Heat pumps can’t take the cold? Nordics debunk the myth::By installing a heat pump in his house in the hills of Oslo, Oyvind Solstad killed three birds with one stone, improving his comfort, finances and climate footprint.
Heat pumps can’t take the cold? Nordics debunk the myth::By installing a heat pump in his house in the hills of Oslo, Oyvind Solstad killed three birds with one stone, improving his comfort, finances and climate footprint.
Doesn’t really matter. Any AC unit can be a heat pump with just a few extra parts to make the flow reversible. We could easily have been putting those in homes for decades and saving fossil fuel use.
Assume a given upper midwest home uses primarily AC in May through September, and primarily furnace heat in October through April. Turn that AC into a heat pump for negligible cost, and now it starts using that in March and switches over in November. As we improved the efficiency further and smart thermostats come onto the market (which are important for intelligently balancing between the two systems), we’d pick off lots of days in between. That would have been a drastic improvement over the choices we actually made, and while I do have the benefit of hindsight, I don’t think this would have been too crazy to foresee at the time. All the technology and numbers were right there.
And don’t get me started on solar water heaters. There’s no reason at all we should have been relying on gas water heaters to the extent we have since the 1970s. Hybridizing it with solar wouldn’t have cost that much.