New York State Energy Research & Development Authority (NYSERDA), but quite a few other states have similar programs. (For those in New York, go to the section on “Residents and Homeowners”, select the program “Save Energy at Home”, go to “Home Energy and Audits” and click on “learn more about home energy audits and ratings”.
All is fully explained, including how to get an audit done and how to select a certified audit contractor in your area. Your auditor will come to your house and spend a couple hours going over a checklist. You will be provided with a free report on what needs to done, including an estimate of the cost, where possible. You will then be able to prioritize the order in which to take corrective measures based on urgency, cost, and your budget (or ability to borrow or your ability to do some of the work yourself).
Personally I was shocked at my audit report, because I thought I had done the most obvious things, such as to add about a 1-foot layer of insulation in my attic, seal off my open fireplace and replace it with a sealed gas insert, put plastic over most of my windows for the winter, switched to fluorescent or LED lamps, used power strips to make it easy to turn off all electronic devices not in use, etc.
No, what surprised me was that my built-in garage, located directly under my living room, has no insulation. It gets very cold in the winter, and its walls and ceiling are directly adjacent to my living space. Also, all house external walls are minimally insulated and the windows have become leaky and ill-fitting and need to be replaced with double- or triple-glazed instead of add-on storms and screens. Worst of all, probably, is that I have a cathedral ceiling in the living/dining area, which doubles the volume of air that needs to be heated and cooled without providing additional living space. Nice to live in but not at all energy efficient.
It soon becomes obvious looking at energy audit results that, in the U.S. post-World War II, when oil and gas was cheap and global warming unheard of, energy efficiency was not a priority and many houses, including mine, now require serious work to address the current global climate crisis.
What is a Heat Pump?
Think of a heat pump as a highly efficient, reversible air conditioner. It’s called a heat pump, because it moves heat into the house in the winter and moves heat out of the house in the summer. You may have noticed when you run a standard air conditioner that blows cold, dry air into your house in the summer, that if you stand next to it outdoors, hot air is coming out. So if you turned it around in the winter, it would blow that hot air into the house.
But viewing a heat pump as a reversible air conditioner begs an important questions: How is warm air moved into your house from outdoors when its already very cold outside? The full answer requires a bit of knowledge about thermodynamics and advanced refrigerants, but we’ll skip that lesson and get right the practicalities.
One way is to sink a loop of pipes deep into the ground down to where the temperature doesn’t vary much from 50 degrees year round. You can extract heat from it in the winter when it’s 15 degrees Fahrenheit outside aboveground and extract coolness from it in the summer when it’s 80 or 90 degrees. That loop is called the geothermal piece, and it adds to the cost and maintenance of heat pump systems, especially in rocky terrain.
Until a few years ago you couldn’t do without a ground-sourced heat pump in the colder parts of the USA, such as the Northeast states. Now with advances in technology and refrigerants with lower evaporation temperatures, heat pumps are effective, with or without the geothermal piece, throughout the USA. Without the geothermal piece, they are called air-sourced heat pumps and they can now heat your house even when the outside temperature is as low as 0 degrees Fahrenheit. Below 0, the ability to extract heat decreases and drops off to nothing at -15 degrees. So, if you live in an area where it’s zero degrees or lower on a regular basis in the winter, you would need a geothermal loop or keep your oil and gas furnace, or propane fireplace, or standalone electric heaters as a backup.
Why Install a Heat Pump for Home Heating and Cooling Systems?
You can eliminate a major component of your carbon footprint from burning fossil fuels: heating and cooling your home and providing year-round hot water.
You significantly reduce the running costs of heating and cooling because of the technology used. Heat pump cooling is about twice as efficient as conventional air conditioning, while heat pump heating is four times as efficient as heating directly using electricity resistance devices. However, these savings may be significantly reduced by the increased service plan costs, because heat pump technology is much more complex than traditional technologies.
Service technicians may be required by the manufacturer to be factory trained, and there are multiple components, such as condensers, evaporators, inverters, as well as expensive and highly toxic (to our atmosphere) refrigerants that have to always be 100% tightly sealed within components and connecting lines. Contractors and heat pump technologies are relatively new and wide variation in purchase and service costs are likely to be encountered, so savings, if any, are likely to vary considerably until the industry is more widely established and settled and until government energy policies subsidize this industry over coal, oil, and gas industries.
