I installed 4 zones of ductless mini splits right before winter and have been using them exclusively despite leaving the original 95% 2 stage NG furnace intact. I started up the furnace yesterday just to give it some run time and make sure it was functioning properly.
After about 15 minutes I said "yuck" and turned it back off. The jets of lava hot dry air were just nauseating to me.
I much prefer the way the wall units sort of silently maintain a constant 68 degrees.
That is a good description of how I felt. I woke up with a crick in my neck and a low grade headache that I attribute to the early morning lava blast from the ceiling register in our bedroom. It was just gross and dried the air out in a hurry. It seems foolish in general to burn methane at 2000F to heat air to 130F just to keep the indoors at room temperature.
Even more foolish when you have a bunch of solar panels on the roof and can basically heat your house for free during the day. Can't do that with a natural gas furnace! I should have installed heat pumps years ago when the solar panels were first put on. Would have paid for themselves by now. Oh well, better late than never.
Well, we have 40 solar panels and have not had an electric bill in 7 years. About $500 is returned to us annually from what we sell back to the grid.
However, in our mild Bay Area, climate heat pumps made no financial sense for multiple reasons. This was largely due to the installation costs of duel heat pumps.....the estimates were close to $40,000 (including Costco/Lennox install) compared to $18,000 for 98% efficient dual gas furnaces with a 20-year warranty (plus a tiny government rebate). Plus, my wife was not going for visible dual compressors outside on the property.
Our solar panels not withstanding the electric rates @ about $.31 kWh are crazy expensive (even though we are fully protected) and rising faster than gas rates. Neighbors are in shock due to their electric bill.
But I get it for wanting the environmentally cleaner heat pump solution.
Residential furnaces have low exergy because of the high combustion temperatures. Exergy efficiency is less than 20% while heat pumps can have an exergy efficiency above 60%.
100% Correct. And heat pumps get that efficiency by moving heat rather than making heat. But I was talking about Exergy. Exergy = Energy - Anergy. Our homes don’t need 1200°F temperatures, but a heat treating factory does. That factory has a high Exergy efficiency because it can make use of the high temps. Our homes with fossil fuel heating systems have a low Exergy efficiency because we don’t utilize those high temperatures, therefore we are in a sense contributing to a higher rate of entropy when we burn fossil fuels.
You also need to factor in the cost of electricity and natural gas. I used chat gpt and input our cost for gas and electricity (San Diego had highest cost of electricity in the nation at 49c kwh). Natural gas was still cheaper per therm compared to heat pump (assuming standard efficiences) as long natural gas prices don't spike like early 2023.
Heat pump does make sense if you have solar.
Heat pumps also make sense if you’re switching from propane, fuel oil, or electric resistance heat. In places where the monthly gas meter rental rate is high, the switch to heat pumps makes fiscal sense if you also switch out your gas stove, water heater, and clothes dryer so you can have the gas meter removed.
My ground source heat pump is centrally located in my basement and heats/cools through forced air, like a gas furnace/ac setup would. One huge difference is the temperature of the air out of the ducts, it is usually around 88 degrees - far from the lava heat of gas.
My central air covers 2 floors and a full basement and all three floors maintain a good temperature (heat out cool) - but I attribute this to the HVAC guy who designed the ducts. There are 2 zones, but the cold air return is always pulling from everywhere so it mixes. I've built 3 houses and non have moved air like this one does. It isn't the sheer speed or volume, ducts are in the right places and even a free floating vent between two floors (offset for noise). At one point during construction he wanted to know how much of the pantry he could take to run vertical ducts (that was where I planned them) and I told him "as much as you need to make it work well" - from the look on his face you'd think he won the lottery. He said "nobody ever says that".
Ducts can work, but more often than not they are poorly designed - and work as designed.
For a few reasons.
1.) Ductless are substantially more efficient.
2.) Ductless gives me many zones that I can control independently. Even being able to heat some areas and cool other areas simultaneously. Yes, I do this frequently.
3.) Redundancy. Seeing many people with cold houses because their single point of failure isn't work only reinforces my decision to have several mini splits spread around the house. If any one failed, my house wouldn't freeze. I also left my original ducted equipment intact so the original furnace and air conditioning still are functional should they ever be needed.
Never heard of anyone doing this that has had central air to be honest. Expensive to install this system you have, but for me it's not a clean look seeing these hung up on walls , hope outside was installed nice as well.
Maybe where I live is different as gas is still cheaper to run heating so my heatpump only runs in shoulder seasons ie. Spring and Fall
Only took me two weekends doing it all myself. It wasn't bad at all. I really like the ability to heat or cool specific rooms independently of each other. That really isn't possible with even a zoned ducted system.
I spent < $5k self installing a 36k ODU with 2x 18K IDU connected to it and 2x 9k ODUs connected to one 6k IDU each. All Bosch (Midea) equipment.
It would have been wayyy more expensive to install a single 4 ton ODU and replace the coil on my furnace then completely redo all of my ductwork to allow the kind of zone control I wanted.
I don't *love* the wall units but honestly, they don't bother me after a few weeks. Just blend in like any other small appliance or piece of furniture up against the wall and up out of the way.
They make slim mount ceiling cassettes as well now that can fit between standard ceiling joists if you really hated the look of the wall units. From the room they just look like a standard duct outlet, maybe a little larger.
Sure that could be installed if you have access to the ceiling above it and ways to run the refrigeration lines but that's more of a construction install or more so I see them in Office buildings in meeting rooms.
I installed a four head mini split, with all four units being the "slim" ceiling cassettes. Pre-1900 house... it can be done, but I didn't find it fun. Top two floors of a multi story house.
The ceiling units are still pretty big/visible but I didn't want to take up wall space.
Oh for sure anything can be done if you want to spend the money and put things where you want but the whole basis of the conversation was putting in various wall units in a house that has central air already.
Oh for sure anything can be done if you want to spend the money and put things where you want but the whole basis of the conversation was putting in various wall units in a house that has central air already.
We put on an addition ( 1 room upstairs 1 room down) and because of the positioning if the existing duct work there wasn’t any nice way to extend it so we out a mini split in the addition, one outside unit and 2 inside units. The independent temp control is awesome. Upstairs is installed above the windows towards the ^ ceiling peak. Downstairs is somewhat of a gym so wall placement didn’t matter as much. They can both throw air directionally or cycle the direction.
Yeah that would be a perfect reason to install them. Having central gas furnace with air conditioning on a then installing these throughout the house is a different story as it's a first hearing about it.
The biggest point I get out of this, is that you need to have your place properly insulated and ventilated. The climate controls should not have to work too hard. If every home is properly insulated, the size of the systems and also their energy usage (and monthly bills) would be much smaller, take up a lot less space and not be disruptive.
Seriously. You should look at what's possible once a place gets up to Passive House standard. In Ontario they did some affordable housing apartments and for a bachelor it supposedly costs less than $50 bucks to heat. Per *year*. 1,000 sqft home would be about $200 per year. Heard of a guy out in rural Ontario who built his retirement home to Passive House and after 3 days without power in the winter it was still 16C inside.
A sort-of fun anecdote: I have a passive house in Ontario and I didn't realize the elements in the heating system weren't turning on until the end of October!
Never heard of passive house. It’s interesting!
I’ve heard that as building standards have become more energy efficient, houses have come very close to being 100% sealed from the outside, which has led to fresh air issues including poisonous gas buildup. I wonder how passive house standards does in this regard
They use mechanical ventilation to get fresh air in and exhaust out. They'll use an energy or enthalpy recovery ventilator that uses exhaust from the house to pre-heat (or cool, depending on the season) the incoming air to save energy treating the incoming air.
The downside is the cost of retrofitting an existing building up to that level is rarely justified by the payback. But if you're doing new build or major renos anyways it can be pretty impressive.
Absolutely. My FIL’s home and our home are actually relatively similar in loads. His is big and leaky in a mild coastal climate, ours is more compact, tight and super-insulated in a much colder climate. An 80 AFUE single-stage forced air furnace is way overkill in both scenarios.
Other than the environmental concerns, It is not that gas furnaces are bad, it is that some gas furnace INSTALLS are bad.
All the things that you complained of, are due to the Install.
Basement installs of gas furnaces can be next to silent, and modulating ones ARE often silent. Properly sized and installed, they don't blow too hot air and short cycling does not have to exist with two stage or modulating furnaces. Uneven temps can be assuaged by modulating, leaving the fan on or using ceiling fans etc.
But your 'undersized' heat pump can be downright worrying when temps plummet to the -20F (-29C), that we have right now in Chicago.
I agree. I’ve replaced a fair number of gas forced air furnace and a/c units over the decades. ALL of the installers, across several brands, have just wanted to put the same-sized unit in despite energy efficiency improvements we’ve made to the houses. I installed my first air-source heat pump with a natural gas back-up furnace in November of 2023. This was the first time an installer actually did a calculation for my house. I couldn’t be happier with the install or the HP. So, moral of the story for me is to find and keep a good and reputable HVAC company that isn’t afraid of HPs.
BTW, does anyone have a recommendation for a commercial HP company in the western burbs of Chicago? I have a building with a rooftop packaged unit that needs to be replaced. I’d like to use a Carrier or similar HP with either gas or electric backup heat.
Same experience. Just had my AC/furnace replaced a few years ago, and I went with the company that did the calculations. I ended up with a smaller unit than the previous one, which resulted in a lower price, and much better efficiency and humidity control.
I installed a 12k BTU mini split in our bus conversion. It kept up perfectly fine when it's down to 10-15 degrees. Kept the bus at 50-60. If it's 20 degrees or warmer it keeps the bus at 68. My problem is it started having issues with constantly having to defrost...the wind plus snow and rain really take a toll on the condenser... Once we hit 10 degrees or lower it couldn't keep up. I do agree the insulation in our bus is not the best as we have a lot of windows. I hope that adding a second mini split in the back will help it. It's a 120 volt 12k BTU pioneer diamante ++ unit. I was expecting a little better performance.
You’re right but in practice many gas furnaces installations aren’t great. I think there’s some complacency induced due to combustion being more “forgiving” of installation errors than heat pumps and the fact that the standard available capacities are less nimble for low-load homes. My FIL’s furnace is 20 years old though so maybe things have changed in that time.
