On Wed, 16 Feb 2005, "Greg O" wrote in the original
thread:

Easiest would be to stuff in a 90+ furnace, but I wonder if a DX heat pump
would not be a better choice, depending on your electric rates compared to
the price of gas.
Greg

To which I replied:

Natural gas is $1.15 per marginal 'therm'.

Electricity is going up real soon IIRC from 8.5 cents / Kw-Hr to at least
10.2 cents /Kw-Hr, and likely will increase again when the FY06 federal
budget mandates BPA raise its rates to 'market'.

Whoops! Does not compute! It's 6.89 cents/KwH now, and will bump up by
over 10% or more (BPA rate hikes which will phase in over three years)
soon. My best guess, since our electric futility (Portland General
Electric) is changing ownership from Enron to (probably) Texas Pacific (the
folks who do such a good job with Burger King), is that Power King will
charge us 8.4 cents per KwH soon.

For reference, in January, we now use 259 more KwH/month than in Spring
(when the windows are open), and 158 more therms/month than in July &
August (when the only use of gas is cooking). Double-pane windows all
arrounf in 2000, house is pretty tight.

So, now that I know not all DX heat pumps are ground source, despite
http://copper.org/applications/plumb...s_stdy_pa1.htm

and also know there's underlying basalt with 50' or surface, 100-150'
downhill....

Anyone have a DX installed to replace both a gas furnace and a heat pump
for air conditioning only, and what did it cost?

For reference the A/C heat pump is a Trane XE 1000, model TTR 030 C10 0A3,
circa Spring 1999... and, I verified it's A/C only, won't run
reverse-cycle, per a Trane service manager who seemed to know what he was
talking about, and didn't try to shine me on when I gave him a chance.

Thank you kindly, all, for your on-topic responses.

And, drop by comp.dcom.telecom.tech or comp.sys.palmtops.pilot if you have
a problem with either, might be able to give you a hand.



--
John Bartley K7AAY http://celdata.cjb.net
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