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I've got to throw out an obvious explanation.

A third of the country rents. Renters pay the utility bills. Landlords pay for appliance upgrades.

Why would the landlord put any effort into upgrading appliances when the cost of not upgrading them is borne by the renters?

I've never rented at a place where they didn't want to fix broken equipment with the cheapest possible replacement. And no renter would ever consider purchasing a major appliance like this since they'll end up priced out before they recover the cost in utility bills.

They're a nice technology, but our incentives are all wrong for a lot of housing stock.

Maybe I have scar tissue from COVID prices but $20k to install a ductless heat pump vs. a $200 to throw a window A/C in or $700 for a portable heat pump. While I get that these heat pumps are better for the environment and much more efficient it's a last mile issue. The installers charge an arm and a leg and I'm not hurting enough to self install. I'm hoping the window heat pumps that just run off mains will be available to more markets soon, I could buy one of those for every room in my house for less than the install on a single mini split.

Where it did make sense was when I was getting solar. It was only a few thousand since I already had the trades out and reducing the load was important for the ROI on the panels.

When I replaced my furnace a couple years back I asked for a heat pump - a previous house had it and it worked great. Turns out my contractor didn't ask the right questions and so mine only works to 25F - it still outputs heat below that, but not enough to keep my house warm and so I use the backup furnace a lot more than I want to.

A previous house the heat pump was sized to work to 14F. They make them that will work down to -25F, but since it gets to -30f where I live (about once every 10 years, but that is enough) we need a backup system so is probably isn't worth getting a system sized to as cold as possible.

Ground source heat pumps are a common option in rural areas - they cost a lot to install ($50k - and this is the cheapest version that needs a lot of land thus rural areas). They are likely to pay off if you live in the same house for 50 years, but the initial upfront costs are high (you do get a house worth $10k more than other heat option). Worth looking into if you are young and have reason to think you will live in the same house for 50 years.

The real question is what the total cost of ownership and what is the payback period? Also there are regional climate differences that have to deal with very large temperature swings as well as very old poorly insulated houses. investing hundreds of thousands to re-insulate one's house, replace all the windows, excavate the heat sink and dispose of a furnace that is already working, so that one can buy a heat pump at greater costs than a furnace to achieve efficiency improvements that barely pay for themselves over thirty years when the same amount of money can be spent elsewhere. if it were such a great idea it would have already been done.

> what it’s going to take, from the human side of the equation, to make heat pumps the obvious, accessible, and default choice for millions of American homes.

Well, this has already happened; living in a third-world American country, I've been heating my houses in winter with heat pumps every winter for many years (even though they iced up occasionally) and most air conditioners here are already heat pumps. Frio/calor, they're called.

But, installations strictly for heating are probably never going to happen en masse. In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45698730 I analyze the costs. It turns out that heat pumps cost around 39¢ per peak watt they save, while low-cost solar panels cost 6.5¢ per peak watt they produce, so it's almost always cheaper to install enough solar panels to heat your house resistively. And that gap is going to continue widening for the foreseeable future.

Our heat pump, a cheap-shit Electrolux mini split assembled in Tierra del Fuego, broke down last winter; somehow the refrigerant escaped. The repairman did a pressure test with nitrogen but couldn't find a link. He pre-emptively soldered shut a pipe that had been crimped shut at the factory, and pointed out that, probably, if we hadn't been using it as a heat pump, it would have been fine. Certainly it would have had many fewer hours of operation. We ended up spending about US$100 on the repair, which is the price of 1500 peak watts of solar panels. I think that brings us to about US$500 total spent on the thing—insignificant to people in the US, but a significant chunk of change in most of the rest of America.

Heat pumps are an energy-crisis-era efficiency measure to conserve energy. But energy is no longer scarce. After 50 years, the energy crisis is, if not ended, at least ending. If your house's solar panels are producing more energy than you can use or sell back to the grid at a decent price, the energy to run a resistive heater is free.

Installed a Minisplit to heat/cool a 1,000 sqft large work area. My average monthly electricity cost is maybe $30 to heat or cool. The tech in these are amazing.

We live in a temperate climate and installed a heat pump / mini-split system to replace our central AC and furnace and get rid of all the ductwork.