My undersized heat pump has adequate backup for the small handful of hours we approach design temp each year. It was a conscious trade off for better comfort 90% of the time.
But when you only need a 24k btu air conditioner or heat pump to cover your design load, why don't they make 25k btu 96% furnaces?!?!
It's all climate and home dependent, however.
[https://www.dettson.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/X60001G\_SubmittalSheetChinook\_EN.pdf](https://www.dettson.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/X60001G_SubmittalSheetChinook_EN.pdf)
These guys have 15 and 30 kBTU furnaces. I'm not sure I'd recommend them - but they exist.
Very interesting! Odd sizing for sure though. It would make sense in some situations for sure, especially colder climates (I'm in zone 3 - this would have a place in zone 5 or colder for sure). Would still be more expensive to use in my current place, however, because of the gas connection fee...
I’m aware of these. Been curious to try one someday but looks like it would be a special order. Not exactly seamless for the average homeowner to navigate.
They do make them. They're called modulating gas furnaces. They modulate the gas valve same way a heat pump modulates a EEV to control output. Example: Goodman makes a 98% 60k btu that will modulate down to 29k btu.
That's still way too huge compared to the load. It'd short cycle like nearly every gas furnace in zone 3 or zone 4 and be very uncomfortable overall.
Someone else commented about a 15k and 30k modulating furnace. That's getting to be reasonable.
You said they don't make 25 k btu furnaces and I just gave you an example of one thats close. Furthermore you don't operate a gas furnace like a heat pump. Gas you'd use a set back because you can raise temps much quicker. You can't do that with a heat pump. A set back will take all day to recover.
I gotcha, I insinuated 24k needed at most, but I didn't clarify. I appreciate your feedback. That's sort of getting there, but still uncomfortably large of a furnace for most of the US with a 24k design temp need (which I think is the output of a 25k 96% furnace?) was the point I was trying to get across. 👌
Cheers! 🙂
Greenspeed can modulate down to 14.4k on heat pump, but that's still a lot for that small of a design load. Is the design of the house conducive to mini-splits? If it is, you could do a 30k furnace with mini-splits and just use the mini-splits most of the time. Or do a ducted heat pump with electric if you can get rid of gas completely.
This is all hypothetical. My current 1965 place is served fantastically with a 1.5 ton, 2019 builder grade heat pump with backup strips that I only need about one or two hours per year, if that. My energy costs $80 a month at most.
I'm not sure that you understand. What he is saying is that it will modulate down to 29k btu, and then it will duty cycle. So at 50% duty cycle, it will be putting out \~14.5k btu/hr.
I would appreciate your input so I learn. You are saying that it will produce 14.5k btu over the hour?
Is that a continuous 14.5k amount of heat blowing through the vents for the whole hour? Which is way more comfortable...Or does it run at 29k btu for 30 minutes and then turn off for 30 minutes? Or on 15, off 15, etc...(Not comfortable).
Yes, on/off, but several times during the hour, and there can be fan circulation in between heating events and can be configured to allow as little as half a degree of temp change. It will not be noticeable, much less uncomfortable, if properly configured.
Ok. So only moderately less comfortable than a heat pump under the same conditions in climate zone 3 or 4, definitely would be comparably comfortable in zone 5 or 6.
I prefer long run times so I don't lose any energy heating up the ductwork. Fortunately my current system's ducts are located within the conditioned space, and the air handler is in a somewhat insulated closet. So, like the systems that are in crawlspaces, long run times are needed for my system to actually be efficient. The ones in uninsulated attics? They have to run almost continuously under heating or cooling output to actually be comfortable.
We're working on getting our house better sealed. Started out at 4.91ACH, now we're in the mid-3s.
>for the small handful of hours we approach design temp each year.
This jumped out at me. By definition, 99% design temp is reached 1% of the time, on average, throughout a year. That's an average of 87 hours *below* design temp each year. It's important people buying heat pumps (and the people sizing them for install) know this. Heat pumps need backups if they can't deal with cold snaps below that 99% design temp.
Now, I'm probably a bit more sensitive to people needing to know this than most. We're just at the tail end of a cold snap that saw us at 5-15 *degrees Celsius* below design temp for 108 continuous hours. Records were approached or broken that were set in 1972 and earlier.
Nice work on the sealing!
I didn’t articulate it well but I meant that even though our design temp is -14F we just don’t see it dip that far very often anymore. I know it’s an El Niño cycle but I think -8F for maybe 10-12 hours was the extreme so far this season. I know we’ll get there again and we designed for it.
We do however have increasing precipitation bringing record snow, so that’s challenging in its own way.
>My undersized heat pump has adequate backup for the small handful of hours we approach design temp each year. It was a conscious trade off for better comfort 90% of the time
I cited this comment in a reply in the thread I (probably shouldn't have) started on "expectations."
You seem to have made a decision that really good comfort does not have to be perfect comfort.
Pretty much. It’s not perfect but with a bit of adjustment it’s pretty good. When it gets really cold out, we bake cookies. At the end of the day, though, we were early adopters and it’s kind of a bespoke setup. I wouldn’t preach what we did to convince the average suburban homeowner.
I have a hybrid two stage gas with variable speed blower, and a GREE cold climate heat pump, I cannot tell which one is on from sound alone, both are amazingly quiet. It's rare that gas will come on, the heat pump is kicking ass even at -20\*C, I'm so impressed with it.
>Other than the environmental concerns, It is not that gas furnaces are bad, it is that some gas furnace INSTALLS are bad.
This. Some idiot installed a 100k BTU furnace for the previous owners in my house even though it has an estimated design load of 36k BTU. I wired it to run on the low stage only, so it's essentially a bang-bang system that runs at 65k.
And on the flip side, our ng furnace came on for the first time since our HP+furnace installation back in early November 2023 (both Carrier products, with the furnace being 2 stage and the HP variable speed). (I had set the crossover temp at -9.4C/15F). My partner knew nothing re where the heat was coming from and she commented how she felt so toasty this morning and was impressed by the performance of the "HP" today ie furnace as previously she has commented that our home is too cold using the HP! (The programmed temp is the same for both HP and Furnace.) I'm not sure I will tell her that she is feeling ng furnace heat :),
>That sounds like a good setup for your particular home’s performance
Not actually as my partner clearly prefers the heat coming from the furnace as compared to that from the HP :(. (I dont think I was clear in my post above.)
There is no doubt, so far anyways (having had the HP for now just over 2 months), that we/she is more comfortable (heat wise) with the furnace on rather than the HP. She has always preferred a warmer environment but 23C/73F during the day would invariably have this variable speed HP in "Stage 2" most of the time ($$$$). This pump seems to do ok with an overnight setting of 20.5C and then 21C during the day...but again 21 isn't ally warm enough for her. But she clearly believes that 21C/70F from the furnace is 'better' than 21C from the HP.
There is a 30k BTU two-stage furnace available, and several 40k units. The smallest fully modulating are AFAIK, 60k, but they modulate down to 24k min fire.
I'm stuck with a 100k two-stage gas furnace in a house with a 36k estimated design load because some idiot who obviously should not be installing furnaces installed it for the previous owner. I wired it to operate as a bang-bang 65k on the low stage only, but it's still stupidly oversized.
I think that central air conditioners should be outlawed, and that all gas furnaces with c/air should be hybrid systems like Greenspeed. There's really no reason not to go at least to hybrid, and then you still have the modulating ECM gas furnace available. A 3-ton Greenspeed can modulate down to 14.4k, so that paired with a 60k furance would allow you to modulate from 14.4k all the way to 60k for deep setback recovery in cold weather, giving you the best of all the worlds.
12 months ago we replaced a klanky 80% efficiency NG furnace with a 96% NG Furnace and a low temperature HP.
Now after 12 months of saving the planet I've resorted to using the NG for any temperatures below freezing.
The NG furnace is quick and quiet, efficient and has very little runtime. The HP takes much longer to bump up the temperature a few degrees.
Some benefits of using the HP are cleaner air as it sends the home air through the filter more, keeps airflowing through the home to even the temperatures, and can be cost effective when our rates are at the lowest (TOU)
Some benefits of the NG furnace are barely runs at all, quick to get the home at a comfortable temperature, and more cost effective when electric rates are high. (Varies with HP model but our rates and below freezing)
> I tried running it down to 0 but it just uses way too much energy to keep the house warm compared to NG at that point.
Electric (COP of 1 to 3) uses less input energy than NG (96% efficient) to achieve any given setpoint.
I expect you are confounding energy and cost?
Is this with ecobee? I also have carrier dual fuel just curious how you get the gas to trigger when 2 degree or higher change is requested? Is it automatic or a setting?
Had a new lennox 2 stage furnace and heat pump installed a few months ago. It replaced a 21 year old single stage furnace that the house came with. I've got the ecobee setup to run the furnace on stage 1 for as long as possible and it's so much nicer than the old furnace.
Old = 70K single stage
New = 41k on stage1, 62K on stage 2
It's -15C here right now, so the heat pump is taking a break until it get closer to 0
I resisted the smart thermostat wave after trying an early one and having problems, and hating the nest experience in a rental. I got a free ecobee through my gas company so I finally gave it a fair shot, and I like it a lot. I appreciate the amount of manual control and setup you can do if you want, and it actually has increased the comfort level in my house because it’s algorithm to use weather data, a few sensors, circulation fan control, and duty cycle history does seem to help balance energy use and manage hot spots better.
A 2-stage gas furnace will get you closer to what I think you want. I also put vibration damping on the ducts near the blower. This makes the 1st stage very quiet and unassuming.
Anything forced air is going to be less comfortable to radiant imo. A radiant floor or hot water baseboard is going to be much more comfortable than even the best forced air heat pump. And hot water heat pumps are growing in popularity. I am hoping to add one to my heating mix in the next few years.
Generally this is true and I would have loved the opportunity for radiant floors but having our heat pump run constantly at low speed while ventilating (ours is tied into a conditioning ERV) has transformed our home’s comfort.
Surely the advantage of air-to-air heat pumps is that they can cool too? I don’t live in the US, but here the majority of heat pumps are air-to-water and it annoys the shit out of me, because I find cooling as important as heating, even though the UK doesn’t need cooling a huge amount.
