do you install these indoors? I get it's pretty hot in Tennessee, but still got some winters? Also isn't noise an issue?
In most of Australia these are installed outdoors. Pool heaters is another one where one could harvest indoor heat.
>Wait do you install these indoors?
Absolutely. Not just because of the heat, but because large parts of Tennessee are subtropical rainforest (~60+" annual rainfall) so dehumidification is absolutely essential. Why not get free dehumidification from heating water?
Installing an air-exchanging heatpump OUTSIDE?!? is absolutely a massive waste of energy in such a climate (and many more).
>isn't noise an issue?
All four of mine are installed in 20sqft utility closets, using insulated ducting to top-wall registers (also, insulated). For my first install, only, I used a solid metal 90° to pierce the wall/inlet (this one is loudest, basically as if the wall weren't there).
Granted, there is definitely a "louder" side (the inlet-sides), but not by much. None of my utility closets are insulated (from surrounding draw rooms), and the entire unit isn't loud enough to justify more than just a layer of sheetrock on both side of the wall/partition.
If this was installed in a garage, it would definitely be known-to-be-on, but not aggressively-so (if you have a workbench outside, e.g.). I don't know the decibel rating, but it's about the same loudness as a stand-alone dehumidifier (same wattage/concept, actually), without walls.
Should you desire the quietest install, insulate the wall (between studs) and use dual 6" insulated ducting, with switchbacks, for both inlet and outlet (that's a lot of hardware). In such an unnecessary installation, it would be whisper-quiet.
I recently had mine installed indoors and regret it.
It's not so much the noise, it's the vibration. The damn thing reverberates through the whole house. In some areas it's quiet, in other areas there's a very disruptive hum.
The worst part though? It has an app which is infuriatingly shit. None of it makes sense, and much of it is silently locked down without informing the user (get used to "Oops! Try again!" messages).
There is no way to shut it up during sleeping hours. I cannot believe there is no option to do so. If I had kids trying to sleep here, I would demand a refund for this reason alone. It is marketed as a super quiet heat pump for indoor installation.
The firmware is cooked. Sometimes the compressor just stays on... I've left it for 36hrs+ and it never turns off. I have to power cycle it.
Fortunately there is an option in the app to use the backup electric heater instead of the heat pump. I'm willing to just use it as a poor electric heater at this point. But... It's broken. It just silently doesn't take effect. Literally as I'm typing this, the room is vibrating due to the compressor while the app reports the electric heater is off.
And now I'm mad again. Fuck Stiebel Eltron.
I've never used a Steibel Eltron tank heater (but have owned their tankless), but neither the AOSmith nor Rheem require an app to use. Both can be placed into "Electric Only" mode via front control buttons == no noise.
The Rheem specifically has a time-of-use relay/powerbox, so you can put a timer onto it which will interrupt ALL heating with a rotary dial/timer. This is entirely mechanical, without computer/app.
Sounds like your unit is cooked (36 hours continues heatpump is very bad for the pump).
A heat pump could win as the best HVAC technology, though a better drilling for ground-sourced ones. Just a shallow drilling (up to 100m) that works in retrofit mode, such as drilling from the basement, would be a great upgrade:
- No outdoor unit that looks awful in many settings
- works well, even in the coldest winter, without a spike in electricity usage, COP 5
- very reliable with long durability
- super quiet, no ambient noise
- 20% more efficient
Currently, drilling is very disruptive in retrofits, but there is progress in compact techniques that might change the equation.
Disclaimer: angel investor in https://www.flexdrill.at/
It's usually so much more expensive than an air source heat pump that makes it completely not worth it.
That depends on climate. The longer and colder your winters are, the more you benefit from the reliable efficiency of a ground source. Ground source heat pumps have been the most common choice for heating new single-family homes in Finland for the last ~20 years.
Installation is probably relatively cheaper there due to volume too. In areas where it is less common, there is less competition and fewer options for competent installers.
True but even then there are other criteria too: as I plan to sell the house in 10 years, the extra cost for drilling simply didn't make economical sense (to me). So the "regular" pump had to do, and does it fine.
There is barely any people living in those latitudes. In Lithuania last 10 years air to water pumps completely took over.
Now you also need consent to drill making it much too difficult.
Yeah, recently saw some numbers for air-to-air vs air-to-groundwater, and it break even after more than 25 years, with more than twice the initial cost
> more than twice the initial cost
Here in Norway you can get a decent air-to-air minisplit installed for $2k. I've not heard of anyone who paid less than 10x that for an air-to-ground or water-to-ground system, drilling 500-1000 feet is expensive.
Sorry, I actually meant air-water vs. water-water for my comment, makes less sense this way...
What were the figures and where are you?
There’s no way the system is designed to last 25 years though?
The well that you drill will last a 100 years if you don't have bad luck. That is half the cost of installation.
The water/water heatpump unit in my house is 20 years old and has not had any major failures yet. I hope it will run for another ten years before the compressor gives up, but it is indeed approaching its calculated technical lifespan. I estimate it will set me back €10k to have it replaced.
Air/air is the cheaper option over time, even in most of Scandinavia with coldish winters. The main drawback of air/air systems are that they are loud and ugly and therefore annoy both yourself and your neighbours.
Air-source heat pumps give their worst performance when you need heat the most. Ground source doesn't vary year-round.
Yeah, not worth it in most cases, but when things line up, it is the best.
I've built 3 houses and got a bid on ground source heat for each one. I finally pulled the trigger on the 3rd house because we:
1) Moved where it was quite a bit colder, -20F for a week is common. 2) We have enough land to trench only 6'/2m deep to bury the loops instead of drilling like we would have needed to do on the first 2 houses. 3) There was a tax credit on it 4) No equipment exposed outside
Absolutely love it and it will make it difficult to move away when we want to down size b/c we'll pay more in utilities for half the space.
We also have some air-source on an addition I built, I'd use it anywhere that was slightly warmer than where I'm at.