You can increase the flexibility and efficiency of use of your heating and cooling by using ducted air distribution in bedrooms and bathrooms. With a ducted system, there is a central air distribution unit with insulated hoses leading to separate closeable vents in each room served. Rooms not in use can have their doors closed and vents closed off. In effect, you have a thermostat in each room, since the vents have variable closure settings.
Non-ducted air distribution in the living/dining/family room areas can be directed left or right, up or down, or can swing between both limits. In July 2019, community-choice aggregation (CCA) was approved in New York State, allowing individual communities to source 100% renewable electricity for all (in my area, this is called the Hudson Valley Community Power CCA). This means for communities with CCA available, your home HVAC becomes totally fossil fuel-free. That energy source switch eliminates between 20 and 60% of your carbon footprint, depending on your lifestyle.
Do Heat Pump-based HVAC Running Costs Really Save Money over Conventional Fossil Fuel Systems?
First, I used the Fuel Switching Calculator available on Central Hudson’s website. Second, I calculate my 2016/2017 winter heating costs based on fuel oil and propane gas heating and compare the five-month total (November through March) with my 2018/2019 winter heating cost, which uses data exclusively from heat pump electricity cost. This is an estimate, because oil delivery dates are not consistent, year to year. I omitted the 2017/2018 winter, because I was still using the old oil heating system downstairs. Service Plan costs are not taken into consideration.
Fuel Switching Calculator. Go to Central Hudson home page and click on “My Energy” button. Select the “Fuel Switching Calculator”. Select primary heating source as “fuel oil” and “Air Source Heat Pump” as the option to switch to. Enter the number of gallons of fuel used and look at the “Annual Fuel Savings ($) column. I entered three numbers: 550 gallons for a warm winter, 573 gallons for an average winter and 900 gallons for a long, cold winter. These numbers were based on actual usage over the 25 years that I used mostly fuel oil and a bit of propane. The calculator yielded savings of $573, $651, and $1,837 respectively.
Actual heating costs for my home. For the five months of the 2016/2017 winter, during which I used fuel oil, propane gas, and electricity, my total cost was $2,164. For the five months of the 2018/2019 winter, during which I used only electricity powered heat pumps, my total adjusted cost was $1,574. The actual cost was $1,749, but this has been adjusted to take into account the difference in heating degree days for the two winters and the difference in electricity supply costs. In other words, the adjusted cost is my estimate for what it would have cost had the two winters been equally cold and electricity supply rates had stayed the same. The savings resulting from the use of heat pumps was $590, or 27% — pretty close to the Central Hudson calculator’s estimate of $651 for an average winter.
Bonus saving from hot water heat pump. My hot water heat pump is located in the old oil furnace room. It takes heat from the surrounding air and transfers it into the water tank. In the process, it takes humidity out of the air by condensation and the latent heat of condensation is given to the water thereby acting as an additional air conditioner and reducing the air conditioning load for the basement rooms. Think of all that heat and humidity your old air conditioner used to take out of your house and release into the outdoors — with a heat pump water heater, all that heat goes into your hot water for showers, dish washing, and clothes cleaning. That’s another reason heat pump water heaters are so much more efficient and energy saving.
Wait a minute, you say. What about in the winter? Isn’t your hot water heat pump making the basement colder and dryer?! Yes, and there’s an easy solution. Turn up your 24,000-BTU room heater heat pump a bit (it’s four times more efficient than straight electricity in heating). In effect, you have a cascaded water heater. The main room heat pump extracts heat from outdoors and pumps it indoors; then, your hot water heat pump takes that heated air and heats it up even more to bring your water to 120 degrees. It looks to me the next improvement will be to optionally eject the cold dry air from the hot water heat pump outdoors in the winter and leave it indoors in the summer.
Heat Pump Purchase and Installation Cost
My home required two Fujitsu Halcyon 24,000-BTU, extra-low temperature heat pump air conditioners for the main floor: one non-ducted mini-split for the living and dining area and one ducted for the bedroom and bathrooms. It required a third 24,000-BTU, extra low temperature mini-split heat pump for the finished basement (family room, bedroom, bathroom, laundry room, storage room).
Hot water is provided by a 50-gallon Bradford White Heat Pump Water Heater. The Fujitsu units were $8,000 each, the Bradford unit $1,339 for a total cost of $25,339. Two-thirds of the cost was paid for with a 24-month 0% interest loan from Synchrony Bank. Costs included electrical hookup to the distribution panel. The panel had to be upgraded to a 200-amp unit with an extra two-phase, 240-volt breakers, and that was priced and installed separately. (This upgrade was also necessary to support a Level 2 Electric Vehicle charging station, so the price is not included in the HVAC cost.)
