My house came with ghastly inefficient heating (ceiling cable) and no AC. Mini splits were worth every penny.

For comparison, I just bought a house here in Japan. Installed 6 minisplit heat pumps across various rooms in the house. All together it cost me 750,000 yen ($5,000) for the hardware and 90,000 yen ($600) for the install.

It's the opposite for me, much bigger ROI on the heatpump than solar. Rural property, 10 years old, ~3,500 sq ft + basement, in Canada where summer can be above 30C (86F) and winter below -30C (-20F). Electricity costs (Canadian) 7.6 ¢/kWh off-peak and 15.8 ¢/kWh on-peak here.

I spent C$40K (about US$30k) on a ground source aka 'geothermal' heat pump to replace furnace powered by propane tank. I kept propane for on-demand hot water and whole house generator. I have no options for utilities other than electricity.

A couple of years later I spent another C$40k for a 20kW rooftop solar system, with net metering and no battery. Net metering was critical for getting any return at all. A battery is next to useless here- I generate almost all of my solar electricity in May-Oct but use the majority of it in Nov-April. Net metering lets me 'store' excess from summer and use it in winter.

Annual costs:

Before:

    C$8,000+ propane (heating + hot water)
    C$2,500 electricity (cooling + misc)
    $10,500 total

    C$4,500 electricity (heating + cooling + misc)
    C$500 propane (hot water)
    C$5,000 total.

    C$2,000 electricity (heating + cooling + misc)
    C$500 propane (hot water)
    C$2,500 total.

In reality it might have cost even more than that to heat with propane. On the propane furnace we barely heated in winter, burned a lot of firewood to make part of the house livable. I'm trying estimate how much it would cost to heat the house to a comfortable 20C (68F) although the thermostat now with the heatpump is set to 22C (72F) in winter so there's an improvement in comfort as well as the ROI.

That’s wild. Is it something that plugs into a central air so not the usual consumer heat pump? I just got a nice heat pump in Finland for two floors with two indoor units for about $3000 with install. It should handle 99% of our heating needs. The most expensive units on the market are about $3000-4000 and for install I got quoted $1k fixed without shopping around. That includes drilling through two brick outside walls. The units are all made in China and labor is cheaper in the US if anything. Where are these prices coming from ?

The materials they install are small copper pipes and insulation and a 16A capable electric cable and some plastic. Maybe $100-200. I feel like you guys are getting screwed.

Northeast US here.

My 30 year old central air which covers 1 floor of my home went out recently so I got a bunch of replacement quotes, most vendors I asked for both a traditional central air & a heat pump central air quote.

The quotes were generally 50% more expensive for the heat pump option.

Vendor A: $12.5k AC, $17.7K Heat Pump + extra electrical work for the heat strips.

Vendor B: $8K AC, $11K Heat Pump + they don't think the existing ductwork is sufficient for comfortable heating and would recommend redoing some of it.

And I wouldn't qualify for any tax credits because it doesn't cover full home (there are upper floors without ducts that already are on mini splits & baseboard heat).

Also worth noting the range of HVAC quotes for the same spec cooling in the same home are insane. Every quote I got seemed to widen the range.

We just got quoted $20k for the minimum setup for our house. Meanwhile, I have two "free" window units which probably cost me an additional $300 in the summer. I really want heat pumps, but I just can't see how I can justify it for $20k.

This is talking about cold-climate heat pumps. A $200 window AC isn't going to heat your house when it's way below freezing outside.

$20k USD is insane though. I live in Ontario and we paid $12k CAD (pre-government subsidy) for a modern heat pump with a backup high efficiency furnace for when temperatures dip down to -40 or lower.

Its most simply summed up as what I call the tradesman's protection racket.

On one side of the coin you have any moron, calling himself a repair man which can and does end in disastrous jobs which can be unsafe. This though has much lower pricing.

The flip side is, basically a protection racket where suppliers only sell to you if you have a 'loicense' and the hurdles required to become said VIP are so high, giving your body to a master tradesman to get a piece of paper over many years and be allowed to practice installing said systems results in a huge shortage of qualified people. Prices then skyrocket.

I wish I could live in a world somewhere in the middle, but as I've seen both ends of the spectrum, they both suck for different reasons.

This. The quotes I got for a single 2 ton heat pump with a oil backup ranged from $15K to $45K.