Bingo. Literally abandonded in Lithuania, air to air is so much cheaper. Some builders even ditch hp altogheter - basic electric underfloor heating + solar panels is so much cheaper.
I'm in New Zealand and my bedroom heater is $20 electric + $20 smart plug + $10 temperature sensor. Winter bill is ~$100 NZD. It would take ~20 years for heat pump to recover install cost alone.
I find that surprising - I'm only slightly north of Lithuania, and the seasonality of solar panels makes them pretty ineffective in the winter, and especially in the pre-dawn when you want to bring the house back up to temperature.
(when I had the instrumentation hooked up for a year: https://flatline.org.uk/daystats.html )
You can sell power to grid and get it back at a reasonable spread. Although I'm sure that's not going to be so lucrative in future.
As a Kiwi (now in UK) NZ doesn't get that cold for that long...mostly just wet, unless you're pretty far south.
In UK/other parts of Europe winter gets colder, lasts much longer, humid the entire time (so heat just escapes all over the place). Plus, the buildings here are a lot older - I think upgrading insulation would make a huge difference this side of the world.
I couldn't even imagine Canada. Almost moved there...decided to stay here. No -20c winters for me ty very much.
Drilling alone is €10.000. The whole installation of a air/water heat pump is €10.000. Mostly not worth it.
To jakozaur’s point, there’s plenty of reasons drilling can get cheaper and there’s at least one other company working on it [1]—would love to hear about others! I’m a minimally informed amateur but my intuition is that the way it’s typically done (multiple inch borehole, U-tube geometry) is fairly suboptimal since the diameter is a lot wider than you need it to be just for hydrodynamic resistance and you get losses from the outgoing liquid cooling the incoming liquid. Dropping the diameter should make drilling a lot easier—-you can sink a 5/8”x12’ ground rod with hand tools in the right soil! (you’d still have to figure out how to make the holes meet up but I imagine there are ways of doing this).
[1] https://www.borobotics.ch/
The fact that you need to roll out a drilling rig plus crew at all is going to be a large part of that cost. For it to become interesting for the average homeowner the price is probably going to have to drop by something like 75% - but that basically kills any margins for clever new innovations...
What I was trying to get at with the ground rod example is it’s entirely possible that you wouldn’t have to roll out a drilling rig and crew. To zoom about a bit, the main risk for heat pumps is really ugly winter peaks but besides that, ASHPs are perfect 90+% of the time. So the main role I see for GSHPs is backing up ASHPs to shave that peak, and once you scale back their role like that it seems like there’s a lot of ways to cut installation costs significantly.
> really ugly winter peaks
The problem is those peaks are at the exact same time you need the heat.
Yes that’s precisely what I’m talking about. The role I’m envisioning for GSHPs is as backup to ASHPs to reduce those peaks.
In some potential future, there is an engineered a plant/fungus in a pot that you place onto the worksite. Months later, with regular sugar-water and hormones, it gives you a root-pipe for pennies a day.
Of course at that point we might not need the cheap pipe in the first place.
Nanobots that manage a plant / fungus / bacteria/‘ / amoeba workforce.
They drill and line boreholes to both anchor the foundations of the building and provide a closed loop system for a reticulated-water ground-sourced heat pump system.
They also use the soil recovered from the boreholes to build the soil-polymer foundation.
In the future, pallets of nutrient-cement are placed on the site and the bio-borg-bot farm also builds the entire building, including all the plumbing and wiring and windows etc etc, with the added benefit that it all looks like some weird alien / xenomorph Gigeresk hive excretion.
> nutrient-cement
That reminds me of a less grey-goo-adjacent idea from a Larry Niven book, in which the base-structure of houses were cheaply made by growing a kind of coral inside a watertight scaffolding.
Given the last few centuries of humans under-estimating nature, I predict that many "nanobots" predictions will turn out to be a kind of optimistic hubris. We'll end up making comparatively minor tweaks to the massive base of existing nanobots called biological life. Especially the multicellular varieties, which have many tested and integrated strategies for building things, such as the towering bipedal mega-fortress my hive mind currently inhabits.
We have a ground-source heat pump for our ADU. We did it because we were curious about just how efficient we could make the house, but I don't expect that it will ever break even financially vs a modern air-source system with resistive backup in our climate (northern New England, typically very few –20˚ nights, –10˚-0˚ more common with daytime highs in the single digits).
It works great, but it's hard to see a way to it making sense for most folks here.
You might still get the most out of it when the AMOC collapses.
I'm not aware that AMOC collapse is going to significantly alter New England's climate as it will Europe's.
The 'outdoor unit that looks awful' is an interesting quirk especially with US equipment - most Japanese and European residential units actually look fine, I'm not sure why American ones have tended to look especially ugly.
I notice this with electrical stuff too - things like switchboards etc. in residential and light commercial installations we have quite neat stuff that's usually quite streamlined and in light white/grey/cream colours, whereas the switchboards and conduits and thigns I see in videos of US home installations look like grey chunky metal stuff that you'd only see in heavy industrial sites here!
Buying the panel box which is unchanged from the last 70 years and costs $50 less than a nicer new style, but also our houses are big enough the panel is nearly always in a mechanical room so who cares what it looks like.
You can’t get the ‘nice’ panels in the US - they aren’t approved by local code.
The "new" white Leviton is kinda nice. Or maybe I don't know what I'm missing!
This one? [https://leviton.com/products/residential/load-centers]
It’s only a minor change from a 75 year old square D design, with some (albeit nice) aesthetic improvements. [https://www.se.com/us/en/product/HOM4080L225PC/load-center-h...]
The ones I think they are referring to a more like industrial control cabinets with DIN mounted breakers, which are indeed (paradoxically) less ‘old industrial’ looking. That Leviton board has a similar look, but with the standard bus bar type mounting in a heavy metal box.
The metal box does serve a useful purpose, which is protecting the flammable wood framing typical in North American construction from fire, where most European and Asian boxes are either much thinner metal, or plastic. Because their construction is often concrete and fire danger is much lower.