How to Find a Heat Pump Contractor
Now, let’s find out how to work with a contractor and get the job done, including cost, technology, and service contracts.
Installing a whole-house, heat pump-based heating and cooling system is a complex and expensive job. You need to be sure to choose an experienced, well established and dependable contractor who will work closely with you and supply you with any information you need to be comfortable with this long-term investment. With the requirement to eliminate the use of fossil fuels as soon as possible, there will be new arrivals on the scene and mistakes will be made, so you need someone who will be happy with you staying on top of the design and installation.
Where I live in New York State, the Energy Research and Development Agency (NYSERDA) maintains a list of contractors certified to perform home efficiency evaluations and upgrades but at this time, I don’t know if they do the same for heat pump HVAC contractors. You can search for qualified contractors in your area using the Internet.
I responded to glossy brochure marketing information and chose Go Green Express, a business in the nearby city of Newburgh, N.Y., and which is a certified Fujitsu dealers (meaning their technicians are trained by Fujitsu and they must achieve a minimum number of installs each year). And although the end result is what I want, mistakes were made and I paid more than I needed to because of those mistakes. I’ll help you avoid similar mistakes with recommendations in this text.
I’ll give you my thoughts on the four stages of the install process. Those stages are: sales and contract management; detailed load assessment and exact configuration specification; installation; and service. With a large contractor, different people may be involved in all four stages and you need to be assured that effective communication takes place between all involved. A small contractor may employ the same people for all stages. For a new contractor, there may be disorganization and confusion and unexpected schedule changes and learning-curve mistakes.
Tips for Negotiating the Contracted Work for Home Heat Pumps
Because houses come in so many shapes and sizes, heat pump components come with many different capacities and temperature capabilities. Units come with heat-moving capacities in thousands of BTUs (British Thermal Units), such as 8,000, 12,000, 16,000, 24,000, 36,000, 48,000 BTUs. There are outside units (see top photo above), which contains the evaporator, condenser and maybe the geothermal hookup and where the heat exchange takes place. There also are indoor units, or heads, where the heated or cooled air is distributed and filtered and the remote-controlled mechanisms are housed. These indoor units may be ducted or direct.
With direct units (also called “mini splits”), there is one major air distributer that is mounted in a box high up on a wall in your main living areas (see photo below). For bedrooms and bathrooms, there is most likely one central air circulation, or distributor, ducted unit in the attic connected to the outside condenser/evaporator, with 4- to 6-inch insulated pipes (ducts) to carry the hot or cold air to ceiling vents in each room. Because each room has a ceiling vent, you can save energy by closing them off completely or partially for rooms not in use. You can also, in effect, set each room to a different temperature by adjusting the hand-screw vent opening.
The most critical parts of a new installation are: the careful measurement of the spaces to be heated and cooled, an estimate of how well your home is insulated, and consequently, a combination of units and their capacities in BTUs, and the placement of components that will achieve the desired result. This is the job of the contractor’s top HVAC technical expert and probably cannot be done by the salesperson who will make the pitch for his equipment and make a rough estimate of what you need and what it might cost.
This means that you should not sign a final contract until the detailed measurements have been made. (You could sign a letter of intent and make a down payment with the salesman.) The final contract should be clearly and accurately typed up so the installer knows exactly what he needs to install. Don’t accept hand-written scribble by an overeager salesman. You and the installer might not be able to read critical information.
If you don’t plan to keep your old heating system as backup, or don’t want the added expense of a geothermal heat source and sink, then make sure that the contract explicitly states that you require the extra-low temperature technology needed for air source heat pumps, especially in the Northeast’s colder climate. Do make the sale dependent upon the free removal of your old furnace or boiler and draining and sealing off the old baseboard or radiator hot-water system.
Improvements in Air-Source Heat Pump Technology
Up until a few years ago, air-source heat pumps were inadequate for heating in the colder parts of the country and a geothermal component was required. Air-source heat pumps could only provide heat when the outside temperature was above 15 or 20 degrees. Now, most leading manufacturers have improved technology and can provide heat without geothermal when the outside temperature is as low as 0 degrees Fahrenheit. Below zero, efficiency tails off to zero at about -15 degrees.