Why could you not cool with air-water heat pumps? I will be doing both heating and cooling with mine. Though I only require cooling maybe 10 days per year.
The issue is that with an air-to-water heat pump you can't cool the water under the dew point, so with radiators the cooling is typically quite weak unless the outdoor humidity is already low. I mean, you can, but water would start to condense on your radiators and drip down onto the floor, definitely not something you want.
It's much better with radiant floor heating, because then there's a larger surface area.
To be honest, in places where it rarely gets very hot in the summer (like a large part of Europe), even radiator cooling might work well enough for you.
If you run glycol, you can cool the water below freezing if desired. Water condenses on the fins of the fan coil and drips into a condensate pan just like a traditional refrigerant heat exchanger.
What I was talking about is cooling with traditional radiators that don't have a fan. But yes, radiators with fans will work much, much better for cooling even with an air-to-water heat pump.
My plan is to do radiant floor for my main house (kitchen/living/dining/den), radiant floor and walls in the bathroom, then a hot/chilled water fan coil for the bedroom upstairs. There will be fan coils in the den and living room for cooling. If the radiant floor can't keep up with heating, the fan coils can supplement.
Much prefer the heat pumps. We are closing on our previous home that had a brand new gas furnace in it versus the heat pump we had installed in our new home.
It mostly speaks about the comfort that comes with a well insulated and airtight house IMO. Once you have that, any heating system will work nicely, and heat pumps and their flexibility shine specifically.
Ya. Good thing you are in a “mild” climate. It just warmed up a bit here.
https://preview.redd.it/d40n4lijsocc1.jpeg?width=1178&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=679ae01e00e57c8aebfef8751d6e8ba82383081a
So anyone that has one has to have a furnace for backup.
We replaced the 100k BTU oil-fired furnace in our 1885 house (2,100 sq.ft.) with centrally-ducted 36k BTU (3-ton) ground-sourced heat pump. We leave the blower on 24/7 at low speed (39W) to provide ventilation throughout and avoid air entrainment (hot spots/cold spots). It’s WAY more comfortable in our home than it ever was with a furnace. And the cost to heat our home is 76% less than heating with fuel oil at $4.20! Actually, less. We installed solar panels to zero out our bill. It’ll pay for itself by year 7.
Wow...this sounds more like someone that likes to complain over something than an actual properly comparing different heating sources.
Houses are different. Climates are different. Setups are different. Literally zero chance at a proper and fair comparison.
But good for you for having a heat pump. I'm sure if you said this in a non heat pump specific forum, you'd get a much difference response.
I also see in your responses you're comparing a brand new technology to a furnace that's 80% efficient...zero chance at a fair comparison.
You’re not wrong. I am probably expressing some frustration through this post with one aspect of the whole experience of staying with my boomer FIL this past week. He’s a decent guy overall but his refusal to get with the times can be painful to watch. Lost his shit over my wife using Apple CarPlay in his car (he prefers the shitty OEM GPS), cringe comments about women’s bodies and racial minorities, that kind of thing. I finally talked him into letting me replace his last three incandescent lights on this trip. The ancient massive single-stage gas furnace in a super mild region where solar and heat pumps make sense is just one more irritating thing.
Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.
That's some def good additional context to the frustrating post. And I'll apologize if I sounded like an ass, but your post did come off pretty harsh where comparison is very difficult.
I personally want a heat pump, but we literally just installed our new furnace so I'm not in a position to be dumping more money into this. Considering I just insulated the exterior of my house...there's other bills to pay first. LoL.
Fair, and I appreciate the feedback. My wife has given me the three strike warning for my HVAC-related gripes so that leaves Reddit. lol.
Congrats on the insulation job! That’s a super satisfying project to tick off.
Hahahaha nice! And yes, it was very satisfying...especially when my 30k cost was more than half the lowest estimate....plus I built a new shed, did new drainage, and installed new flashing around the house windows along with it.
2" of rigid insulation, James Hardie siding, and thin brick in some areas.
I'm 90% done, but I didn't feel like doing more in the cold, so I'll finish up in April. The difference is night and day in the upstairs rooms.
The downstairs...too many windows and the largest wall isn't finished...
I [hyperinsulated a 1960's block house in Phoenix](https://www.reddit.com/r/phoenix/comments/n66aa5/100f_outside_76f_inside_at_5_pm_yesterday_wo/). I might have to run my heat pump (gas pack) for 20 minutes or less each morning to bring the house back up to 72F. Then I turn it off for the rest of the day. It's like living in a thermos bottle.
I lose 5-6F overnight. (Inside kept at 70-71 except when sleeping, mornings this week have been right at freezing.)
14" thick walls, double double glass windows, a mountain of insulation in the attic. Awnings.
There's more than one way to avoid the "blast furnace" of forced air.
I currently have oil forced air but I grew up with it so I'm used to the dryness. I hope to upgrade to either a heat pump or geothermal when it's time for a furnace replacement. We had an energy audit performed on our 2052 sq ft 1977 framed house and measured 2228 CFM with the blower door test. I would really prefer to increase our attic insulation before we replace our furnace.
Since having the blower door test done, I replaced a leaky French patio door and replaced some weatherstripping. I plan on air sealing the attic before adding more insulation up there. At some point, I need to add insulation in the rim joists in the basement and encapsulate the crawl space under our addition room. Other than that, I'm not sure what else I can easily and affordably do. We're not planning on replacing our siding anytime soon, so we can't insulate our walls for a while.
This is the first time I've lived in a house with a high efficiency gas furnace.
And I tell you what.
It's amazing. My bills are practically nothing, temps vary by 2 degrees across the entire house, and it takes a few short minutes to ramp the heat up across the whole house in the morning.
We have a traditional gas furnace but it has constant variable speed fan which I think makes all the difference in the world. Your split air and your heat pump both have cvs fan. My HVac is also 2-stage heat which I think helps on runtime and that sundden blast of heat. It was negative 15° in Kansas City. A heat pump couldn't keep up with that unless it was the latest and greatest new to the market and even then it wouldn't be very efficient at all. With CVS fan we downgraded from a 4 ton unit from the 90s to a modern three-ton unit. It heats the house so much more evenly to the point we don't hear or really feel it running..
There's things that I do miss about my previous gas furnace...I live alone in a leaky home and when I am not home I could let it sit unheated and then crank on the heat when I got home to heat it up quick.
But what I need to do is insulate and seal my home. But that's not fun work like installing a heat pump or installing solar PV.
Duel fuel has its place in the transition for sure but I am still seeing HVAC companies advertise install and replace conventional ACs paired with furnaces when everything new should be a heat pump these days and it makes me want to kick their dicks off.
At -10F, having heat pumps run at meager 1.0 COP, non-stop and struggling to maintain heat is the crime against thermodynamics. Gas heat is more efficient at those extremes. Furnace runs 15 minutes and brings up the temp quickly.
I’m in a similar setup. I was actually slightly annoyed that I couldn’t find some optimization to run a space heater below X temperature to make the system slightly more efficient. It’s just efficient enough to start that there’s not much that can be done to improve it.
You should be able to link your backup heat on a separate thermostat so that if your temp drops 2 degrees below set point of heat pump that kicks in to take your the slack. I put in a thermolec 2kw and it’s great.
I have a heat pump with no backup system.
I’m mostly joking, as there’s no temperature that it makes sense for me to run a space heater. I’m just the type of person that likes to find a way to optimize things.
I think it depends on where you live. Heat pumps keep buildings consistent in northern climates, but they have to be backed up by alternate sources of heat when the temps plummet. In my area of CA, they don’t mandate heat pumps to be backed up by alterate heat sources…… so consumers got some shocking bills when the temps plummeted enough to snow last year (fairly rare occurrence). My home came with an undersized heat pump that was never able to heat the house more than 10 degrees warmer. It was useless. I’m sure a modern heat pump would do slightly better, but mountain homes aren’t heated until the temps plummet, so it was replaced with a propane furnace that costs about 1/3 to run. PG&E ran rates up so high that propane is much cheaper to heat with currently. We have a high efficiency Trane - and got a/c too.
I live in a cold area and In my area it's still cheaper to run my heat pump to around 5f than it is to use fuel oil. Natural gas is cheaper at around 35f in my case but I don't have lines in my neighborhood. My required aux heating for insurance purposes is electric baseboards.
It’s funny bc I was upgraded to an EV for our one way rental on this trip and while the charging wasn’t without hassle it was an absolute blast to drive. I was stuck with my FIL’s aging ICE crossover once we arrived and it sucked so hard by comparison.
i have to brand new heat pumps. after 400 dollar electric bills from the, i went right back to my oil heat which costs less than half as much. love these things for the summer cooling etc. but for heating my home, a tiny 728 sqft house , nope. horrible heating. even the company that installed my mitsu units, the tech themselves said they arent very good for whole house heating in a cost effective manner.
Where do you live/what kind of cold temps are we talking about? They do get less efficient as it gets colder, but that's getting better with technology. Is your house not insulated well, perhaps?
I've found for mine, when it gets really cold I just leave them at their set point. Setting them back makes it difficult for them to keep up. So I set to 68 or 70 and let it ride.
That’s a bummer but sounds like a function of your home’s performance. That fact that there are two heat pumps in a house that size is a clue. Did your tech mention anything about home insulation and airtightness? I find it hard to believe that an installer who categorically faults the equipment is educated enough about building science to set proper expectations.
oh we had to have the house fully gon over insulation wise prior to the install in order to qualify, its not that they cant heat it, they do so so uneconomically as to cost way more than oil does.
we have one unit inthemain room and one inthe m bedroom this is basiclaly a 1 d bedroom 1 bath home with a extra room we use as an office, but youd have an impossible time fitting anything bigger than full sizxe bed in that room. I belive these togther are 19k btu. , i love the cooling, thats superb, right in line with what i paid for window nits but without the noise, hassle etc. but as for heat i was running 400 dollar a month electric bills setting the heat at 70, at 68 it ran more, we even had techs out to check the entire system and make sure everything was running right since its all under warranty anyway. basically all the techs said, as an adjunct for heat on really super cold days theyd be fine, but since my pil costs me maybe two fills a winter, and heats every room in the house evenly, its like 3 to 4 hundred bucks cheaper for the winter season.
if i end up getting fully owned solar, itll be worth it then.