It's insane and really made me look into the DIY installs. Even if I broke 2 of those it would still be cheaper than one professional one.

Solar install is another scam. All those companies want to steer you into a PPA rather than let you buy panels.

Of the $20k, let's assume $5k is the hardware. Now $15k is the work. Let's consider the installation a highly skilled job, commanding $100/hour. This is 150 hours, or a tad more than 6 business days for a team of 3, working with full load 8 hours a day.

Does a split system indeed take so much work? What is so effort-intensive?

COVID prices just aren't a good comparison. I needed to replace a tankless water heater and was quoted $4k. I laughed, paid $1100 for a top of the line one and had my neighbor help me who used to be a plumber. Took 30 minutes and a bottle of a tequila for my neighbor.

Why not pick up a few mini splits from Home Depot and slap them in yourself?

Agreed. They feel massively overpriced. Covid and government rebates had everyone using them as cash cows.

I installed a 24k btu one for my recording studio myself. Took me 3 hours. It’s a cheap Mr Cool one, but seems good enough for me and has been problem free. $1300 from Costco.

The quotes I got were $10-30k for one to five head units around my house. Nope!

If I’m going to spend that much I’m going to be looking into geothermal for heating

In some locations you can't rent out places without minimum energy efficiency ratings, which then leads to insulation and heat pumps getting installed.

Then why aren’t they in 2/3 of houses

I recently got a Mr. Cool DIY minisplit at Costco for $1600. I called an independent electrician to run the wiring for $200 and he helped me install the thing for another $200. So I got a fully installed minisplit for $2k and it works great.

I’m in California, I have two heat pumps installed. I can sum up the problems as follows:

1. They are EXPENSIVE. The equipment itself isn’t that expensive tbh but installation is pretty expensive. The government subsidies have made sure that the contractors jack up their own prices by as much.

2. I end up paying more in utilities because electricity is very expensive and heat pumps aren’t nearly as good at heating in the winters as old fashioned gas furnaces when it comes to the cost.

I made the massive investment because I could and I eventually want my house to run completely on rooftop solar as a way to reduce my carbon footprint. But the cost is nowhere near mass market adoption price range.

I ended up self-installing my HP-WH. Professionals either tried to talk me out of it like you described, or charged a premium for the upgrade. My county has a rebate that allows for self-installs. It was rather straight forward and ended up being ~$700 in the end. The old unit I tore out took an extra $350/year in electricity, so I've already broken even.

I had a similar problem too. Was unable to find anyone who was willing to quote me on a heatpump when I was installing my air conditioner. I assume it will be better in 5-10 years when I have to replace them.

I guess I lucked out; our house had a (very old) whole-home (that is, ducted) heat pump system for heating and cooling when we moved in. When it was time to replace, our local contractor knew exactly what we needed. They even do mini-splits, had we wanted one.

Honestly yeah. Even a certified heat pump engineer would try to persuade me to "just get a gas boiler" when asked for quotes.

We have the same setup , we love it.

>Rates for my northeast town increased by ~25% in 2024 and are going up by another ~10% this year.

Don't forget that those costs are going up in large part because heat pump subsidies are being rolled into electricity prices.

Imagine being a ~$100k HHI household and paying $300+/mo for electricity so that $200+k HHI doctor/lawyer/HN households can have subsidized heat pumps and our sleazy contractors, and the dealers, and everyone else upstream) can over-charge us for the privilege (thereby getting their cut of the subsidy).

It's a miracle we haven't all caught hot lead yet.

Costs are a big thing, sure, but for me it's electrical reliability. For better or worse our heating oil and natural gas supply are both more reliable than our electricity supply. I don't need the heat going out in the dead of winter when some wind storm drops a bunch of branches on power lines.

I'm aware that both my boiler and a natural gas furnace have electric blower motors. It's a lot easier to power them from a generator than it is to have a generator than can power a house worth of heat pumps.

My personal anecdote? Don't.

I have a house where the first floor is served by a gas/ac combo unit, and the second floor with a heat pump.

I literally see no advantage to the heat pump and wish I didn't have it. It takes forever to heat and cool, comparitively, and likes to ice over when it gets too cold in the winter while running 24/7 doing nothing. The emergency heat eventually kicks in and fixes it, so I'm considering just running emergency heat all winter.