If you install the old technology, you will have to keep your old fossil-fueled system as backup for the seriously cold months. If you install the new, extra-low temperature technology, you can get rid of your old fossil fuel system entirely, except for maybe a propane heater in case of extended electricity outage.
Finally, if you have an older house with an old power-distribution board, be prepared to upgrade to a modern 200-amp board with plenty of 220-volt slots (the same used by electrical clothes driers and stoves), because heat pumps use 220-volt, two-phase power, not 110-volt single-phase.
A note on noise: The compressor units are mounted outside the house and no noise is audible indoors. Some pump noise is audible outdoors near the units. The indoor air-distribution units require variable-speed fans that can be manually set to low, medium, high or auto — running the fan continuously on high might produce noticeable fan noise.
Costs and Home Heat Pump Service
I was shocked when I first saw my service plan costs. Charges are based on the number of heat pump systems installed and assume twice-yearly service: during spring before summer cooling and fall before winter heating. There will also be top-priority response 24/7 emergency calls during severe weather.
I have four heat pumps now. The 36,000-BTU unit costs $46 per month, the first 28,000-BTU unit costs $28 per month, the second 28,000-BUT unit costs $17 per month and the hot water heat pump $17.30 per month. The total is over $1,300 per year compared with about $300 per year for a comparable oil-burning baseboard-heating system.
My biggest source of confusion was in understanding what work needs to be done on a regular basis to maintain efficient operation of the system. There appears to be two levels of cleaning. First and easiest is simply taking the filters out, cleaning and drying them, and putting them back or replacing them with new ones. Almost any person with a bit of DIY ability can do this.
Second is the much more important job of keeping the heat exchanger components clean. That is, the coils and metal fins that transfer heat in or out of your home. In a mini split, there is one in both the outdoor and indoor units. Air is constantly circulated over these components either transferring heat into the system or transferring heat out of the system. Air is inevitably somewhat dirty these days and may contain dust, pollutants, hair, pet dander, cooking fumes, possibly smoking fumes, etc. These pollutants tend to stick to the coils and fins and then mold tends to grow in the muck, especially in humid climates or outside in dry dusty climates. This accumulation of muck gradually reduces the efficiency of the heat exchange and it takes more electricity to get the job done.
Clearly you need to ascertain the circumstances of your particular installation and figure a “deep cleaning” schedule. Deep cleaning involves removing the metal covers revealing the coils and fins, spraying them deeply with a special penetrating cleaning foam, leaving it for 15 to 20 minutes, then flushing it out with water. Easily done outside, but for those heads located up on your indoor walls, you’ll need a protective shroud and a funnel leading to a bucket. And you may have to be safely balanced on steps to reach the heads.
So the big questions are: How often should I schedule a deep clean? Are such cleans included in the service plan? If not, how much do they cost?
This is where the shock hit me. Deep cleaning was not included in the expensive service plan. I needed a head deep clean after two years of use, and it cost an extra $800 for ½ hour of work! I have three such heads in my house and one attic air-distribution head. How on earth do they clean that?
If you go online and do some research on deep cleaning, you can get detailed instruction on how to do it, but they still recommend that an expert do it for you. They do say that to keep you unit running efficiently and to ensure it lasts that you should do it once a year if you live in an area with lots of dirt in the air. These internet search results and the contractors recommend using air purifiers to keep accumulation of muck to a minimum, but Consumers Reports say that even the most expensive air purifiers only take out 30% at best and they can be noisy and use plenty of electricity (no heat pump advantage).
So it looks like frequency of deep cleaning will be a best guess based on likely pollutants present and degree of cleanliness of your home. The use of air purifiers may help a bit but will use more energy and require cleaning. Remember we got into this to reduce our HVAC costs and carbon footprint, but once you get into the details, it sure is a lot more complex and expensive an undertaking than servicing a simple and cheap oil or gas burner or hot water baseboard heat system.
Running heat pump-based HVAC systems may be more efficient and less expensive than using fossil fuels, but the servicing and maintenance of heat pump systems will negate savings. In my opinion, homeowners will have to want to use heat pumps to reduce fossil fuels and combat climate change rather than to save money or be more comfortable. Subsidies, tax credits and other incentives will be needed for mass adoption.
Peter Callaway is a Philipstown Climate Smart Community Task Force member and veteran environmentalist in the Hudson River Valley region of New York. He took on this extensive heat-pump conversion project to respond to recommendation 42 of the Project Drawdown framework.