It's awesome in many respects and I don't regret it, but it's also MUCH more expensive in the winter vs our gas furnace. Electricity is just so much more expensive than the gas equivalent for heating. Overall this is costing us a lot more money per year.

But the upside is that it maintains the temperature in each room much more effectively, and it's a LOT quieter, both inside from the air handlers and outside from the ... loud outside fan thing (compressor?).

i bought a mitsubishi minisplit, as well as a lineset, and installation tools (vaccuum pump, valve core removal tool, flaring tool, micron guage, nitrogen, pressure regulator, manifold) and installed it myself after watching several hours of ac service tech youtube videos. it was a little stressful but i saved 8,000 usd and i honestly feel pride every time i turn it on. its worked absolutely flawlessly. i recommend this route if you have the time!

Electricity costs are a big factor in this, imo.

Rates for my northeast town increased by ~25% in 2024 and are going up by another ~10% this year. It's a hard sell to spend a large amount of up-front money (even after rebates, which decreased this year) to convert to a system that will cost you more than you pay today, and may not work as well in cold weather (every heat pump company I talked to suggested keeping my existing gas heating in place and automatically switching to it when it gets cold enough).

I was also told that the electrical grid in my area is having difficulty keeping up with the push towards heat pumps, which increase load exactly on the coldest nights of the year, when you need heating most.

Right as COVID lockdowns were starting in early 2020, our gas furnace reached the state of nearly broken and would have been unfixable if it finally broke. We called local HVAC for a quote and they convinced that instead of simply replacing the furnace, we should get full-house air conditioning with electric heat pump with gas furnace backup. We agreed and what was amazing was that they wanted to install it the NEXT DAY. Unprecedented speed. This was because it was COVID and everyone was stopping construction projects etc. Their technicians were ready to go and needed all the work. Next day wasn't good so we installed it the next next day. 4 burly guys, all masked and gloved, did it all in just a few hours. Our friends trying to do the same couple of years ago had to wait months for installation. We've been enjoying AC since then, a lot.

I think it cost about $13k for heat pump and furnace and labor, maybe a bit more with tax, and I got ~1.7k rebate/refund of some sorts? Or 1.3k? I don't fully recall why but it must have been government sponsored.

My ongoing energy costs are about the same, but the mix completely switched from gas to electricity. I cook with gas so there is just a bit every month, but virtually no heating with it, the gas hardly ever starts except in the height of winter. If I only had solar to feed it with sun, but the house location with shade, hill and trees isn't suited for it. Instead I pay a little extra to energy company to presumably source my electricity from solar. Works.

One other challenge is for existing homes a water heater may only have a gas line running to it. Want a heat pump hot water heater? Hiring the electrician alone, not to mention potentially ripping up walls will ruin any economic advantage.

> we’re waiting on people

Right on. I have a heat pump water heater and a heat pump heating system in my HVAC. Getting those installed felt like swimming upstream. Most contractors would try to dissuade me from them.

Luckily, I found a contractor who was skilled and knowledgeable about heat pumps and rebates (back when govt thought climate change was real). Very happy with my heat pump tech.

I recently installed a mini split heat pump in a detached accessory building. The installer upsold me on a more expensive unit because I’d get federal refunds due to its higher SEER rating. Ok, sure: higher efficiency, same price.

In fact, efficiency was the main reason I wanted a mini split in the first place. It just bugged me to _not_ pump the heat entirely outside the structure. And I paid a bit more for that versus just using a window unit or “portable” AC. All we’re talking here is the location of the condenser coil: inside versus outside. It just makes sense to put it outside, with just a small penetration in the building.

Well, during electrical inspection apparently I paid too much. After paying more than a certain threshold for converting an unconditioned space to a conditioned space, I now need to insulate the accessory structure to a certain degree in order to pass code.

The kicker is, the only way I can insulate the space to meet code is to insulate with polyiso (aka styrofoam) because the structure is so small. So, I guess in an effort to be “green” according to local government, I need to rip out the mineral wool insulation, dump it and replace it with styrofoam. Or put the mini split in the dump and buy a cheaper less efficient unit like a window unit.

I’d save approximately $0.30 a year on energy costs to insulate to code versus what I have now with the mini split.

This whole industry is stupid and that’s because it’s regulated by idiots.

Name and shame: this is Chapel Hill, NC.