The IEEE and ASTM decided that ANSI 61 Gray is the color that all low-voltage (under 1000V) switchgear should be painted.
https://blog.se.com/datacenter/2013/04/09/two-shades-of-grey...
Electrical panels are installed in mechanical/electrical rooms or outdoors, there’s zero point in having a cream colored panelboard cover or enclosure. The coating is to protect the metal, not for aesthetics.
Colored conduit is available, but it’s more expensive and specifically used for different low-voltage (under 50V) control wiring, like red for fire alarm wiring, blue for BAS wiring, and so on.
Borehole or the pipe grid they stick under your backyard/garden (if you have a decent sized one) end up way more expensive.
But tbf, AI and robotics are rolling along pretty well. I'm surprised there's not a company that's just build the "this robot installs your borehole/underground pipes in 3 hours by itself" robot.
Friends in south Sweden and they got a hole drilled in the front yard like it’s the most normal thing. Is it there?
The challenge is for people who live in apartment buildings in urban environment where you have no front yard you can drill into at your leisure.
The solution is of course to get a communal system. As a bonus, drilling one giant loop is significantly cheaper than drilling hundreds of smaller ones.
What isn't cheap, though, is maintaining the plumbing of the communal system, especially outside cities.
>The solution is of course to get a communal system.
If it's that simple why is Austria not doing this in the cities? I don't know any voter who opposes cleaner air and cheaper heating.
If you have district heating I think there might be conflict of interest / regulatory capture.
No, it's individual apartment building based heating with the oil burners in the cellar for each building.
It doesn't work this way. Dense cities just don't have enough space for geothermal heating. It really works for single-family homes only, or maybe just a slightly more dense areas.
Not to mention that city infrastructure is WAY too expensive to build, anywhere. You'll spend more money on planning than on doing the actual construction.
> geothermal heating
Ground source heat pumps != geothermal heating.
The technologies are completely different.
https://mncifa.mn.gov/heights-geothermal-district
Granted, this system is being installed on the grounds of a former 112 acre country club that is being redeveloped, so it’s more of a greenfield project than slapping a geothermal loop in a central business district, but it’s a geothermal district heating and cooling system in a city.
Their resulting density (~450 square meters per housing unit) is only a bit more than a dense SFH zone. And they also are able to tap into an aquifer, significantly improving their capacity.
In general, you absolutely can do district-level heating. The former USSR countries are known for doing this on the scale of entire cities. But I don't think it's feasible with geothermal (unless we're talking about Iceland).
>The former USSR countries are known for doing this on the scale of entire cities.
Not today anymore. In my warsaw-pact country, my parents and most of the city residents cut themselves off from district hating since the 2000 and installed natural gas heaters/boilers in their apartments, which is what most people in my city use to this day.
It's because the former commie district heating was incredibly wasteful and inefficient in the post commie era, making it cheaper and more convenient to have you own apartment heating.
Probably the same thing would happen with heat pumps in apartments now, if air-to-air heat pumps could produce enough heat in cold winters.
District heating worked really well with coal/gas power plants because the waste heat was essentially free. But the infrastructure for heat transmission was costly and required constant maintenance. I did calculations for district/distributed heating costs professionally in mid 2000s, and back then they were about even.
The engineering culture in the USSR was also quite poor, so it was easier to build one steam/heat plant rather than hundreds of individual water heaters.
Ground source heat pump owner here in the US. The original system was installed in 2007, and the loop field was designed to "best knowledge at the time". Well in the 20 years since then, NREL changed guidance on how far apart and how deep loops need to be installed. Rightly so, because our circa-2007 is "short looped", it's not sufficient for the house loads, but there is nothing we do about it other than putting on more expensive pumps, more expensive antifreeze and live with heat pump compressors dying pre-maturely because they are working at their design limits. All this makes it as expensive as traditional system (and if we tried to go net-zero with solar, the amount of solar required (because it runs so inefficiently) is larger than our roof area.
So I'm looking at a backup gas boiler to take load of the heatpump/ground loop (house has radiant heat).
And they are not quiet. 5-Ton water to water compressors are not quiet.
And the control system (HDX) and amount of expertise required to keep the thing running is a major barrier to getting low cost maintenance.
Maybe a 2026-designed system will work better and actually live up to the hype you talk about, but there are decades of poorly designed and discarded ground loop heat pumps that have "poisoned the well" if you will.
Does the ground source heat up (or cool down) over time, making it less effective? The deep ground is very well insulated, which is why after a century of operation the London Underground is 10 degrees warmer. I wonder whether GSHP users need to balance their load by (say) consuming more heating than they actually need in winter so that summer cooling remains effective.
I think there are two types of this, only have experience with 1 so far. Within a single season, absolutely. In deep winter entering water temp (EWT) is around 30degF (this is a pretty accurate measure of bulk ground temp). Typical for where I live is 50degF.
Other type is permanent change that persists year over year. Haven't lived here long enough to measure this. But if you pull more heat from the ground in the winter than you put back into it into summer (we use a water to air compressor for AC in summer), then yes, it can happen and does happen. Don't know if we are in this bucket yet.
I wonder if you could cost effectively store heat during the summer, running a system strictly to do that vs doing it as a side effect of conditioning.
Out of curiosity, has the demand stayed the same? I'm asking because you see the same with electricity grids, designed in a different time with much lower demand.
Sorry to hear this, it seems like a great system to me but you have to have the capacity right. I'm planning on getting one in the next year but the drilling will be more than we need and we opt for no glycol (yet) as that also gives us headroom
I don't think system ever met demand when commissioned (we are 3rd owners). 1st owner largely neglected the system (which I interpret as reaction to it not working well), 2nd owner had local company known for "fixing geothermal" do a lot of retrofits (new higher flow pumps, increasing diameter on plumbing within the utility room to decrease "lift/work" required of the compressors, more feedback sensors / logic boards, added backup electric water tank heating for the radiant system, switch to methanol). These fixes have seamed to limit failure modes to a smaller set of things: mainly compressors dying early.
