Sales are growing so quickly that some installers wonder whether heat pumps could even wipe out the demand for new air conditioners in a few years and put a significant dent in the number of natural gas furnaces.
Just to share some climate change context, as of 2020, natural gas usage by buildings (mostly for heating) accounted for 54% of community-wide emissions in Toronto. Transportation only accounted for 33%, so reducing our use of natural gas for heating is something Canada needs majorly to focus on if we don’t want to burn.
To me, it’s absolutely crazy that AC units are even still marketed. An air conditioner is just a heat pump that only work in one direction (cooling). All that is needed to allow it to work for both heating and cooling is one extra valve. If you’re going to install a heat pump (in the form of an air conditioner) and a furnace anyway, you might as well let the heat pump provide heating as well. That way, your furnace is only required on the coldest nights. For most of the year, the heat pump is sufficient.
With the caveat that at lower outdoor temperatures (think below about -20C), heat pumps become increasingly ineffective at heating up indoor spaces.
For places that reach those temperatures in winter (most of the prairies and northern Ontario) you also need supplemental heating of some sort.
Well, everywhere in Canada outside of maybe Vancouver does dip deep below -20 once in a while. But for the “Quebec City to Windsor corridor” (which is where about half of Canada lives eg GTA) you theoretically should be able to get away with some electric space heaters as a backup heating source. They’d be expensive to run but it would likely only be for a few days per year.
At what point is city wide infrastructure the answer?
Especially for hot water. Is it worth ripping up the roads and putting in hot water pipes or are we at the point in “electrify everything” that it’s actually cheaper to have individual appliances for everything.
I can’t help put think with hot water most is used in morning or at night. Seems like a huge storage tank that is filled at night and at peak solar is beneficial for the grid.
Hot water continuously radiates it’s heat into the environment around it. City wide hot water infrastructure would be hugely inefficient and impractical as that water would constantly have to circulate to and from homes to be re-heated and re-circulated.
Literally heating massive quantities of water; just to pump it out into essentially a field (of pipes), wait for it to cool, then pump it back and do it again.
Without that recirculation to keep hotwater immediately available at each home/tap; you’d be waiting hours for all the cooled off water to flush out of the pipes and be replaced with hot water, wasting all that water while you wait. (kinda like waiting on a typical hotwater tank, but x100)
Electric hot water on demand combined with green sources of electricity should be the goal.
Lots of countries have city hot water. It’s a simple concept. I don’t there there is that much heat wasted covering that many people in such a small area.
I just wondered about the economics. I think most of the current ones use waste heat from electricity generation
It would be unwise to not have a backup heat source if you’re installing a heat pump in Canada. Some may claim their balance point is well into the -20s, but relying on a system that cannot provide adequate heat in extreme cold events could get rather dangerous.
As for the offsetting NG furnaces, it’s unlikely someone would remove the furnace when the heat pump can easily be installed in the air handler, in line with the furnace, and a ‘dual-fuel’ thermostat used to control the switch point.
Here in Saskatchewan, NG is also significantly cheaper than electricity. So, with our high heating demands, those who have access to NG often choose that. I have a heat pump and electric furnace backup, but I’m in a net-zero house designed for significantly lower energy use, which is definitely an outlier to the typical terribly designed homes built to minimum code.
It would be unwise to not have a backup heat source if you’re installing a heat pump in Canada.
As always, in all things, solicit advice from a pro. Conditions will vary wildly between Vancouver, Regina, StJohns and Sarnia.
My new heat pump works perfectly fine down to -30C, but it’s a very new model. And for the few times a year it gets that bad, use a space heater.
Every time the carbon tax goes up, the gap between electric and natural gas closes.
But heat pumps are much more efficient than electric heating and a much cheaper source of heat.
Here in Saskatchewan, NG is also significantly cheaper than electricity. So, with our high heating demands, those who have access to NG often choose that.
It makes sense, because they burn gas to make the electricity. I understand a heat pump can create a lot more heat than just an element would, though, so it still comes out cheaper.
It would be unwise to not have a backup heat source if you’re installing a heat pump in Canada. Some may claim their balance point is well into the -20s, but relying on a system that cannot provide adequate heat in extreme cold events could get rather dangerous.
I hear there’s work being done to make more cold-resistant ones. For myself, I wonder about the ground-loop systems. They’re more expensive, but I don’t know by how much.
Running heat pump isn’t cheaper than NG in Saskatchewan. Natural gas is about 9x cheaper than electricity for the same amount of energy. A heat pump also doesn’t create heat, it only moves it. It can be over 300% efficient, but natural gas is still cheaper to heat the same space.
Ground loop (geothermal) is significantly more expensive to install and also needs to be designed properly or it will remove the available heat from the ground in just a decade.
Not sure this should be downvoted, I’m guessing this guy knows his local prices, and the rest sounds right or just is right.
For myself, I wonder about the ground-loop systems. They’re more expensive, but I don’t know by how much.
More expensive to install, and may not be possible in a normal city lot.
But there are situations when it is the sinning choice. My brother did a new house build on a rural property about 10 years ago and went with a ground source system (with supplemental electric heat for the coldest days in those cold Manitoba winters). The incremental cost was not that much, since the had the space for the outdoor loop, and had the construction equipment already on-site.
He is very happy with it.
I mean you’re in SK, that’s kind of an extreme case. Most Canadians live in parts of the country with more moderate weather, where it only goes below -20 on the absolute coldest night of the year, if at all. I mean “backup” could just mean a couple of 1500 watt space heaters in the closet if you find the pump isn’t cutting it - yes you’ll burn through your heating bill but it’s going to be for maybe a couple of nights tops.
I mean you’re in SK, that’s kind of an extreme case. Most Canadians live in parts of the country with more moderate weather,
In Manitoba (which gets the same or worse winters as Sask) heat pumps can make sense.
But that’s because our electricity is much less expensive.
Good job Technology Connections.
Air conditioners literally are heat pumps.
Technically, but they’re only one way.
The ones sold as “heat pumps” can operate both directions-- cool the outside world/heat your home in winter.
Huh. I had wondered whether air conditioners could be made reversible. Neat.
We had one professionally installed in our previous rural house. It was great most of the time, only really an issue when it hit -25C. However, we didn’t use it as our primary heat…that was propane.
I appreciate that the article notes that households on the prairies and other colder areas often retain their gas furnaces the coldest periods - particularly as the electricity costs to run the heat pump in those periods outweigh the cost of gas.
I took the lesson to be that it’s best not to wait until your gas furnace has to be replaced but rather to replace the air conditioner and save the remaining life of the furnace for the deep cold periods when it’s energy inefficient and more expensive to use the heat pump. It would be great to see some good analysis/modelling of this.
A friend of mine just had a new heat pump/furnace combo installed. It has a single controller for the whole system (is my understanding), so the heat pump will run normally and the furnace will kick in if needed. I can’t recall the details of when exactly the furnace kicks in.
I’m planning on doing something similar to that with an air to water heatpump and an oil fired boiler to heat up an indirect water storage tank. I hear it’s more easy to get a forced air solution installed like your friend has, but low and behold apparently something does exist for those of us with hydronic heat.