I’ve had a heat pump with backup gas in Seattle area since 2016. Great to have AC and heat; the gas comes on when house needs to be warmed quickly. I like constant air circulation and have it set so fan runs even when it doesn’t need to heat or cool so it works really well for me; no complaints at all.

All this push to electrify everything makes me nervous, as it effectively centralizes a lever that someone evil enough could use to coerce the general public in unsavory ways.

I'm doubly suspicious of areas that combine mass-electrification with reducing availability of the most reliable alternate source of electricity (i.e. generators). California in particular is pushing to make generators increasingly hard to obtain.

Heat pumps are so _ordinary_ here (Central Europe), im always a bit surprised how skeptical folks in the US and UK seem to be about them

Regarding the crazy prices - it’s structural.

In Asia, manufacturers sell direct or through highly competitive retail channels and the installers really only have to know minisplits.

Minisplits in the US get sold by the brand -> distributor -> dealer (contractor) -> homeowner with each step being a 20% market up. Sometimes there is even a master distributor in there AND usually there is a “rep group” taking points too.

That is fundamentally what drives up costs. That and the fact that the US housing marketing is very heterogeneous so contractors have to know boilers, ducted heatpumps, furnaces, packaged units, ductless, etc.

We had a heat pump installed last year. It’s advertised as a cold-climate heat pump and it’s “good enough” for us, but it’ll never again be toasty on a cold night, just relatively warm. When under heavy load, it also has some kind of loud vibration issue, I think in the lines that run from inside out to the condenser. The system is an Ecoer, which is a Chinese company that pretends to be a U.S. company. And it has a really suspicious 4G cellular IoT modem that, of course, feeds all the data to their cloud, with no end-user access.

I will say, it keeps the temperature very stable, which is nice. And it saves money, paying for itself within 10 years. But there’s actually quite a bit that can go wrong during installation and it’s not easy to get them to fix everything, maybe because U.S. installers aren’t used to all of the nuances of heat pumps yet. Our aux heat strips still aren’t working properly, after multiple service visits.

If I could do it over again, I would still get a heat pump. But I would go with a Mitsubishi system and a more experienced installer. The extra cost is worth it.

People are reluctant to install them because they don't work as well as the good old boilers we'd be replacing. I'm not saying they can't, and I'm not saying that there are zero models out there that work. But in practice, a lot of us that have interacted with heat pumps have the specific experience that they get anemic as the temperature goes down and eventually become unable to do much of anything.

I live in the mid-Atlantic (US) climate zone, where it's certainly not as cold as the north but definitely goes well below freezing regularly for several months of the year. 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. It's because it's old, everybody told me, modern heat pumps are better! So last year when both systems needed repairs at the same time, I not-entirely-willingly switched to a brand-new 2024-model heat pump. It absolutely could not keep up when the temperature was freezing until they came back and installed resistive heat strips for low temperature---these seem to be a fancy version of the heating elements in a space heater or a toaster. They do not seem to be particularly efficient. And to the extent that my "heat pump system" does now more or less keep the house adequately warm, if not as comfortable as the radiators always could, it's not solely due to the heat pump, but the other stuff they had to put in because the heat pump couldn't keep up.

My experience is far from unique. Maybe it's that they only install the good ones in farther-north locations! Maybe it's that the good ones are just way more expensive! I'm perfectly prepared to believe the factual statements about the physics and the tech. But if we're talking about perception and "why aren't more people looking to install heat pumps", it's because lots of people have experiences like the above, and that is what the industry needs to work on.

Interesting to view this from the POV of the fossil fuel usage rampdown needed because to mitigate the climate catastrophe.

It seems that the fact that a lot of people have utility gas over there, and low price of gas due to regulation (no externalities taxed in) is the big one.

Hm, these are just called AC in Europe. To my knowledge, AC has always worked both ways here. In Europe we call heap pumps when they heat the water. So they are are Air-Water (the outdoor unit looks like a bigger AC outdoor unit) or Water-Water (the outdoor unit is a long underground water pipe loop). The warm water is used for underfloor heating or for shower, kitchen, etc.