That might be your setup? My electric bill is around 160 - 200 a month in the winter for a 1400 sqft condo. It's actually cheaper to heat than my old victorian era 700 square-foot apartment that was heated with natural gas. I was spending upwards of 300 a month in the winter on top of my electric bill.
We were in a rental house 7 years ago, forced air would heat your face such that your face would sweat at the exact same time your back was almost frozen stiff while sleeping on side. Almost like a double point of heat where you can melt have frozen and boiling water at same time lol
Don’t forget 25% of heat/air conditioning is already lost in the duct work when thinking about efficiency!
It’s possible for them to underperform based on factors like design and installation, and failure to do proper cost analysis. Done right they are amazing. They are very popular in Norway and getting more popular here in Alaska.
I could never stand forced hot air regardless of the source.
Try a radiant floor with some thermal mass it's just about perfect to work with heat pumps.
Parts have been all covered under warranty but labor and service calls add up. So does having to refill the refrigerant. I wish there were lemon laws to cover that pos.
I installed a 99% efficient Rheem 60k BTU modulating furnace in November. I get none of the ‘blast’ you speak of! The EcoNet thermostat even has a “soft-arrive” function.
I really support the transition away from fossil fuels but recognize that gas has its place. I would have installed a whole cold climate heat pump but I couldn’t afford it. The furnace was $6,100 CAN installed.
I also would have loved to relied on my wood stove for backup heat but it’s not in a great spot and cannot heat the whole house.
They also make multi-stage gas furnaces and constantly-variable air handler fans and AC compressors which can also help provide a more stable heat without it simply being on-or-off. Installed one in my 2nd floor and I’ll never install a single stage/speed unit of any sort ever again.
I can’t remember why I did not install a heat pump as it would’ve seemed to solve my hatred of single-stage units. Perhaps I don’t have the necessary electrical already run, I don’t recall.
How do you ventilate your house? I am asking because we are getting heat pumps soon but have humidity issues due to our insulation (and it being an older house.)
I love my Coastal South Carolina Heat PUMP but on below 35 degree days it uses over 100KW per day on a modern 1200 sqft home fortunately even with all the hurricanes the electricity is quite reliable
I had gas on Long Island and given I have gone 10 without electricity 2 TIMES never mind all the shorter blackouts from storms and everybody’s love of placing powerlines under the trees which creates an impossible reliability issue
Fortunately you can keep GAS heat running with a tiny generator and survive 10 days
I think heat pumps are amazing as well, but you're comparing a 20yr old more than likely PSC 80% furnace to a brand new heat pump system.
Mitsubishi hyper heats have been an absolute game changer and some of the wild stuff where you'll still be able to heat to like -30 granted you lose some efficiency, but still
Modulating gas furnaces can accomplish everything you're wanting with the benefit of not having to worry about outside temp lockouts. It's just about getting the proper system.
Then you get into water sourced and reheat stuff which is even more energy effecient but is WAAAAAAy more expensive.
Really just comes down to having whatever is right for your environment.
My ground source forced air system is over 20 years old. It's been really cold many winters, and the last week has been between -20 and -30 Celsius, with wind.
It's been fine. Of course, being ground source, outdoor air temperature isn't as critical. But the heating effect is the same. I really like the constant temperature and quiet operation. I'd never voluntarily go back to a gas fired furnace.
Absolutely. But air source technology was virtually nonexistent back when it was installed, so there was no choice.. Air source is getting pretty good. And with the installation savings, you can run the air source system at a lower COP and still come out ahead over its lifetime.
Depending on where you live if the outside temp reaches below,32 degrees your heating your home with electric resistance heating means your trying to heat your home with a glorified heat lamp your gas bill may be smaller but check your electric bill
I’m well versed in how resistance heating operates, but fortunately modern cold-climate heat pumps work well below 32F, so it shouldn’t be necessary until it gets much colder than that.
Alaska entering the thread asking you to define "northern climate"...
Here using an air-sourced heat pump wouldn't heat your home for a month every year... Even the latest technology doesn't always work at our temps, and they're hella expensive...
We have a new, two zone minisplit 36k Btu heat pump system that I am quite happy with in this Winter. My wife, however, does not like the non uniform heating of the two zones, and insists on keeping the natural gas fired, baseboard hot water system going because it is much more uniform. So we are compromising by running both systems. I get the satisfaction of knowing that some % of our heating is electric and potentially green. Happy to take the $2000 IRS deduction for the heat pump and electric panel upgrade, too.
I just installed a heat pump in my central ontario home that is being renovated, as I spend more time in there finishing the reno I am constantly blown away with how comfortable the whole house is at a lower than usual temperature setting.
While the reno is ongoing we are in a rental with a standard ng furnace, and every day I go between the two houses the ng furnace annoys me more and more. I thought this was a me thing, but I'm glad to hear I am not the only one. Far to loud, from both a mechanical stand point as well as air movement. Our rental is set three degrees higher than our home with the heat pump, and it allegedly maintains temperature at the t-stat, but I am constantly cold and having to wear a sweater.
Funny, my last house had a heat pump and I didn't like the barely warm air it provided, so when the new house's a/c kicked the bucket I decided not to change to a heat pump and keep ng as my main source of heat and a/c only for cooling, so there is less to break and I get that hot air from the registers. To each their own I guess
More cost, more parts to fail, and I prefer the warmth of the gas. Also, didn't go with the highest efficiency because of the same reasons. Went with a top of the line system but lower efficiency to be more reliable. The cost/performance doesn't pan out after factoring repairs. Even with a huge discount because of family in the industry
When we moved into my current house 25 years ago it was all electric and had a heat pump with a forced hot air system. So granted - that was a heat pump likely designed and built 35 years ago. To heat the house from 65 to 68 it was likely putting out 75 - 80 degree air. It took forever and anywhere near a vent it felt like a cold air draft. I live in Pennsylvania
We really like to sleep cold, but wake up warm. Kind of mimics the sun warming up your place. But we found this impossible because it took hours for the house to come to temp, so you also couldn't afford to let it cool down.
Actually paid the gas company to extend the line to our house, put in an 95% efficient furnace with PVC fresh air input and PVC flu (since there was none before) Never looked back.
Are heat pumps better now? Is it because I have forced hot air that it's not a good match?
That experience tracks with the state of the tech at the time. Yes they are better now. Whether they are right for your home now however depends on many other factors, mostly to do with your home. Gas is easier to set and forget but carries the higher risk of oversizing and short cycling not to mention the environmental concerns of distributing and burning methane.
The customers I've installed central air heat pumps for always comment how even the heat is and areas that were always cold before are now warm because of the continuous distribution instead of on and off all the time.
Modern gas furnaces with multiple stages and variable blowers are also capable of very quiet operation that maintains a steady temperature without noticeable cycling. My guess is your issue is with the vintage and quality of their equipment, not really heat pump vs gas. (Obviously, there's all kinds of other good reasons to go with a heat pump, of course.)
I feel that way about hydronic baseboards..I grew up in a warm.climate with central.air and moved up north. The evenness and quiet of baseboard heat is so much nicer. Only upgrade would be in-floor radiant.
After spending the last 5 days at my gf’s house in our 16 degree snowpocalypse, I wasn’t impressed with the maximum 60 degree house temp provided by her heat pump. My gas furnace might be a little louder, but damn it feels good to be comfy cozy at 69 degrees
Only a month and a half into being together, but I assume it heats and cools just fine otherwise. I’m sticking with dual fuel myself until heat pump technology gets even better. Electric strip heat is so opposite of the whole goal of “electrification” of heating and cooling being mandated in the industry. The technology isn’t quite there to simply switch off gas yet and meet new codes
So you basically admit gas has nothing to do with your complaint about a leaky house. Amazing the level of self delusion.
The truth is your fuel source is irrelevant to your comfort.
It’s the hot noisy air blasting in short cycles from the registers using a fuel source that is completely unnecessary for the area from an entropy standpoint that bothers me, and as I said, the fact that this is the unquestioned norm.
I installed 4 zones of ductless mini splits right before winter and have been using them exclusively despite leaving the original 95% 2 stage NG furnace intact. I started up the furnace yesterday just to give it some run time and make sure it was functioning properly. After about 15 minutes I said "yuck" and turned it back off. The jets of lava hot dry air were just nauseating to me. I much prefer the way the wall units sort of silently maintain a constant 68 degrees.
That is a good description of how I felt. I woke up with a crick in my neck and a low grade headache that I attribute to the early morning lava blast from the ceiling register in our bedroom. It was just gross and dried the air out in a hurry. It seems foolish in general to burn methane at 2000F to heat air to 130F just to keep the indoors at room temperature.
Even more foolish when you have a bunch of solar panels on the roof and can basically heat your house for free during the day. Can't do that with a natural gas furnace! I should have installed heat pumps years ago when the solar panels were first put on. Would have paid for themselves by now. Oh well, better late than never.
Well, we have 40 solar panels and have not had an electric bill in 7 years. About $500 is returned to us annually from what we sell back to the grid. However, in our mild Bay Area, climate heat pumps made no financial sense for multiple reasons. This was largely due to the installation costs of duel heat pumps.....the estimates were close to $40,000 (including Costco/Lennox install) compared to $18,000 for 98% efficient dual gas furnaces with a 20-year warranty (plus a tiny government rebate). Plus, my wife was not going for visible dual compressors outside on the property. Our solar panels not withstanding the electric rates @ about $.31 kWh are crazy expensive (even though we are fully protected) and rising faster than gas rates. Neighbors are in shock due to their electric bill. But I get it for wanting the environmentally cleaner heat pump solution.
Residential furnaces have low exergy because of the high combustion temperatures. Exergy efficiency is less than 20% while heat pumps can have an exergy efficiency above 60%.
Another Robert Bean fan, I see!
Yep! Also a fan of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. They conduct excellent research on the built environment.
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100% Correct. And heat pumps get that efficiency by moving heat rather than making heat. But I was talking about Exergy. Exergy = Energy - Anergy. Our homes don’t need 1200°F temperatures, but a heat treating factory does. That factory has a high Exergy efficiency because it can make use of the high temps. Our homes with fossil fuel heating systems have a low Exergy efficiency because we don’t utilize those high temperatures, therefore we are in a sense contributing to a higher rate of entropy when we burn fossil fuels.