Currently system is running 20% methanol to combat the 29degF EWT (entering water temp) in deep winter. House is in Zone 6a.
One thing I learned in researching all of this is that use of ground source over many years can move the bulk ground temp permanently. (House also has water-to-air water furnace for AC). If heat pulled from ground in winter is not sufficiently replaced by heat added during summer, can move bulk ground temp over time. (If densely packed residential ground loops ever became a thing, I think this is a real risk.). But I am not sure if we have this issue at our place, still in first year, not enough data points.
It seems like you need to add new pipes. That isn't impossible, but it isn't cheap even compared to compressors.
Drilling in the basement seems like a pain to remove the dirt you dig up. Saving yourself a couple of feet cannot be worth the access troubles
Drilling only works if you have access to a garden where to drill. Any kind of apartment has to use the outdoor unit
If you're an individual with an apartment you don't have the choice to drill.
If you're building the apartment building you have the choice to drill for the entire building, and the number of units that benefit mean this is much more cost efficient than with single family homes.
In sensible countries each housing unit have a central heating solution, regardless of where the heat comes from.
That is you thinking whatever your area does must be best. Different does not mean better. there are pros and cons.
In DACH, there's not really an alternative for many homes. Heat pumps are by now cheaper, more efficient, more versatile and definitely greener than other means of heating.
If you get one, just make sure to get the dimensioning right. They are WAY more complex to plan, install and maintain than traditional heating.
> DACH, an acronym for Deutschland (Germany), Austria, Confoederatio Helvetica (Swiss Confederation), the three major German-speaking countries
I was not familiar with this term before, had to look it up.
A great acronym as it translates to roof (Dach in german).
I guess GAS is a bit awkward when talking about green energy (even if somehow natural gas is considered "green") and sustainable heating source.
It doesn’t even make sense though, shouldn’t it be DÖCH?
It goes by license plate codes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_vehicle_registra...
It makes for a fun acronym DACH meaning roof in german. If they used Ö why not DÖS with an S for Schweiz then ?
I think you mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166
Because this consortium seemingly has nothing to do with receiving license plate assignments. And the acronym seems to derive from your general vernacular, lending its name to many other things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_distribution_of_G...
>[heatpump waterheaters are] WAY more complex to plan, install
Only if you place them within <700sqft (for a typical indoor residential location). Only in areas smaller will you need to duct them, somewhat similarly to:
<https://i.imgur.com/4wCez9u.jpeg> this specific design draws from both bath and bedroom [dual 6" inlets], exhausts into kitchen [single 8" outlet] | utility closet is only 5ft x 4ft (~20sqft)
As an added bonus it'll passively dehumidify/cool whereever it drafts to/from.
> They are WAY more complex to plan, install and maintain than traditional heating.
I'm curious what about them would be more difficult to plan, install, and maintain. Obviously there are many things to consider when retrofitting a building with a central gas furnace... but otherwise why would they be much more complicated than an air conditioning system?
I've had a lot of mold problems with mine. Because they have to be strong enough to handle the coldest winter days, which makes them way overpowered when running air-conditioning in the summer, which means that when you run them in energy efficient mode, they are actively cooling only a small fraction of the time and all of the condensed water just sits there growing mold all day long. It also leaves the home far more humid than usual because it's not removing nearly as much humidity from the air as a less powerful unit running constantly would.
This isn't a problem with regular air-conditioning that is provisioned correctly for the size of your home, because it winds up actively running a lot of the time so the water is draining as new humidity condenses.
Sounds like you've got a single stage/speed heat pump, the good ones nowadays are variable speed, with pretty significant turndown ratios, so oversizing is less of an issue. I've been idly hacking on this site for comparing heatpump stats, if you're curious to learn more: https://www.heatpushers.com/
Yep! Massively overlooked aspect of the pro- heat pump crowed.
It’s good to see this brought up and discussed more.
>In DACH, there's not really an alternative for many homes.
And yet in Austria, most apartment buildings in big cities are still heated by burning heating oil, gas or even firewood. Worst of the worst for air quality.
Walk through Graz in sub-zero winters and it's like you're breathing in a barbeque bonfire. Even your clothes smell like soot when you get home if you've been out too long. Which is bizarre to me, considering how much posturing and chest thumping Austria is doing about how green and anti-Nuclear they are yet they love burring wood and oil. Male this make sense please.
Sure, rich people in the bacon belt living in single family homes in the suburbs or rural areas, have heat pumps, solar panels on the roof and a Tesla in the garage, but that's a different story compared to those living in the city stuck in the fossil fuel stone age, where they have no choice over their rented building's heating method.
How do you convert the city's apartment buildings to heat pumps? Is it a technological limitation? Money limitation? Bureaucratic and political limitation? All of the above?
It's incentives. Landlord pays for the installation and decides, tenant for the operation/heating.
Best way to get around this is making heat pumps more accessible (easy to get, financing options), as well as legislation (banning gas/oil heating).
>Best way to get around this is making heat pumps more accessible (easy to get, financing options), as well as legislation (banning gas/oil heating).
So if people on HN see what the solution is, why isn't the Austrian government doing it, to get rid of polluting fossil fuel heating in the cities?
Austria has really good subsidies for households. The "subsidy stop" the article refers to was stopping 100% subsidies. Austria has an incredibly progressive and green environmental and energy policy.
>Austria has really good subsidies for households. Austria has an incredibly progressive and green environmental and energy policy.
Then why are most Austrian apartment buildings in cities still burning oil and gas for heating and not all switched to heat pumps if it's so green and progressive? Why is Graz air quality getting worse and worse?
> The "subsidy stop" the article refers to was stopping 100% subsidies.
Which article? What subsidies? What are you talking about? I never mentioned anything like this.
Beurocratic and political limitation.
Firewood and heating oil isn't cheaper, it merely has lower upfront cost in exchange for a higher total cost. An efficient governance system (whether that's capitalism and banks with loans or renting out the hearpumps or a centrally planned replacement program or anything else) would figure out the financing and save the system money by updating.
