On Dec 8, 7:37*pm, "Mike Dobony" wrote:
I live in an area that rarely gets any lasting snow (lasting usually until
afternoon and occasionally a few days). *I have a forced air furnace that is
ready to be replaced and I want to also upgrade to AC. *Financially theheatpumpmakes the most sense as it costs little more than AC and I don't have
to pay full price for a furnace then. *I have heard comments both good and
bad aboutheatpumps. *For those of you who haveheatpumps, what is your
experience?

Mike D.

I think this is a great question and you should know more about what
you are getting into before signing up for the heat pump.

I live in northern Colorado, and it's likely my situation is similar
to yours. We get snow, but many years it doesn't last. Days are
generally warm (30's to 50's or higher are common during the winter)
but nights get cold (20's or lower). Our local electricity coop
offered a rebate for heat pumps, and I was wanting A/C for the hot
summer evenings, so I took the bait. I also wanted to get away from
fossil fuels. We still needed a furnace for backup, but went with 95%
efficient gas unit at 90,000btu

Does the heat pump work? If it's installed correctly it should work
with the outside temp in the correct range. You have to be prepared
for it not being anything like a furnace. It's much more like running
a warm A/C during the winter. We got a 3 ton unit for heating
approximately 2000 sqft (at the very best, the manufacturer claims
32,000 BTU heating). Heat pumps work more efficiently at higher
temperatures and your contactor should be able to provide you with a
breakeven temperature at which it becomes cheaper to run the HP than a
furnace. With the electricity and gas prices we have, and the
efficiency of our furnace and HP, the breakeven for us is around 35f.
It only makes sense to run the HP if the outside temperature is above
35f. For us this is usually during the day and at 35f the sun usually
is enough to heat the house.

So, what is the HP like? It runs a lot, its noisy, and the air coming
out of the register is cool. Like A/C, it's best to think of how much
heat the HP will add to the cold air running though your ducts. In
our case, the HP warms the air up by around 15f compared to over 50f
for the furnace. This means that if the house is at 70f, the heat
coming out of the registers is 85f. This is cool on a cold day. By
the time the air reaches a few feet from the register, it's 70f air
blowing across you. If you set the temperature back at night, like we
do, you could be looking at 60f + 15f = 75f air at the registers and
the air moving across you is cold. Also, it's very slow to change the
temperature in the house. In the morning, our house would warm up at
less than 1f per hour. This really makes a setback at night
impractical.

The noise from the heat pump can also be something entirely different
from what you are used to. You now have loud machinery operating
outside your window day and night. In our case there also a random
loud gurgling noise when the compressor switched over to defrost
(which can happen even when it's fairly warm outside due to the coils
running substantial colder then the ambient air, they almost always
become coated with frozen condensation). The frequency of the noise
penetrates right through concrete making even the basement noisy.

HP are also much more complex than furnaces. It took nearly a year to
get reasonable efficiency out of our HP and I'm still not convinced we
aren't throwing a lot of money down the drain. In our case, for many
months, the air in the registers was only being heat by 5 degrees.
After a very frustrating exchange over several months, my HVAC
contactor contacted the factory and were told to replace the thermal
expansion valve. This got me back to the 15f, but it was not easy to
understand that 1)there was a problem 2)it could be fixed 3)find the
source of the problem.

If you can live with the issues mentioned above, the HP can keep your
house warm. I've thought that running the house at a higher
tempurature, say 74f, would make the cool breezes issuing from the
registers less of an issue because the house would simply be hot.

Would I do this again? As much I wanted this to work. As much as I
like the technology and want to save green house gases. NO. I would
not do this again. We can only run the HP a few weeks during the
year, and it doesn't seem justified. I don't expect it ever to pay
back financially and it's not a comfortable way to heat. Our
electicity bills have been higher than ever and I'm not convinced that
our total energy costs are lower (I may be able to piece this together
in a couple more years).

I should add that geothermal heat pumps are a whole different animal.
They are very expensive, but if installed properly I believe they
would be very efficient and useful down to colder outside
temperatures (although still noisy).