Our heat pump for HVAC is awesome.

Until it gets under 30. Then you can watch the power meter crank when auxiliary heat kicks on. And we only keep it 65 in the house in the winter.

Luckily I live in the upper Midwest, so it's only that cold for like 4 months. . . Pretty cool. P.r.e.t.t.y. cool

Heat pumps are just air conditioners in reverse. They use the same amount of electricity whether heating or cooling. While many people have air conditioners, and grids seem to be able to handle them in the summer, an assertion that the grid can’t handle them in the winter is doubtful. Plus there are fewer people using them in the winter (just because fewer are installed). Most people in the NE heat with oil, gas, or wood, so that would reduce the electric load (compared to summer) even further.

There would be an increase only if people were supplementing the heat pump with electric heat, which to be fair is a possibility.

There’s a lot of misinformation about heat pumps, especially by HVAC people who don’t have a lot of experience with them, so they tend to recommend what they’re more familiar with.

But yes, understanding the electricity cost is essential when considering one.

A heat pump just makes no sense whatsoever for me in my northeast town. The electric bill alone would outpace the old propane bill, not to mention installation.

And it won't even work during some of the coldest winter weeks when you _really_ need it to work.

Maybe I would consider it if I was in, like, Nevada or somewhere.

I would argue that accurate sizing is not that important as labor constitutes the bulk of the cost. My total bill was about $20K and going for 30% less capacity would net about $19K so its easier just to go for the maximum. Calling in an IR imaging drone would certainly cost more than the potential savings from accurate sizing.

Unlike gas furnaces which basically can only do ON or OFF, heat pumps can regulate the heat with much higher granularity.

What certainly calls for innovation is managing the labor costs. In my case installation involved way too many people and way too many visits.

Isn’t it important to right-size non-heat-pump installs anyway? Too large a system causes short cycling, humidity problems, temperature swings. I have read installers habitually guesstimate over size to over charge (rather than do the proper calculations).

This wouldn't work, unfortunately. A lot of insulation has a reflective layer yielding invalid readings from thermal imaging.

There are several other factors like air tightness which requires a blower door to measure and even the number of elbows in the duct system could have an effect. It's a surprisingly complex field. You wouldn't gain anything over a traditional home energy auditor.

The real opportunity is to scrap everything and rethink the system from scratch.

>There's a few parts to this. Everything has to be carefully sized - power, pipe sizes, unit locations.

No. Not even in the slightest. A two bit could make conservative guesses or work off a conservatively spec'd sizing table and then deal with the resulting excess capacity with controls/distribution.

Whether it's a sewer line or a hvac system or retaining wall it's the same stupid situation. The only reason that we do calculated minimum-ish sizing for all this stuff is because if you're being screwed by law into paying to make work for a credentialed professional you might as well make them save you money on the rest of it so that you're only getting screwed out of $0.95 on the dollar instead of $1 on the dollar instead.

or you could, you know, wing-it, like they do overseas, and I tell you, the world does not end.

This is such a weird tale to hear. I heat my 2 story 147m2 house in Sweden with a single heat pump and it's downright cosy down to -10C. I have noticed that my office, which is located at the furthest possible place from the heatpump, tends to get a bit chilly when outdoors temperatures fall below -10°c. usually a blanket is enough to keep me toasty, but on the rare occasion that it gets real cold (below about -15°c), I have a fireplace to save the day. That fireplace actually gets used more for the cozyness of a fire than it does for actual need of heating, but it does help on the worst days of Scandinavian winter.

All this to say: if your pump can't handle +5°c, I wonder if you got scammed or if there are other factors at play? Is your house insulated at all? Do you keep your windows open throughout winter? Your experience is so different from mine it's hard to believe we're even talking about the same technology!

> The place I've lived for 15 years had a heat pump and a (oil) boiler with radiators, and when it was below 40°F (~5°C) I had to switch to the radiators.

When was the heat pump manufactured? Mitsubishi, for one, publishes data were they have 100% heating capacity at -15C, which some models being 100% at -20C and -23C:

* https://www.mitsubishielectric.ca/en/hvac/home-owners/zuba

There's a website for cold climate air-source heat pumps (ccASHPs), that has performance data down to (at least) 5F/-15C:

* https://neep.org/heating-electrification/ccashp-specificatio...