Technology can make the incentives even larger. Excess money can make it easier for the governance system to reach the solution. But it's at the point where without any improvement to either an ideal system would figure out how to make the switch happen.
There is also a minor incentive problem here, mainly that a landlord can/will often offload the running costs, Nebenkosten, to the renters indefinitely.
That means they are sometimes economically incentivized to choose an option with lower initial cost but a higher running cost. Governments can/do bend these incentives via taxes but it can be hard/expensive to renovate old complexes (and that part cannot directly be offloaded by the landlord).
Sounds like it's something the government can fix on a whim if it wanted to. Why doesn't it?
1) To make it really green and viable -> you „need” solar installation
2) To have solar installation you have to abaid to painfully stupid legistlation
3) In winter pump is as green as the diesel generator that produces energy for it to run
That's not true. A heat pump produces 1.5 to kwH of heat per kwH of electricity consumed, so it's already much more efficient than a diesel generator.
Even in winter, electricity from the grid is greener than burning diesel. I didn't find specific numbers for winter, but wind is about 30% of Germany's (just picking the biggest country out of DACH to support the point, not trying to come up with exact numbers) electricity production year-round, and wind doesn't tank in winter like solar does.
So, in short. Installing a heat pump and just taking electricity from the grid is still better for the environment. Of course, having your own solar is great if you live in a house, but you don't need it.
I'm sure you already made up your mind about heat pumps and that I can't convince you otherwise. But for other readers, let me add some thoughts to your points.
1) well, there's a grid. So as long as someone somewhere on your continent produces green energy it is viable and green.
2) arguable. Depends on your legislation.
3) Again, there's a grid. And even considering the worst case of no renewable sources at all: A heat pump (which uses 1kWh of electricity to provide 3-6kWh of heat) powered by a diesel generator is still more efficient than burning the diesel directly. Now add efficient combined cycle power plants, wind, biomass, hydro and battery storage systems...
We are 40 years in back when it comes to grid infrastructure investmets. Grid is not some magical thing that has infinite capacity and transfer speed and costs.
The reason why powerplants have to be strategically distributed around the country and have to consist of multiple different power geration sources.
Cyting Germany’s cancelor „Going full green was a strategic mistake”
Ps. Heat pump is as effective as the heat source it can use..
Sounds like you're in a specific situation.
I wonder what it is and whether it applies to a lot of other people?
In what I assume is GP's general area coal furnaces are quite common for heating.
yuck. worst possible option.
> [it] become[s] cheaper than gas heating within 11 to 14 years
This a no-brainer for buildings with high energy use. But we looked into getting a heat pump last year but it doesn't pan out because our house (15 years old) has a very low energy use and we would not recover the costs (about 20K euros after subsidies) for 20+ years.
Your existing system will not last forever. When you have to spend money anyway that changes things.
It did for me. 40-year old furnace was starting to sound bad and subsidies locally were excellent; I now have a 3-ton heat pump and my house is fine in winter or summer for far less money than gas. It might have been harder to justify without subsidy, but we do need people to make this shift and a lot of homeowners will not consider things with 20-year ROI.
Yes. It also depends on the age of your gas heating as in Germany you get 20% subsidies when your system is 20 years or older, unfortunately this subsidy decreases 3 percentage points every year so when we are due it will be about 5%.
in my case: 3k at most for a replacement gas furnace, and heat pumps would require new wirings as well. Many things would need to break at once to make it worth considering when you have older homes
New homes with mandated PV and battery, that's another story.
Where I live every house has the wiring for AC anyway, so a heat pump only needs a different valve in the system you will always have (this is about $50 in parts, but they charge thousands extra for it)
I paid for it anyway - my furnace was 50 years old (probably 60% efficient when new), and I have no idea how bad the AC was. That said, for less money I added more insulation to my house and that has a better ROI. (unfortunately the design of the house doesn't allow for even more insulation even though I could save a lot more if it could be done)
With any luck, oil prices will rise enough to make that conversion worthwhile!
> [it] become[s] cheaper than gas heating within 11 to 14 years
They also always stop the savings estimates right before the expected lifespan of the heatpump, at which point you have to buy a new unit which destroys the actual savings
At the moment, heat pumps are mostly retrofitted to homes not designed for heat pumps, which adds to the cost. You can't compare that work to a future heat pump swap which is a much smaller job.
I'm building a house right now, it's much cheaper to invest in insulation, well designed window placement and passive cooling (ground/air or ground/water exchangers) than heat pumps and other high tech solutions.
Heat pumps are like pellet stoves in Europe a few years ago, the day the subsidies go away nobody wants them anymore.
Remember: every heat pump is a semi-permanent move to electricity over other fuels.
People almost never go back. This isn't just a temporary improvement.
Interesting looking at how EV sales plumented.
>how EV sales plummeted
This was because the US federal rebate disappeared, mostly (no?).
----
IMHO, hybrid electric vehicles make much more sense (range, refueling, infrastructure) – unless your local-only.
1. EV sales are skyrocketing in most of the world.
2. EV sales going down does not contradict what that person said, unless you have data about people who already own EVs are suddenly switching back to combustion, which is not observed.
If you have any data contradicting those, I'd love to see them, otherwise I think you're just spouting rot.
... They didn't. Globally, and in the EU and China, they're rising fairly healthily (the EU did have a ~flat year in 2024, but 2025 and so far '26 have resumed growth). They're down a little in the US, but the US is a particularly awkward market for them (preference for large cars, and domestic manufacturers are rather behind the curve).
Yup 0.6% in 2025 in Europe for sure makes a difference.
The moment subsidiary for EVs is removed, sales will plument like in US. And those will be removed as EU is going through energy and resources crisis.
EVs make sense only in China, where goverment has a working brain and invests heavly in nuclear power plants.
... Where are you getting that figure? BEV sales grew by about 30% in Europe last year.