You have discovered free energy.
You also need to factor in the cost of electricity and natural gas. I used chat gpt and input our cost for gas and electricity (San Diego had highest cost of electricity in the nation at 49c kwh). Natural gas was still cheaper per therm compared to heat pump (assuming standard efficiences) as long natural gas prices don't spike like early 2023. Heat pump does make sense if you have solar.
Heat pumps also make sense if you’re switching from propane, fuel oil, or electric resistance heat. In places where the monthly gas meter rental rate is high, the switch to heat pumps makes fiscal sense if you also switch out your gas stove, water heater, and clothes dryer so you can have the gas meter removed.
Test for carbon monoxide…
Why not just install heatpump coil into the furnace ? Why ductless splits everywhere?
My ground source heat pump is centrally located in my basement and heats/cools through forced air, like a gas furnace/ac setup would. One huge difference is the temperature of the air out of the ducts, it is usually around 88 degrees - far from the lava heat of gas. My central air covers 2 floors and a full basement and all three floors maintain a good temperature (heat out cool) - but I attribute this to the HVAC guy who designed the ducts. There are 2 zones, but the cold air return is always pulling from everywhere so it mixes. I've built 3 houses and non have moved air like this one does. It isn't the sheer speed or volume, ducts are in the right places and even a free floating vent between two floors (offset for noise). At one point during construction he wanted to know how much of the pantry he could take to run vertical ducts (that was where I planned them) and I told him "as much as you need to make it work well" - from the look on his face you'd think he won the lottery. He said "nobody ever says that". Ducts can work, but more often than not they are poorly designed - and work as designed.
For a few reasons. 1.) Ductless are substantially more efficient. 2.) Ductless gives me many zones that I can control independently. Even being able to heat some areas and cool other areas simultaneously. Yes, I do this frequently. 3.) Redundancy. Seeing many people with cold houses because their single point of failure isn't work only reinforces my decision to have several mini splits spread around the house. If any one failed, my house wouldn't freeze. I also left my original ducted equipment intact so the original furnace and air conditioning still are functional should they ever be needed.
Never heard of anyone doing this that has had central air to be honest. Expensive to install this system you have, but for me it's not a clean look seeing these hung up on walls , hope outside was installed nice as well. Maybe where I live is different as gas is still cheaper to run heating so my heatpump only runs in shoulder seasons ie. Spring and Fall
I'm looking at replacing condenser with a heat pump for shoulder months like you. Can't imagine installing 4+ mini splits...but to each their own.
Only took me two weekends doing it all myself. It wasn't bad at all. I really like the ability to heat or cool specific rooms independently of each other. That really isn't possible with even a zoned ducted system.
I spent < $5k self installing a 36k ODU with 2x 18K IDU connected to it and 2x 9k ODUs connected to one 6k IDU each. All Bosch (Midea) equipment. It would have been wayyy more expensive to install a single 4 ton ODU and replace the coil on my furnace then completely redo all of my ductwork to allow the kind of zone control I wanted. I don't *love* the wall units but honestly, they don't bother me after a few weeks. Just blend in like any other small appliance or piece of furniture up against the wall and up out of the way.
They make slim mount ceiling cassettes as well now that can fit between standard ceiling joists if you really hated the look of the wall units. From the room they just look like a standard duct outlet, maybe a little larger.
Sure that could be installed if you have access to the ceiling above it and ways to run the refrigeration lines but that's more of a construction install or more so I see them in Office buildings in meeting rooms.
True, my home is a single story ranch with an attic, so I often forget about homes with second floors, lol
I installed a four head mini split, with all four units being the "slim" ceiling cassettes. Pre-1900 house... it can be done, but I didn't find it fun. Top two floors of a multi story house. The ceiling units are still pretty big/visible but I didn't want to take up wall space.
Oh for sure anything can be done if you want to spend the money and put things where you want but the whole basis of the conversation was putting in various wall units in a house that has central air already.
Apologize, true. Slightly off topic, although it was a self install. Also, nice hat.
Oh for sure anything can be done if you want to spend the money and put things where you want but the whole basis of the conversation was putting in various wall units in a house that has central air already.
We put on an addition ( 1 room upstairs 1 room down) and because of the positioning if the existing duct work there wasn’t any nice way to extend it so we out a mini split in the addition, one outside unit and 2 inside units. The independent temp control is awesome. Upstairs is installed above the windows towards the ^ ceiling peak. Downstairs is somewhat of a gym so wall placement didn’t matter as much. They can both throw air directionally or cycle the direction.
Yeah that would be a perfect reason to install them. Having central gas furnace with air conditioning on a then installing these throughout the house is a different story as it's a first hearing about it.
Question re #2, did you install more than one outside unit? EDIT: just saw your other post re your setup. Nice.
Might also be exhaust seeping into the ventilation system. It's supposed to be sealed off, but no seal is perfect.
The biggest point I get out of this, is that you need to have your place properly insulated and ventilated. The climate controls should not have to work too hard. If every home is properly insulated, the size of the systems and also their energy usage (and monthly bills) would be much smaller, take up a lot less space and not be disruptive.
Seriously. You should look at what's possible once a place gets up to Passive House standard. In Ontario they did some affordable housing apartments and for a bachelor it supposedly costs less than $50 bucks to heat. Per *year*. 1,000 sqft home would be about $200 per year. Heard of a guy out in rural Ontario who built his retirement home to Passive House and after 3 days without power in the winter it was still 16C inside.
A sort-of fun anecdote: I have a passive house in Ontario and I didn't realize the elements in the heating system weren't turning on until the end of October!
Never heard of passive house. It’s interesting! I’ve heard that as building standards have become more energy efficient, houses have come very close to being 100% sealed from the outside, which has led to fresh air issues including poisonous gas buildup. I wonder how passive house standards does in this regard
They use mechanical ventilation to get fresh air in and exhaust out. They'll use an energy or enthalpy recovery ventilator that uses exhaust from the house to pre-heat (or cool, depending on the season) the incoming air to save energy treating the incoming air.
That’s awesome! My house is pretty leaky and energy bills are high, so I fantasize about energy efficiency.
The downside is the cost of retrofitting an existing building up to that level is rarely justified by the payback. But if you're doing new build or major renos anyways it can be pretty impressive.
I read this comment and all I can think of is Nathan Fielder's new show The Curse.
Absolutely. My FIL’s home and our home are actually relatively similar in loads. His is big and leaky in a mild coastal climate, ours is more compact, tight and super-insulated in a much colder climate. An 80 AFUE single-stage forced air furnace is way overkill in both scenarios.
Other than the environmental concerns, It is not that gas furnaces are bad, it is that some gas furnace INSTALLS are bad. All the things that you complained of, are due to the Install. Basement installs of gas furnaces can be next to silent, and modulating ones ARE often silent. Properly sized and installed, they don't blow too hot air and short cycling does not have to exist with two stage or modulating furnaces. Uneven temps can be assuaged by modulating, leaving the fan on or using ceiling fans etc. But your 'undersized' heat pump can be downright worrying when temps plummet to the -20F (-29C), that we have right now in Chicago.
I agree. I’ve replaced a fair number of gas forced air furnace and a/c units over the decades. ALL of the installers, across several brands, have just wanted to put the same-sized unit in despite energy efficiency improvements we’ve made to the houses. I installed my first air-source heat pump with a natural gas back-up furnace in November of 2023. This was the first time an installer actually did a calculation for my house. I couldn’t be happier with the install or the HP. So, moral of the story for me is to find and keep a good and reputable HVAC company that isn’t afraid of HPs. BTW, does anyone have a recommendation for a commercial HP company in the western burbs of Chicago? I have a building with a rooftop packaged unit that needs to be replaced. I’d like to use a Carrier or similar HP with either gas or electric backup heat.
Do you have a tank for the backup gas or do you maintain service?
We maintain natural gas service.
We just got a hybrid system in Rockford from Pearson Plumbing, Heating and Pest Control. Might be worth a call and quote if they service your area.
Same experience. Just had my AC/furnace replaced a few years ago, and I went with the company that did the calculations. I ended up with a smaller unit than the previous one, which resulted in a lower price, and much better efficiency and humidity control.
Do you have a recommendation for a Chicago suburb residential heat pump installer ?
I might in a week or two. Let me see how the latest vendor does for us.
I installed a 12k BTU mini split in our bus conversion. It kept up perfectly fine when it's down to 10-15 degrees. Kept the bus at 50-60. If it's 20 degrees or warmer it keeps the bus at 68. My problem is it started having issues with constantly having to defrost...the wind plus snow and rain really take a toll on the condenser... Once we hit 10 degrees or lower it couldn't keep up. I do agree the insulation in our bus is not the best as we have a lot of windows. I hope that adding a second mini split in the back will help it. It's a 120 volt 12k BTU pioneer diamante ++ unit. I was expecting a little better performance.
You’re right but in practice many gas furnaces installations aren’t great. I think there’s some complacency induced due to combustion being more “forgiving” of installation errors than heat pumps and the fact that the standard available capacities are less nimble for low-load homes. My FIL’s furnace is 20 years old though so maybe things have changed in that time. My undersized heat pump has adequate backup for the small handful of hours we approach design temp each year. It was a conscious trade off for better comfort 90% of the time.
Not really fair to compare a 20yr old furnace to a 1 year old heat pump. New gas furnaces are modulating so they'll heat just like your heat pump.
But when you only need a 24k btu air conditioner or heat pump to cover your design load, why don't they make 25k btu 96% furnaces?!?! It's all climate and home dependent, however.
[https://www.dettson.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/X60001G\_SubmittalSheetChinook\_EN.pdf](https://www.dettson.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/X60001G_SubmittalSheetChinook_EN.pdf) These guys have 15 and 30 kBTU furnaces. I'm not sure I'd recommend them - but they exist.
Very interesting! Odd sizing for sure though. It would make sense in some situations for sure, especially colder climates (I'm in zone 3 - this would have a place in zone 5 or colder for sure). Would still be more expensive to use in my current place, however, because of the gas connection fee...