* https://ashp.neep.org/#!/

OEMs can optionally have publish data on "Lowest Cataloged Temperature" if it's below 5F/-15C.

Also: how (air) leaky is your house? how much insulation? For a lot of folks dealing with those two things would be more cost effective than anything.

As it stands, even if you are heating with "cheap" methane (née 'natural') gas, propane, or oil, you're throwing money out the window by letting the heat out in winter. (And the heat in / cold out in the summer.)

I have to agree. I've spent about 2/3s my life in houses with heat pumps and the last 5 years with a gas furnace (the rest being wood heat as a child). Mostly in Western NC and Eastern TN near the mountains, so chilly but not extreme cold.

Heat pumps work, but they aren't nearly as _pleasant_. You can write essays about the efficiency of heat pumps, how lukewarm air works just fine to warm the house, how heat pumps are great _most of the time_ and you can supplement with space heaters or whatever when they fall short... But as long as furnaces are accessible and affordable, an awful lot of people are going to choose to have nice warm heat that is always going to be nice and warm regardless of the outside temperature.

Resistive heat strips are what all electric furnaces use. It's just a bunch of coils of nichrome heating wire. The efficiency of a resistive heater is basically 100%. One Watt of electricity in gives you one watt of heat out.

The mistake people make is assuming a heat pump can do everything by itself anywhere in any climate. If you have cold winters, you need a dedicated furnace to supplement the heat pump.

I say supplement because while an electric furnace is near 100% efficient at turning electricity into heat, a heat pump can be far more than 100% efficient. And that's the crucial detail: a heat pump can give you more heat per Watt than a resistive heater when outside temperatures are warm enough.

What brand and was it sized for winter load?

Im in NY, 6 heads across 3 floors with 2 heads per outdoor unit. 2500sf covered.

Mitsubishi h2i (i think im on my phone). Get plenty warm in the winter as my sole heat source. I could have gotten smaller outdoor units and had resistive backup but I didn’t want that.

Yes this is actually the worst – when open minded people get a heat pump for "the right reasons" and then have buyer's remorse. Completely backfires the transition. Do you have a ducted or ductless heat pump? Sounds like ducted, and if so that might be part of it too. The air cools down in the ductwork and if that's not accounted for - i.e. you reuse ductwork that was meant for a furnace – you run into issues like this. And you also need a cold climate heat pump.

(disclosure/transparency I'm the founder of Quilt, a ductless heat pump manufacturer)

How is the insulation in the house? Poor insulation and an undersized system will be a bad experience regardless of the heat source.

The radiators might make you feel warmer despite not actually making the air in the room warmer: the black body radiation from the big warm radiators affects your perception of warmth in a not insignificant way.

I just wrote a big thread yesterday responding to someone with similar concerns to yours (https://bsky.app/profile/shreyassudhakar.com/post/3m3w3nra2h...). Copying it here if it's helpful to other folks. FWIW, the challenges you are facing seem to be grounded in bad design and application, which happens more than it should and really sucks. We need to move the bar much higher for the contractors installing heat pumps. Here's what I wrote on that thread:

This is why contractor & homeowner education are so so so important to get this energy transition right! I always hate to see reviews like this from folks that have installed a heat pump.

It’s almost always a combo of poorly communicated expectations & installer issues.

A few thoughts…

1) “Air doesn’t come out hot” is a common complaint. It’s by design! You don’t need scalding hot air to have a comfortable space. If you’re targeting a 70 degree setpoint, even 80 degree air will get you there eventually. Heat pumps work best when you let them run - they soak the space with heat.

Your furniture, walls, floors all equalize in temp and radiate heat. A totally different form of comfort than standing in front of a vent that blows hot air at you for 5 minutes and then shuts off!

2) AC doesn’t reduce humidity as well. Unfortunately, this is a classic problem with oversized heat pumps. The key to dehumidification is runtime. A well sized system will run for longer, which will pull the humidity out of the space. If the system is too big, it’ll cycle on and off & not dehumidify.

Your contractor should be do load sizing calculations to determine the size of your heat pump, not using rules of thumb or matching the size of the existing equipment! The very best contractors use performance based load calcs, where they look at your past energy bills to size your new system.