> And those will be removed as EU is going through energy and resources crisis.
... Which is making petrol cars more expensive to run. Right as EVs are starting to get cheaper than petrol cars. In Ireland, say, an id.Polo starts at at 20k EUR, after a 3500 euro subsidy. A _normal_ Polo starts at 25k. Even without the subsidy, the EV version is still cheaper.
And petrol is 1.90eur/litre right now and rising. A Polo does about 20km/l, so 950eur/10,000km. The id.Polo does 13.3 kWh/100km, that is 0.133kWh per km. On a normal 24 hour tariff of 30c/kwh, that's 399eur/10,000km. If you're okay with charging it between 2am and 4am, and are on a smart meter plan with cheap early-morning energy (you probably should be if you have a BEV) it's more like 100eur/10,000km. If you have solar panels, it's likely approximately free.
(If you want to get a bit weird, some providers offer free electricity on weekends in exchange for more expensive energy during the week, so if that fits your usage pattern... Some European countries, though not Ireland, have providers who'll offer tariffs based on spot price plus a margin, so in some cases you can even get paid for charging it, as spot prices can go negative! That said, if you want to do any of the seriously esoteric stuff, you're probably looking for something with more range than the base id.Polo.)
So given that, if you have space for a charger at home... why are you buying the petrol version? I think 2026 will actually be a bit of a bumper year for EVs; they're finally beginning to get to the price level where they're cheaper than the equiv petrol car _even if you ignore running costs_.
And this is Ireland, which has about the highest electricity costs in Europe.
(This isn't just the Polo, btw; VW EVs generally come in a bit cheaper than the equivalent petrol version after subsidies, though the id.Polo may be the only one that's cheaper even _without_ subsidies right now. Which broadly makes sense as it's the newest.)
As a PSA, mini splits are pretty easy to self-install, and it can save you a bundle, even when buying all the equipment new. Lots of youtube videos on how to do it, though I'd add that most of them show using a manifold with analog gauges to do a vacuum test. You should really get a digital micron gauge and pull a deep vacuum.
Also, make sure that's actually legal in your jurisdiction. It is not legal here (primarily due to handling of coolant)
Good point, though you generally don’t really have to handle coolant for mini splits, they come precharged. You mainly have to add more if you have a longer lineset.
I’ve heard the online EPA course/test for coolant cert is pretty easy, though.
The main thing is just making sure you test the lineset well, including deep vacuum decay, and ideally a nitrogen high pressure test.
Even where it's not legal you can often do much of the work and hire a licensed contractor for the "final step". It can be worth asking around.
I run daily comparisons between a gas boiler and a heat pump in the UK. Given that gas is cheaper than electricity, a well-installed and well-controlled gas boiler can still be cheaper to run. Heat pump running costs can drop drastically when combined with solar and battery storage, but that requires a much greater upfront investment.
https://x.com/AO7186252340513
https://bsky.app/profile/showpiece.bsky.social
I'm no expert on UK energy pricing, but the main difference between a boiler and heat pump is that heatpump can be, eg "500% efficient" - a COP of 5. So even if a KWH of energy is 2x the price for electricity a heatpump often comes out ahead.
Electricity in the UK is often 3x or more expensive than electricity for the same energy content. We have some of the most expensive electricity in the world.
Yeah a COP of 5 is very good. 3 is much more typical.
And OP is right. When I've looked into it you aren't going to save any money going to a heat pump; in fact it will likely increase costs slightly.
So it really only makes sense to do when you need a new boiler. If you don't, it makes way more sense to get solar because that's also good for the environment but actually saves you money.
COP of 5 when running in perfect conditions (load, EWT temps, variable stage compressor, infinite heat sink/source). You might want to research how realistic constant COP of 5 really is.
I've ended up with a "hybrid" system, which (claims to) automatically choose which of gas and electricity is cheaper on a minute by minute based on COP derived from temperature. I have solar panels but not a battery. On net, it's ended up as roughly the same price as the old gas boiler. Better CO2 emissions but not that much cheaper.
It's not automatically linked to rate updates. There's probably a way of automating that for Vaillant systems?
(Shoutout to ProllyInfamous, who's been making the great point that in many climates HW systems that also cool and dehumidify are a great benefit. Not here at 56N, though)
On one of your graphs you have the CO2 per day of gas and heat pumps but the two use different scales on the same graph.
Another graph in a footnote table shows the heat pump is delivering 6x the heat of the gas boiler, which feels like it should be mentioned in the text when you say it costs 3x more.
And actually that makes the previously mentioned CO2 graph even more misleading.
Seems like a decent place to point out that there are good savings to be had on heat pump running costs with a smart controller designed for heat pumps which can learn the dynamics of your building then preheat when tariffs are low or outdoor conditions are favourable.
I work for homely energy which has such an offering, but fwiw I genuinely think it's a good product. It's been studied by Salford uni in their energy house lab, so if anyone's interested maybe dig into that for a more neutral verdict.
I have always wondered if a heat pump is even worth it if you don't have solar, all well and good the government giving massive discounts on heatpumps but not for a combined heatpump/solar install which would probably actually push most people towards it
IMO we don’t place enough emphasis on the gain in comfort: my home is a solid 21°C at all times since we replaced our aging gas boiler. The larger radiators, lower water temperature and “always on” operation have removed the temperature swings.
Heat loss in our home is high (single skin brick), but our bills over the course of the year are on a par with having the heating running for 12h a day. They are substantially more expensive during the winter when temperatures drop below 5°C, but that isn’t noticeable when averaging the bills out over the year.
Got to do our roof in the next couple of years so solar is a natural next step for us.
I think there's one big issue for massive electrification and insulation of buildings: renting.
As a renter, I have no incentives to invest thousands in my home's betterment because I will have lost those when I am gone. As an owner, I have no incentives to make my apartment/house better because I don't live in it and I don't pay the energy bills.