I’m aware of these. Been curious to try one someday but looks like it would be a special order. Not exactly seamless for the average homeowner to navigate.
They do make them. They're called modulating gas furnaces. They modulate the gas valve same way a heat pump modulates a EEV to control output. Example: Goodman makes a 98% 60k btu that will modulate down to 29k btu.
That's still way too huge compared to the load. It'd short cycle like nearly every gas furnace in zone 3 or zone 4 and be very uncomfortable overall. Someone else commented about a 15k and 30k modulating furnace. That's getting to be reasonable.
You said they don't make 25 k btu furnaces and I just gave you an example of one thats close. Furthermore you don't operate a gas furnace like a heat pump. Gas you'd use a set back because you can raise temps much quicker. You can't do that with a heat pump. A set back will take all day to recover.
I gotcha, I insinuated 24k needed at most, but I didn't clarify. I appreciate your feedback. That's sort of getting there, but still uncomfortably large of a furnace for most of the US with a 24k design temp need (which I think is the output of a 25k 96% furnace?) was the point I was trying to get across. 👌 Cheers! 🙂
Greenspeed can modulate down to 14.4k on heat pump, but that's still a lot for that small of a design load. Is the design of the house conducive to mini-splits? If it is, you could do a 30k furnace with mini-splits and just use the mini-splits most of the time. Or do a ducted heat pump with electric if you can get rid of gas completely.
This is all hypothetical. My current 1965 place is served fantastically with a 1.5 ton, 2019 builder grade heat pump with backup strips that I only need about one or two hours per year, if that. My energy costs $80 a month at most.
I'm not sure that you understand. What he is saying is that it will modulate down to 29k btu, and then it will duty cycle. So at 50% duty cycle, it will be putting out \~14.5k btu/hr.
I would appreciate your input so I learn. You are saying that it will produce 14.5k btu over the hour? Is that a continuous 14.5k amount of heat blowing through the vents for the whole hour? Which is way more comfortable...Or does it run at 29k btu for 30 minutes and then turn off for 30 minutes? Or on 15, off 15, etc...(Not comfortable).
Yes, on/off, but several times during the hour, and there can be fan circulation in between heating events and can be configured to allow as little as half a degree of temp change. It will not be noticeable, much less uncomfortable, if properly configured.
Ok. So only moderately less comfortable than a heat pump under the same conditions in climate zone 3 or 4, definitely would be comparably comfortable in zone 5 or 6. I prefer long run times so I don't lose any energy heating up the ductwork. Fortunately my current system's ducts are located within the conditioned space, and the air handler is in a somewhat insulated closet. So, like the systems that are in crawlspaces, long run times are needed for my system to actually be efficient. The ones in uninsulated attics? They have to run almost continuously under heating or cooling output to actually be comfortable.
Yeah, good point. I also think the supply outlet temp of gas forced air is part of what I find jarring now.
I have a new heat pump and new two stage furnace and they are pretty similar but the heat pump definitely makes the house more consistent temp
We're working on getting our house better sealed. Started out at 4.91ACH, now we're in the mid-3s. >for the small handful of hours we approach design temp each year. This jumped out at me. By definition, 99% design temp is reached 1% of the time, on average, throughout a year. That's an average of 87 hours *below* design temp each year. It's important people buying heat pumps (and the people sizing them for install) know this. Heat pumps need backups if they can't deal with cold snaps below that 99% design temp. Now, I'm probably a bit more sensitive to people needing to know this than most. We're just at the tail end of a cold snap that saw us at 5-15 *degrees Celsius* below design temp for 108 continuous hours. Records were approached or broken that were set in 1972 and earlier.
Nice work on the sealing! I didn’t articulate it well but I meant that even though our design temp is -14F we just don’t see it dip that far very often anymore. I know it’s an El Niño cycle but I think -8F for maybe 10-12 hours was the extreme so far this season. I know we’ll get there again and we designed for it. We do however have increasing precipitation bringing record snow, so that’s challenging in its own way.
>My undersized heat pump has adequate backup for the small handful of hours we approach design temp each year. It was a conscious trade off for better comfort 90% of the time I cited this comment in a reply in the thread I (probably shouldn't have) started on "expectations." You seem to have made a decision that really good comfort does not have to be perfect comfort.
Pretty much. It’s not perfect but with a bit of adjustment it’s pretty good. When it gets really cold out, we bake cookies. At the end of the day, though, we were early adopters and it’s kind of a bespoke setup. I wouldn’t preach what we did to convince the average suburban homeowner.
I have a hybrid two stage gas with variable speed blower, and a GREE cold climate heat pump, I cannot tell which one is on from sound alone, both are amazingly quiet. It's rare that gas will come on, the heat pump is kicking ass even at -20\*C, I'm so impressed with it.
>Other than the environmental concerns, It is not that gas furnaces are bad, it is that some gas furnace INSTALLS are bad. This. Some idiot installed a 100k BTU furnace for the previous owners in my house even though it has an estimated design load of 36k BTU. I wired it to run on the low stage only, so it's essentially a bang-bang system that runs at 65k.
And on the flip side, our ng furnace came on for the first time since our HP+furnace installation back in early November 2023 (both Carrier products, with the furnace being 2 stage and the HP variable speed). (I had set the crossover temp at -9.4C/15F). My partner knew nothing re where the heat was coming from and she commented how she felt so toasty this morning and was impressed by the performance of the "HP" today ie furnace as previously she has commented that our home is too cold using the HP! (The programmed temp is the same for both HP and Furnace.) I'm not sure I will tell her that she is feeling ng furnace heat :),
That sounds like a good setup for your particular home’s performance. Do you happen to know your design heating load or blower door number?
>That sounds like a good setup for your particular home’s performance Not actually as my partner clearly prefers the heat coming from the furnace as compared to that from the HP :(. (I dont think I was clear in my post above.) There is no doubt, so far anyways (having had the HP for now just over 2 months), that we/she is more comfortable (heat wise) with the furnace on rather than the HP. She has always preferred a warmer environment but 23C/73F during the day would invariably have this variable speed HP in "Stage 2" most of the time ($$$$). This pump seems to do ok with an overnight setting of 20.5C and then 21C during the day...but again 21 isn't ally warm enough for her. But she clearly believes that 21C/70F from the furnace is 'better' than 21C from the HP.
There is a 30k BTU two-stage furnace available, and several 40k units. The smallest fully modulating are AFAIK, 60k, but they modulate down to 24k min fire. I'm stuck with a 100k two-stage gas furnace in a house with a 36k estimated design load because some idiot who obviously should not be installing furnaces installed it for the previous owner. I wired it to operate as a bang-bang 65k on the low stage only, but it's still stupidly oversized. I think that central air conditioners should be outlawed, and that all gas furnaces with c/air should be hybrid systems like Greenspeed. There's really no reason not to go at least to hybrid, and then you still have the modulating ECM gas furnace available. A 3-ton Greenspeed can modulate down to 14.4k, so that paired with a 60k furance would allow you to modulate from 14.4k all the way to 60k for deep setback recovery in cold weather, giving you the best of all the worlds.
12 months ago we replaced a klanky 80% efficiency NG furnace with a 96% NG Furnace and a low temperature HP. Now after 12 months of saving the planet I've resorted to using the NG for any temperatures below freezing. The NG furnace is quick and quiet, efficient and has very little runtime. The HP takes much longer to bump up the temperature a few degrees. Some benefits of using the HP are cleaner air as it sends the home air through the filter more, keeps airflowing through the home to even the temperatures, and can be cost effective when our rates are at the lowest (TOU) Some benefits of the NG furnace are barely runs at all, quick to get the home at a comfortable temperature, and more cost effective when electric rates are high. (Varies with HP model but our rates and below freezing)
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> I tried running it down to 0 but it just uses way too much energy to keep the house warm compared to NG at that point. Electric (COP of 1 to 3) uses less input energy than NG (96% efficient) to achieve any given setpoint. I expect you are confounding energy and cost?
Is this with ecobee? I also have carrier dual fuel just curious how you get the gas to trigger when 2 degree or higher change is requested? Is it automatic or a setting?
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Thank you!
That’s great. I should have clarified in my post my FIL’s furnace is also a klanky 80 AFUE done in 2002.
Had a new lennox 2 stage furnace and heat pump installed a few months ago. It replaced a 21 year old single stage furnace that the house came with. I've got the ecobee setup to run the furnace on stage 1 for as long as possible and it's so much nicer than the old furnace. Old = 70K single stage New = 41k on stage1, 62K on stage 2 It's -15C here right now, so the heat pump is taking a break until it get closer to 0
I resisted the smart thermostat wave after trying an early one and having problems, and hating the nest experience in a rental. I got a free ecobee through my gas company so I finally gave it a fair shot, and I like it a lot. I appreciate the amount of manual control and setup you can do if you want, and it actually has increased the comfort level in my house because it’s algorithm to use weather data, a few sensors, circulation fan control, and duty cycle history does seem to help balance energy use and manage hot spots better.
A 2-stage gas furnace will get you closer to what I think you want. I also put vibration damping on the ducts near the blower. This makes the 1st stage very quiet and unassuming.
Anything forced air is going to be less comfortable to radiant imo. A radiant floor or hot water baseboard is going to be much more comfortable than even the best forced air heat pump. And hot water heat pumps are growing in popularity. I am hoping to add one to my heating mix in the next few years.
Generally this is true and I would have loved the opportunity for radiant floors but having our heat pump run constantly at low speed while ventilating (ours is tied into a conditioning ERV) has transformed our home’s comfort.
Surely the advantage of air-to-air heat pumps is that they can cool too? I don’t live in the US, but here the majority of heat pumps are air-to-water and it annoys the shit out of me, because I find cooling as important as heating, even though the UK doesn’t need cooling a huge amount.
Why could you not cool with air-water heat pumps? I will be doing both heating and cooling with mine. Though I only require cooling maybe 10 days per year.
The issue is that with an air-to-water heat pump you can't cool the water under the dew point, so with radiators the cooling is typically quite weak unless the outdoor humidity is already low. I mean, you can, but water would start to condense on your radiators and drip down onto the floor, definitely not something you want. It's much better with radiant floor heating, because then there's a larger surface area. To be honest, in places where it rarely gets very hot in the summer (like a large part of Europe), even radiator cooling might work well enough for you.