3) Supplemental heat runs a lot - this SUCKS. Electric resistance heat is really expensive to run. It really should be something that comes on for emergencies, if ever. Definitely not regularly.

Many contractors set the temperature where the supplemental heat kicks on way too high. You could be running the heat pump (which is way more efficient) to a much lower temperature, but it’ll switch to expensive aux heat instead. Fortunately, the fix to this is simple - just a thermostat setting.

In other cases, they’ll install a cheaper mild climate heat pump in a truly cold climate. This might save money up front, but it’ll kill you in operating costs when you’re paying 4x as much as you could be in the middle of winter to heat your home. The lowest bid could cost you in the long run!

PS - this homeowner later chimed in that swapping the thermostat helped reduce their electricity bill roughly $30/month! A lot of heat pump issues actually boil down to a poorly configured system. Choosing the right contractor is probably the single most important decision you'll make when you get a heat pump installed.

Spot on.

Where in the system did they install the resistive wires? Is that a defroster on the evaporator (outside) or is it inline with the condenser?

Well

Mitsubishi sells heat pumps that produce 14kw of heat output all the way down to 5f at a COP of 2.3.

Resistive heat has a COP of 1, by definition.

Do you know the size of your oil burner? It's likely over 20kw output.

It's not that pumping heat cannot work sufficiently at cold temperatures, it's that you are expecting the electric car rated 100 horsepower to go as fast as the gas car rated at 300 horsepower.

An oil burner sized to the same output as the heat pump also would not keep up.

If you installed two of those Mitsubishi heat pumps (which would require two independent 240v circuits), you would be at 28kw output and would not need resistive heat strips. These units also claim 75% rated capacity at -13f so that would be about 21kw of heat output even when very very cold.

If your resistive heat strips activate at any point other than extreme weather events or emergencies, your "system" is not sized properly. They are a massive waste of power and money.

A big part of the problem is that the contractors who are essentially the point of sale for these systems are just obscenely dumb about them. They will sell you utterly undersized units or sell units that aren't rated for cold, as well as just install things so poorly that they drain condensate into your walls and cause mold issues. They had similar problems with Oil burners, but at least those they tended to upsell bigger systems so their ignorance didn't matter. They seem very bad at doing the planning or design required to actually spec out a system, so you have to be your own engineer.

>and that is what the industry needs to work on.

I don't know how the industry is supposed to force contractors to read their very very clear documentation, or follow the very clear instructions (of boiler manufacturers no less) of "You must measure heat load to accurately size a heat appliance".

The strength of your heat pump shouldn't be outside surface temperature, but underground aquifer temperature. Those two temperatures are related but not as directly as they seem. A good aquifer in certain cavernous regions of the US might stay about 55 degF year round, regardless of outside surface temperature. 55 degF is still below what a lot of people want their home to be year round so a heat pump still has to supplement heat somehow in winters (or radiators or what have you), but a "free" boost to 55 degF is still a better starting place than 20 or 40 degF outside temperature.

I don't think latitude is a factor in how efficient a heat pump you can find, I think the type geography under you feet is (probably where "interior" regions probably have more luck than coastal regions), combined with how well regulated or unregulated your area's aquifer generally is (things like nearby wells and industrial water dumping will effect aquifer levels and temperatures). (Maybe not enough heat pump proponents realize that you only have good, cheap heat pumps if you have a powerful EPA and other Water protection groups fighting the good fight in your region.)

Looks like poor installation.

I've spent 1.5 years in a brand-new building with Mitsubishi heat pumps. It had some initial trouble with a faulty electronic component, but afterwards it worked quite fine, needing little if any attention.

It's really amazing how often I hear that same story: poor choices by the installer left the home owner in a bind with a poorly functioning system. The industry (certainly the residential side) really does need better educated installers/planners.

Even as a homeowner who's a bit of an energy geek, it's entirely too challenging to understand the entire space and what options fit one's needs. LLM's help a lot here (if you can trust them!), but it's a funny situation where there's silos of knowledge that are hard to connect.

gets to -30f where I live (about once every 10 years)

For this specific problem, I'm always inclined to just keep a 1800W space heater or two in the closet.

I'm amazed at these prices, I replaced a propane tank + furnace with horizontal loop ground source for $40k Canadian (+ tax, but government rebate matched that). It's almost paid for itself in about 6 years, I gave more detailed numbers in another reply.