Something has to be done about that if we want to combat climate change. I know in France it is now forbidden to rent again or sale when the renter leaves if the home's energy grade is F or G (A is best) but it is probably loosely enforced/easy to circumvent. And it is too damn slow ! This is for regulation but maybe there are other levers ?
As a renter I would basically have to wait for energy prices to skyrocket for it to make economic sense. I hate this situation.
Another big problem is NIMBYism and ideological opposition to air conditioners.
Installing a heat pump can require (city) permits, permission from your landlord (if renting) or HOA/condo association (if you own a flat in a shared building) which can either be or feel impossible to get.
Some cities have either actually or de facto (through requirements/regulations that are impossible or unaffordable to meet) banned air conditioners, resulting in people buying inefficient monoblock units that can't be used for heating.
Edit: Other regulatory hurdles come from rules about refrigerant handling. Refrigerant must only be handled by experts who are certified in proper handling and recovery (and who, of course, are now in high demand and charging princely prices for their work). This made a lot of sense in the times where 1 kg of refrigerant had 10 tons CO2e in global warming potential, ozone depletion potential or other dangers.
Nowadays, a skilled layperson can probably set up an air conditioner with quick-connect couplings by themselves, but they aren't legally allowed to. These cost something like 500 EUR, contain less than 1 kg of R32 with a GWP of 675, so let's say 500 kg CO2e of harm if it leaks. If you passed a law that landlords cannot prohibit installation, and any electrician that passes a quick online training can install them, you could have them all over the place very quickly.
These could then be used for covering some or all of the heating load in winter, but they'd also alleviate suffering in summer, and that's luxury, and we can't have that (especially as it uses energy to provide the "needless" luxury!)
> As an owner, I have no incentives to make my apartment/house better because I don't live in it and I don't pay the energy bills.
In a rental market with more supply than demand, having more efficient / cheaper heating is an advantage to attract tenants - but this kind of market in residential housing is typically rare these days.
Which is why governments need to enforce this by regulation, e.g., in my country landlords are required to meet insulation / heating / ventilation standards that often end up with their rental housing being better insulated and heated than the homes that the landlords live in themselves.
https://www.tenancy.govt.nz/healthy-homes/
If you own an older home and are renting it out, you'll often find that the heating capacity is too low for the modern standards, and in that case, a heat-pump is usually the most cost effective solution.
What also makes these standards work is that a lot of banks offer cheap loans for energy efficiency upgrades: for example https://www.anz.co.nz/personal/home-loans-mortgages/loan-typ...
Well, there are heatpumps made to slot into a window frame (ex: https://www.mideacomfort.us/packaged.html ). The ones I'm familiar with are made for double hung windows, which are more common in the US, though. But might be worth a look?
Germany just enacted a law that makes landlords pay part of the heating bill to change the incentives for upgrading the equipment.
“ A total of around 575,000 residential heat pump units were sold across 11 European countries from January to March 2026, up from 494,000 in the same period in 2025”
Not a big increase on a relatively small base. What is the takeaway here?
2.3 million a year for something with a 20-30 year lifetime is a lot. It's not quite enough for "in 20 year everyone will have one", but you only need another 5 or 10 years of similar 15% growth to get there.
> with a 20-30 year lifetime
More like 15-20, if you find a proper maintenance guy who won't scam you into buying another one because "yours is dead" even though it isn't
Must be nice having more than 3kW available at the breaker
in the south, a lot of people opt for split Airconditioning instead of heatpumps. Cheaper and much easier to install/maintain
Do the places you are referring to not require heat? If so I don't see why having a separate heating and cooling system would be cheaper to maintain than a single system. Come to think of it I don't see why a heatpump would be more expensive to maintain than split AC. I guess there is some extra circuitry to make sure it doesn't ice up in the winter and maybe backup resistance heating builtin.
Most split A/Cs can also heat.
"Heat pump" can mean many things, from essentially "split A/C" (air-air heat pumps) to ground-source heat pumps, using floor heating for the output, warm water production from the heat pump, etc.
Split ACs which can heat but are not billed as heat pumps will very often use resistive heaters.
The ones I saw all promised heat output significantly higher than the electrical input in heating mode, so I'm sure they were actually heat pumps.
That's the same thing, no?
It needs some extra valves to switch the flow of coolant around, but yes.
In the same way that an electric motor and a generator are the same thing.
In an EV they literally are.
Yes?
But without the few bits and bobs of extra control for handling that condition they are, effectively, not.
Same for AC and heat pumps.
EVs have regenerative breaking and so come with those bits and bobs.
But not all electric motors are paired such. Which is the point: a heat pump and an AC are "the same thing" at the gross level, but that doesn't mean all ACs have all the bits and bobs necessary for them to act as heat pumps.
Some refrigerants are more suited for cold climates, some of which require very high pressures.
I think they mean "air exchange" (split AC) vs "heat pump" (dig into the earth to draw/eliminate heat). Not saying that's the right definition though. I am guessing at an auto-correction of what they meant.
Dug into the ground, we usually call a "ground source heat pump", or less accurately, "geothermal". The normal split systems are "air source heat pumps". AC is a heat pump without a reversing valve.
A heat pump is not necessarily dug into the earth. Rather, the flow of the heat pump is moving heat (thermal energy) from outdoors to indoors or the other way around in an air conditioner.
Depending on the direction of the coolant flow, you get either a indoor heating or cooling unit. This is best demonstrated by going in front of the outdoor unit of a heat pump, when they are cooling, the outdoor unit generates heat because it's compressing gas, which then is then expanded when it reaches the indoor unit, generating cold. Exactly like a refridgerator.
There's also air-to-water retrofits for houses where you had centralised gas/wood heaters and water radiators.
split a/c (heat/cooling) is dirt cheap compared to the cost of heat pump installation
it makes sense combined with solar, I think. Hot weather usually means a lot of solar energy you can ideally use to cool your home. I still wonder why there isn't as much PV activity in Greece. I see solar water heaters on nearly every roof, but not solar energy.
Why would it be easier to install/maintain? It's basically the same machine.