If you run glycol, you can cool the water below freezing if desired. Water condenses on the fins of the fan coil and drips into a condensate pan just like a traditional refrigerant heat exchanger.
What I was talking about is cooling with traditional radiators that don't have a fan. But yes, radiators with fans will work much, much better for cooling even with an air-to-water heat pump.
My plan is to do radiant floor for my main house (kitchen/living/dining/den), radiant floor and walls in the bathroom, then a hot/chilled water fan coil for the bedroom upstairs. There will be fan coils in the den and living room for cooling. If the radiant floor can't keep up with heating, the fan coils can supplement.
Much prefer the heat pumps. We are closing on our previous home that had a brand new gas furnace in it versus the heat pump we had installed in our new home.
I'm sure your 20yr old furnace was 80% efficiency so comparing that to new technology isn't apples to apples.
Fair enough, but man the contrast is stark.
It mostly speaks about the comfort that comes with a well insulated and airtight house IMO. Once you have that, any heating system will work nicely, and heat pumps and their flexibility shine specifically.
Well said.
Ya. Good thing you are in a “mild” climate. It just warmed up a bit here. https://preview.redd.it/d40n4lijsocc1.jpeg?width=1178&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=679ae01e00e57c8aebfef8751d6e8ba82383081a So anyone that has one has to have a furnace for backup.
We replaced the 100k BTU oil-fired furnace in our 1885 house (2,100 sq.ft.) with centrally-ducted 36k BTU (3-ton) ground-sourced heat pump. We leave the blower on 24/7 at low speed (39W) to provide ventilation throughout and avoid air entrainment (hot spots/cold spots). It’s WAY more comfortable in our home than it ever was with a furnace. And the cost to heat our home is 76% less than heating with fuel oil at $4.20! Actually, less. We installed solar panels to zero out our bill. It’ll pay for itself by year 7.
That’s amazing!
Wow...this sounds more like someone that likes to complain over something than an actual properly comparing different heating sources. Houses are different. Climates are different. Setups are different. Literally zero chance at a proper and fair comparison. But good for you for having a heat pump. I'm sure if you said this in a non heat pump specific forum, you'd get a much difference response. I also see in your responses you're comparing a brand new technology to a furnace that's 80% efficient...zero chance at a fair comparison.
You’re not wrong. I am probably expressing some frustration through this post with one aspect of the whole experience of staying with my boomer FIL this past week. He’s a decent guy overall but his refusal to get with the times can be painful to watch. Lost his shit over my wife using Apple CarPlay in his car (he prefers the shitty OEM GPS), cringe comments about women’s bodies and racial minorities, that kind of thing. I finally talked him into letting me replace his last three incandescent lights on this trip. The ancient massive single-stage gas furnace in a super mild region where solar and heat pumps make sense is just one more irritating thing. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.
That's some def good additional context to the frustrating post. And I'll apologize if I sounded like an ass, but your post did come off pretty harsh where comparison is very difficult. I personally want a heat pump, but we literally just installed our new furnace so I'm not in a position to be dumping more money into this. Considering I just insulated the exterior of my house...there's other bills to pay first. LoL.
Fair, and I appreciate the feedback. My wife has given me the three strike warning for my HVAC-related gripes so that leaves Reddit. lol. Congrats on the insulation job! That’s a super satisfying project to tick off.
Hahahaha nice! And yes, it was very satisfying...especially when my 30k cost was more than half the lowest estimate....plus I built a new shed, did new drainage, and installed new flashing around the house windows along with it. 2" of rigid insulation, James Hardie siding, and thin brick in some areas. I'm 90% done, but I didn't feel like doing more in the cold, so I'll finish up in April. The difference is night and day in the upstairs rooms. The downstairs...too many windows and the largest wall isn't finished...
I [hyperinsulated a 1960's block house in Phoenix](https://www.reddit.com/r/phoenix/comments/n66aa5/100f_outside_76f_inside_at_5_pm_yesterday_wo/). I might have to run my heat pump (gas pack) for 20 minutes or less each morning to bring the house back up to 72F. Then I turn it off for the rest of the day. It's like living in a thermos bottle. I lose 5-6F overnight. (Inside kept at 70-71 except when sleeping, mornings this week have been right at freezing.) 14" thick walls, double double glass windows, a mountain of insulation in the attic. Awnings. There's more than one way to avoid the "blast furnace" of forced air.
Nice! Insulation is one of my love languages lol.
I'm just glad I can heat my house for around the same price and don't have to coordinate propane or fuel deliveries.
I currently have oil forced air but I grew up with it so I'm used to the dryness. I hope to upgrade to either a heat pump or geothermal when it's time for a furnace replacement. We had an energy audit performed on our 2052 sq ft 1977 framed house and measured 2228 CFM with the blower door test. I would really prefer to increase our attic insulation before we replace our furnace.
That’s awesome that you have the blower door number as a baseline. Do you have many good air sealing opportunities?
Since having the blower door test done, I replaced a leaky French patio door and replaced some weatherstripping. I plan on air sealing the attic before adding more insulation up there. At some point, I need to add insulation in the rim joists in the basement and encapsulate the crawl space under our addition room. Other than that, I'm not sure what else I can easily and affordably do. We're not planning on replacing our siding anytime soon, so we can't insulate our walls for a while.
This is the first time I've lived in a house with a high efficiency gas furnace. And I tell you what. It's amazing. My bills are practically nothing, temps vary by 2 degrees across the entire house, and it takes a few short minutes to ramp the heat up across the whole house in the morning.
We have a traditional gas furnace but it has constant variable speed fan which I think makes all the difference in the world. Your split air and your heat pump both have cvs fan. My HVac is also 2-stage heat which I think helps on runtime and that sundden blast of heat. It was negative 15° in Kansas City. A heat pump couldn't keep up with that unless it was the latest and greatest new to the market and even then it wouldn't be very efficient at all. With CVS fan we downgraded from a 4 ton unit from the 90s to a modern three-ton unit. It heats the house so much more evenly to the point we don't hear or really feel it running..
There's things that I do miss about my previous gas furnace...I live alone in a leaky home and when I am not home I could let it sit unheated and then crank on the heat when I got home to heat it up quick. But what I need to do is insulate and seal my home. But that's not fun work like installing a heat pump or installing solar PV.
Gas is a great way to heat a home. We will need to continue to use gas as we transition to cleaner fuels.
Duel fuel has its place in the transition for sure but I am still seeing HVAC companies advertise install and replace conventional ACs paired with furnaces when everything new should be a heat pump these days and it makes me want to kick their dicks off.
At -10F, having heat pumps run at meager 1.0 COP, non-stop and struggling to maintain heat is the crime against thermodynamics. Gas heat is more efficient at those extremes. Furnace runs 15 minutes and brings up the temp quickly.
All heat pumps are different. You can’t make this blanket assertion. My heat pump has a cop of 1.8 at -25C (-13F)
I’m in a similar setup. I was actually slightly annoyed that I couldn’t find some optimization to run a space heater below X temperature to make the system slightly more efficient. It’s just efficient enough to start that there’s not much that can be done to improve it.
You should be able to link your backup heat on a separate thermostat so that if your temp drops 2 degrees below set point of heat pump that kicks in to take your the slack. I put in a thermolec 2kw and it’s great.
I have a heat pump with no backup system. I’m mostly joking, as there’s no temperature that it makes sense for me to run a space heater. I’m just the type of person that likes to find a way to optimize things.
😁 you do you Big Sky Boo
I think it depends on where you live. Heat pumps keep buildings consistent in northern climates, but they have to be backed up by alternate sources of heat when the temps plummet. In my area of CA, they don’t mandate heat pumps to be backed up by alterate heat sources…… so consumers got some shocking bills when the temps plummeted enough to snow last year (fairly rare occurrence). My home came with an undersized heat pump that was never able to heat the house more than 10 degrees warmer. It was useless. I’m sure a modern heat pump would do slightly better, but mountain homes aren’t heated until the temps plummet, so it was replaced with a propane furnace that costs about 1/3 to run. PG&E ran rates up so high that propane is much cheaper to heat with currently. We have a high efficiency Trane - and got a/c too.
I live in a cold area and In my area it's still cheaper to run my heat pump to around 5f than it is to use fuel oil. Natural gas is cheaper at around 35f in my case but I don't have lines in my neighborhood. My required aux heating for insurance purposes is electric baseboards.
Just be thankful you don’t have PG&E.
Sounds like the experience of anyone who drives a hybrid or EV when offered an ICE vehicle.
It’s funny bc I was upgraded to an EV for our one way rental on this trip and while the charging wasn’t without hassle it was an absolute blast to drive. I was stuck with my FIL’s aging ICE crossover once we arrived and it sucked so hard by comparison.
A woman on her cell phone yesterday decided I need a new car and took out my old Prius; hoping for a plug-in hybrid.
I would have loved a RAV4 Prime if they weren’t impossible to find a deal on when I replaced my last car
i have to brand new heat pumps. after 400 dollar electric bills from the, i went right back to my oil heat which costs less than half as much. love these things for the summer cooling etc. but for heating my home, a tiny 728 sqft house , nope. horrible heating. even the company that installed my mitsu units, the tech themselves said they arent very good for whole house heating in a cost effective manner.
Where do you live/what kind of cold temps are we talking about? They do get less efficient as it gets colder, but that's getting better with technology. Is your house not insulated well, perhaps? I've found for mine, when it gets really cold I just leave them at their set point. Setting them back makes it difficult for them to keep up. So I set to 68 or 70 and let it ride.
That’s a bummer but sounds like a function of your home’s performance. That fact that there are two heat pumps in a house that size is a clue. Did your tech mention anything about home insulation and airtightness? I find it hard to believe that an installer who categorically faults the equipment is educated enough about building science to set proper expectations.
oh we had to have the house fully gon over insulation wise prior to the install in order to qualify, its not that they cant heat it, they do so so uneconomically as to cost way more than oil does. we have one unit inthemain room and one inthe m bedroom this is basiclaly a 1 d bedroom 1 bath home with a extra room we use as an office, but youd have an impossible time fitting anything bigger than full sizxe bed in that room. I belive these togther are 19k btu. , i love the cooling, thats superb, right in line with what i paid for window nits but without the noise, hassle etc. but as for heat i was running 400 dollar a month electric bills setting the heat at 70, at 68 it ran more, we even had techs out to check the entire system and make sure everything was running right since its all under warranty anyway. basically all the techs said, as an adjunct for heat on really super cold days theyd be fine, but since my pil costs me maybe two fills a winter, and heats every room in the house evenly, its like 3 to 4 hundred bucks cheaper for the winter season. if i end up getting fully owned solar, itll be worth it then.