Remember: The season that you need heat is the season with the least sunshine. Solar is only cheap as you claim due to net metering; without pairing it with batteries or some other form of storage, you're pushing your heating cost on others by flooding the grid with electricity when it isn't needed.

Now, I will gladly point out that I have a roof of solar panels, and benefit from subsidies: It's important to understand that solar currently is unsustainable economically and will only be sustainable with more R&D on storage.

Don't you still need a generator to run the blower and the logic on the furnace? I mean, obviously a much lower power load, but wouldn't a generator still be necessary?

Quality control by the contractor is soooo important. Formicary corrosion like you described can happen if a contractor doesn't pull a proper vacuum on the system to evacuate moisture before releasing refrigerant. I saw an anecdote where Bill Spohn, who literally owns an HVAC tools company, had this happen with the contractor installing a system in his own house! (https://www.heatpumped.org/p/are-heat-pumps-a-commodity)

I suspect it's especially bad with new builds, as new builds are a race to the bottom and every subcontractor is fighting to get the lowest bid. The best way to make it cheaper is skip steps, and that hurts in the long run. Sorry you ended up in that situation, crummy experiences like this set the industry back. For what it's worth, the same corrosion could happen with a traditional AC system too (it's not just heat pumps). But the difference is, often those refrigerant lines don't get as hidden on interior walls as the ones for ductless mini-splits do.

This was a major barrier for me. I had to replace an existing natural, tanked gas water heater. Ultimately I just bought a $750 replacement because I could easily swap it out myself. Installing a heat pump would have involved an electrician to install a new circuit, and possibly other changes. While there were some 120v models available locally, they all had pretty bad reviews. So I would have paid a couple thousand dollars more. Maybe I could break even over 10 years paying less for gas but that seemed like a poor use of funds.

A possible challenge, yes, but there exist 1500w, standard outlet hpwh, and it's a lot less common to not have any power near a water heater.

Hey Paul! Good to see ya on here. I'm in a Facebook group of small HVAC contractors, and recently there was a conversation about who is installing heat pumps vs traditional ACs and furnaces. I was thrilled to see that most were saying that they are moving a lot of their business toward heat pumps. Of course, there were a few that were stuck in their ways and were "gas or die" type people, but it's exciting to see the ship slowly starting to turn. There are more and more heat pump forward contractors coming online every day, and it's great that we can team up with folks like you pushing the hardware forward. There is so much work to deploy these systems, and winning is going to look like all of us working together!

>> someone evil enough

There's so much evil being demonstrated today, in real time, that we can't dismiss this any more, it must be seriously considered.

What makes you believe the same doesn't already apply to natural gas, or petrol?

Besides, coercing the general public like that generally doesn't end well: people tend to get annoyed when their basic needs of survival aren't being met - especially if it is a deliberate choice. The people in power will be gone within days.

I don’t know whether you can get a completley silent unit, but I can say that our Mitsubishi heat pump does make a high pitched sound while running. Although I am used to it now, I found it annoying until I got used to it. It is very different than the intermittent low pitched rumble of my oil boiler.

Split system is a common term that covers both heat pumps and traditional AC systems. It has to do with the physical setup, not the theory of operation.

A heat pump specifically is an AC system that can run in reverse: moving heat from outside to inside.

Yes! Also often referred to as "Reverse Cycle Air Conditioning" in Australia

What do you mean when you say “heat pump hybrid?”

That seems really weird, the only real difference is a reversing valve that costs a couple bucks. A heat pump is an AC, it just can be run backwards to produce heating as well. In cooling it's literally the same thing.

That's crazy. It's a reversing valve.

But you might also be comparing multi-stage variable load DC heat pumps with single stage air conditioners and not an actually equivalent air conditioner.

That's the upfront price. What about the total cost of ownership (TCO)?

For me it was more like 1.1× the price.

Its not hard to say at all, the math can be done pretty easily based on your local electric and gas rates, and most people who go for a heat pump already need an air conditioner for summer.

The math actually works out in many places unless you have cheap gas and expensive electricity. Its also better then to burn the gas at a power plant at 60% efficiency then 300-400% efficiency at the heat pump than pipe and burn the NG at 80% efficiency in your furnace.

Only if you write a haiku about the site guidelines first.

Congratulations?