Split units are heat pumps right? They heat and cool. What’s the catch? They don’t have a very high range of operation?
A heat pump is a condensing unit with a reversing valve. Or, a condensing unit is a heat pump without a reversing valve.
Carrier article: https://www.carrier.com/residential/en/us/products/heat-pump...
imagine the President of the US and his "braintrust" accidentally making the world much more green and efficient by forcing a radical reduction in oil dependency
while they purposely end climate-change research including destroying billions in observation satellites by deorbiting them
the history written about this decade is going to be wild, if we survive it
EU severely reducing its fossil fuel imports from Russia in 2022 cut down natural gas usage by 17% and overall energy consumption by 3%. So yeah, increased price due to scarcity help a lot in shifting around the energy mix.
It's a bit shit that hits poorer people relatively more than richer people. Governments can reduce this impact by subsidizing sustainable alternatives (like heat pumps). It's still leading to inequality (unless you give more subsidy to the poor), but at least overall people will hopefully benefit.
> overall energy consumption by 3%
Is it possible that some non-trivial part of that number comes not from increased efficiency but from losing some energy-dependent industries?
It might be difficult to separate that out from the effect of US tariffs.
That's a neat proxy measurement to track.
I am probably simply confused but what’s the proxy measurement?
I assume a product related directly to another product. So when energy prices start to go up, invest in heat pump companies.
Thats what I was guessing but was thrown off because it is a pretty natural nth order effect. Gas prices go up, more efficient cars get sold.
Heat pump sales for energy costs.
More efficient hvac tech is a partial substitute for fuel.
Reading comments here i think many are missing something, all of our summers are getting longer and hotter, we didn’t need air conditioning before.
It’s not just heating anymore, now places need active cooling too.
Governments should have been full bore pushing subsidies and cost breaks for phevs, home solar, evs,and hear pumps for the last decade.
Covid was the wakeup call that globalization was dying a slow death, and the first trump that world cop America was also on the way out.
Oil dependence in a top level national security concern of the last 150 years (hey, what really triggered WW1?), yet the primary means for independence has been politically suppressed for 50 years.
How soon would we have has better PV, better batteries, better heat pumps with proper subsidies and research starting with the 70s oil shocks?
They’re pretty efficient
A significant proportion of the European population will only ever talk about heat pumps when they are in a social setting which allows for free conversation. And they haven't shut up about it for about 20 years now. It used to bore me to death.
Shame on The Netherlands: ~89% of homes still use natural gas in some way for heating [1], and their government are now "scrapping the obligation to purchase a heat pump in 2026" [2].
[1] https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2025/50/ever-more-gas-free-hom... [2] https://www.abnamro.nl/en/personal/specially-for/preferred-b...
Yeah big surprise that the populist government didn’t achieve anything and rolled back green initiatives. Good thing that they fell, sad that it took so long.
Stupid symbolic politics to own the greens. Good thing is that heatpumps are the most rational choice for new homes, so I don’t think much damage was done.
If governments would get their act together and build nuclear power…
End users could have simple resistive heating.
But no, in the name of invitation and net zero, end user are forced to bear the cost and maintenance burden of much more complicated equipment systems.
It’s all arse-backwards.
The latest nuclear reactor built in Europe was in France and took 17 years and its costs were 23 billion euro (roughly 27 billion $) with this amount of money you can basically install around 750000 heat pumps costing 30000€. So no it is probably not arse-backwards. (Germany alone would need 20-25 of them and it is unlikely that we can build more than 3-4 at the same time and even that is unlikely…)
Now pick the best (least costly / swiftest build) new power reactor build in the last ten years anywhere in the world.
And anyway, your numbers are disingenuous, because it ignores the fact that heat pumps need electricity to power them, and that nuclear power reactors can provide district heating and that, and that the mean time between failures for the average split system heat pump is 7 to 10 years and that heat pumps sometimes fail in ways that the ozone depleting refrigerant to escape.
It’s evident the average commenter on this subject hasn’t run the numbers on a full cost benefit of the various options.
A mix of nuclear / hydroelectric / combined cycle gas turbine power plants provided ample electricity for end-users to make use of cheap to manufacture heating technology (resistive), low maintenance, low replacement costs.
Well, that’s my argument anyway.
> Now pick the best (least costly / swiftest build) new power reactor build in the last ten years anywhere in the world.
Unless you can pay the workers the same rates, and it's politically acceptable to the electorate to use the same standards, this is as irrelevant as the fact (yes, I have done the maths on this) that it's *technically* possible for China to divert an affordable percentage of its aluminium output over a decade to build a genuine planet-spanning power grid with 1Ω electrical resistance so you can have your mid-winter midnight electricity supplied by the mid-summer midday on the opposite side of the planet.
> and that nuclear power reactors can provide district heating and that
I have a heat pump. It works both ways, which means that unlike district heating, it also cools down the building in summer.
> that heat pumps sometimes fail in ways that the ozone depleting refrigerant to escape.
Solved by banning such refrigerants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kigali_Amendment
"Can" is also doing a lot of heavy lifting even if such things hadn't been banned.
> A mix of nuclear / hydroelectric / combined cycle gas turbine power plants provided ample electricity for end-users to make use of cheap to manufacture heating technology (resistive), low maintenance, low replacement costs.
Hydro is cheap, but nuclear isn't. Hydro also works as a buffer (and pumped hydro as storage), so if you're combining it with stuff anyway, may as well combine with PV. Even small-scale domestic rooftop PV (which is the most expensive PV) is cheaper than nuclear at this point, so cheap that it makes sense to use as a fencing material even if you never get around to using it for power generation.
| It’s evident the average commenter on this subject hasn’t run the numbers on a full cost benefit of the various options.
Strong words.
| heat pumps sometimes fail in ways that the ozone depleting refrigerant to escape.
R-290(propane) and R-744 (carbon dioxide) both have a Ozone depletion potential(ODP) of 0. What are you talking about?
Nuclear promised "too cheap to meter" in the 1960s and never delivered on that.