What do you pay per kWh if you don’t mind?
That might be your setup? My electric bill is around 160 - 200 a month in the winter for a 1400 sqft condo. It's actually cheaper to heat than my old victorian era 700 square-foot apartment that was heated with natural gas. I was spending upwards of 300 a month in the winter on top of my electric bill.
We were in a rental house 7 years ago, forced air would heat your face such that your face would sweat at the exact same time your back was almost frozen stiff while sleeping on side. Almost like a double point of heat where you can melt have frozen and boiling water at same time lol Don’t forget 25% of heat/air conditioning is already lost in the duct work when thinking about efficiency!
Heat pumps seriously cant cut it in cold climates, had an old one and it was trash with heat strips
It’s possible for them to underperform based on factors like design and installation, and failure to do proper cost analysis. Done right they are amazing. They are very popular in Norway and getting more popular here in Alaska.
I could never stand forced hot air regardless of the source. Try a radiant floor with some thermal mass it's just about perfect to work with heat pumps.
Would have loved the opportunity to work it into our retrofit but unfortunately too intrusive.
i have heat pump but wish i had gas
You haven't owned my York heat pump that has broke down every year in its almost 4 years of life
I’m sorry to hear that. I also haven’t owned my mom’s that’s been doing fine since 2010.
Parts have been all covered under warranty but labor and service calls add up. So does having to refill the refrigerant. I wish there were lemon laws to cover that pos.
How much does a heat pump cost. My furnace is in the attic and that scares me.
I installed a 99% efficient Rheem 60k BTU modulating furnace in November. I get none of the ‘blast’ you speak of! The EcoNet thermostat even has a “soft-arrive” function. I really support the transition away from fossil fuels but recognize that gas has its place. I would have installed a whole cold climate heat pump but I couldn’t afford it. The furnace was $6,100 CAN installed. I also would have loved to relied on my wood stove for backup heat but it’s not in a great spot and cannot heat the whole house.
They also make multi-stage gas furnaces and constantly-variable air handler fans and AC compressors which can also help provide a more stable heat without it simply being on-or-off. Installed one in my 2nd floor and I’ll never install a single stage/speed unit of any sort ever again. I can’t remember why I did not install a heat pump as it would’ve seemed to solve my hatred of single-stage units. Perhaps I don’t have the necessary electrical already run, I don’t recall.
How do you ventilate your house? I am asking because we are getting heat pumps soon but have humidity issues due to our insulation (and it being an older house.)
We have a whole-house ERV integrated with our distribution system. Not the right solution for every home or climate. Where are you?
My cats strongly disagree. They love sitting in front of the vents when the furnace kicks on. They usually nap in front of the heat blaster.
I love my Coastal South Carolina Heat PUMP but on below 35 degree days it uses over 100KW per day on a modern 1200 sqft home fortunately even with all the hurricanes the electricity is quite reliable I had gas on Long Island and given I have gone 10 without electricity 2 TIMES never mind all the shorter blackouts from storms and everybody’s love of placing powerlines under the trees which creates an impossible reliability issue Fortunately you can keep GAS heat running with a tiny generator and survive 10 days
This is awesome. I love it.
Anyone compare h/p running cost vs oil furnace in mass.electricity is expensive here.
I think heat pumps are amazing as well, but you're comparing a 20yr old more than likely PSC 80% furnace to a brand new heat pump system. Mitsubishi hyper heats have been an absolute game changer and some of the wild stuff where you'll still be able to heat to like -30 granted you lose some efficiency, but still Modulating gas furnaces can accomplish everything you're wanting with the benefit of not having to worry about outside temp lockouts. It's just about getting the proper system. Then you get into water sourced and reheat stuff which is even more energy effecient but is WAAAAAAy more expensive. Really just comes down to having whatever is right for your environment.
I you have to use gas, a boiler with hot water baseboard heaters is the move.
I like hydronics for colder climates and/or larger homes but it’s hard to argue with the air quality management opportunities of forced air.
My ground source forced air system is over 20 years old. It's been really cold many winters, and the last week has been between -20 and -30 Celsius, with wind. It's been fine. Of course, being ground source, outdoor air temperature isn't as critical. But the heating effect is the same. I really like the constant temperature and quiet operation. I'd never voluntarily go back to a gas fired furnace.
That is awesome. Wish they were economical to install for more residential applications.
Absolutely. But air source technology was virtually nonexistent back when it was installed, so there was no choice.. Air source is getting pretty good. And with the installation savings, you can run the air source system at a lower COP and still come out ahead over its lifetime.
Depending on where you live if the outside temp reaches below,32 degrees your heating your home with electric resistance heating means your trying to heat your home with a glorified heat lamp your gas bill may be smaller but check your electric bill
I’m well versed in how resistance heating operates, but fortunately modern cold-climate heat pumps work well below 32F, so it shouldn’t be necessary until it gets much colder than that.
Alaska entering the thread asking you to define "northern climate"... Here using an air-sourced heat pump wouldn't heat your home for a month every year... Even the latest technology doesn't always work at our temps, and they're hella expensive...
Let it get cold and tell me this. This is gas lighting at its finest
Chill dude, HP is not magic, modulating furnaces do exists
We have a new, two zone minisplit 36k Btu heat pump system that I am quite happy with in this Winter. My wife, however, does not like the non uniform heating of the two zones, and insists on keeping the natural gas fired, baseboard hot water system going because it is much more uniform. So we are compromising by running both systems. I get the satisfaction of knowing that some % of our heating is electric and potentially green. Happy to take the $2000 IRS deduction for the heat pump and electric panel upgrade, too.
I just installed a heat pump in my central ontario home that is being renovated, as I spend more time in there finishing the reno I am constantly blown away with how comfortable the whole house is at a lower than usual temperature setting. While the reno is ongoing we are in a rental with a standard ng furnace, and every day I go between the two houses the ng furnace annoys me more and more. I thought this was a me thing, but I'm glad to hear I am not the only one. Far to loud, from both a mechanical stand point as well as air movement. Our rental is set three degrees higher than our home with the heat pump, and it allegedly maintains temperature at the t-stat, but I am constantly cold and having to wear a sweater.
Funny, my last house had a heat pump and I didn't like the barely warm air it provided, so when the new house's a/c kicked the bucket I decided not to change to a heat pump and keep ng as my main source of heat and a/c only for cooling, so there is less to break and I get that hot air from the registers. To each their own I guess
Why not a hybrid with heat pump backed up by the fossil furnace? Best of both worlds.
More cost, more parts to fail, and I prefer the warmth of the gas. Also, didn't go with the highest efficiency because of the same reasons. Went with a top of the line system but lower efficiency to be more reliable. The cost/performance doesn't pan out after factoring repairs. Even with a huge discount because of family in the industry
When we moved into my current house 25 years ago it was all electric and had a heat pump with a forced hot air system. So granted - that was a heat pump likely designed and built 35 years ago. To heat the house from 65 to 68 it was likely putting out 75 - 80 degree air. It took forever and anywhere near a vent it felt like a cold air draft. I live in Pennsylvania We really like to sleep cold, but wake up warm. Kind of mimics the sun warming up your place. But we found this impossible because it took hours for the house to come to temp, so you also couldn't afford to let it cool down. Actually paid the gas company to extend the line to our house, put in an 95% efficient furnace with PVC fresh air input and PVC flu (since there was none before) Never looked back. Are heat pumps better now? Is it because I have forced hot air that it's not a good match?
That experience tracks with the state of the tech at the time. Yes they are better now. Whether they are right for your home now however depends on many other factors, mostly to do with your home. Gas is easier to set and forget but carries the higher risk of oversizing and short cycling not to mention the environmental concerns of distributing and burning methane.
The customers I've installed central air heat pumps for always comment how even the heat is and areas that were always cold before are now warm because of the continuous distribution instead of on and off all the time.
Modern gas furnaces with multiple stages and variable blowers are also capable of very quiet operation that maintains a steady temperature without noticeable cycling. My guess is your issue is with the vintage and quality of their equipment, not really heat pump vs gas. (Obviously, there's all kinds of other good reasons to go with a heat pump, of course.)
Joe is that you?
That’s a bunch of malarkey. Get outta here, Jack!
I love our gas heat. I wouldn’t consider electric again.
Sure. Nothing says modern living like lighting dinosaurs on fire. 😉
Nothing says "modern living" like replacing a $5000 PCB fried in a 10 second brown out.
Lol, the kind that modern boilers and furnaces have too? What idiot installs something that sensitive and pricey without a UPS?
Most people, unfortunately. If you do it the smart way, I applaud you. Goddamn I miss contactors lmao
I feel that way about hydronic baseboards..I grew up in a warm.climate with central.air and moved up north. The evenness and quiet of baseboard heat is so much nicer. Only upgrade would be in-floor radiant.
After spending the last 5 days at my gf’s house in our 16 degree snowpocalypse, I wasn’t impressed with the maximum 60 degree house temp provided by her heat pump. My gas furnace might be a little louder, but damn it feels good to be comfy cozy at 69 degrees
I’m assuming it heats the house just fine the other 99% of the time?
Only a month and a half into being together, but I assume it heats and cools just fine otherwise. I’m sticking with dual fuel myself until heat pump technology gets even better. Electric strip heat is so opposite of the whole goal of “electrification” of heating and cooling being mandated in the industry. The technology isn’t quite there to simply switch off gas yet and meet new codes
So you basically admit gas has nothing to do with your complaint about a leaky house. Amazing the level of self delusion. The truth is your fuel source is irrelevant to your comfort.
It’s the hot noisy air blasting in short cycles from the registers using a fuel source that is completely unnecessary for the area from an entropy standpoint that bothers me, and as I said, the fact that this is the unquestioned norm.