> This piece isn’t about reinventing the wheel. It’s about understanding why we’re not using the wheel we already have—

common man please just write the text yourself

I live in a heat pump only house and the only thing I don't really love are mid summer electric bills, but I think that'd basically be the same with a dedicated AC. In my climate heat is more nice than complete necessity and usually only spikes bills if there are true hard freezes.

I will say, they seem to have gotten more expensive. It took about $10k to replace ours (it was over 20 years old and replacing coolant+fixing was quoted at nearly half that). Even though research suggested it could be more like a $6.5 to $7.5k cost, it was hard to even get people quoting in a timely manner, let alone getting any kind of a deal.

It's... a bad article?

It takes as given that the tech is here, and it's economically feasible, but it's not giving any arguments. Just blames the people.

It's also not exactly defining the problem space. Is it talking about air-air AC with heating? Those are common and very cheap. Is it talking about large HVAC systems that include hot water? Those are indeed a hellof a lot more expensive, but also a hellof a lot more complex. And no matter what the author is saying, technology isn't to the point of giving us hot water from heat pumps. The math just isn't mathing - to take cold water and heat it up to "hot" by cooling off freezing air, you'd simply have to cool huge amounts of air. Yeah, probably, if you put a room-sized HVAC system and spend a ton on electricity - but that's where it stops being competitive.

Is it talking about geothermal heat exchangers? Because those are indeed a lot more efficient - but also more expensive for obvious reasons. You need to drill.

Everybody seems to agree that installation costs way too much.

There's a few parts to this. Everything has to be carefully sized - power, pipe sizes, unit locations. You need to put a house's thermal profile (how much heat loss, how much air leak, how much thermal mass) along with the regional thermal profile into an engineering calculation which computes what you need.

Thermographic inspections are a thing.[1] Usual price is around $400. They're not very standardized. You get IR images of a house, which is good for finding leaks but not quantitative enough to size a heating and cooling plant.

This would be a great drone application. Fly over and around the house. Build a 3D model of the house and paint heat loss on top of it. Crunch on data to get the engineering info needed to correctly size HVAC. Also discover big heat leak points. Turn this from experienced guessing into measurement.

Then submit that data sheet to multiple sites that offer heat pumps.

Startup opportunity here.

[1] https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/thermographic-inspections

Execute, execute, execute, execute, execute, execute, execute, execute, execute, execute, execute, execute, execute, execute, execute, execute, execute, execute, execute, execute, execute, execute, execute, execute, execute, execute, execute, execute, execute, execute, execute, execute, execute, execute, execute, execute, execute. It's working, keep going. Don't stop.

Make them easy to buy and install leading to lower costs, and more getting into homes.

I live in a community in the Pacific Northwest that was built in 2018 and (almost) every home (22/23) has (Carrier) heat pumps; for some unknown reason, the other has heated floors.

Many of us are proponents of heat pumps thanks to reduced costs and emissions *but* we've not had a generally good experience possibly (!) as a result of bad installation and definitely due to limited numbers of indoor heads (if I close my main bedroom door, the rest of my upper floor has no heating/cooling).

There's always someone in the community frustrated that their house is too cold/hot, that the condensation drains are blocked and water is running down an interior wall, that an indoor head or the condenser is having problems, or that there's unexplained coolant leak.

People moving into the community are inheriting issues with at least 2 homes having to augment/replace the system. To save breaking into the walls, this often necessitates putting the power, coolant and drainage lines on the outside of the house and then boxing the result.

We're saving money on monthly bills (probably; we don't have a comp) but many of us have spent quite some $$$ on maintenance and replacement equipment.

I love heat pumps. Had one in my house in the southern US and am about to put one in my house in the EU. I also recently bought a heat pump dryer, also great. Very gentle on clothes, doesn’t need a vent, or the high power plug - just a drain like a washer.

I’ll just say that most of the core issues with heat pumps seems to resolved with monoblock designs. Specifically, by moving the refrigerant cycle outdoors, install can be cheaper, and capacity can be more variable than when you are relying on sizing to the phase change occurring in each indoor unit.

One thing I haven't been able to figure - I have a flat in Spain with a combined aircon heat system costing ~$3k which functions from the physics point of view as a heat pump but was not marketed as a "heat pump" which I think are supposed to be more expensive. Is there any difference between heat/cool aircon and heat pumps?

My mini-split was installed sometime between fall 2017 or spring 2018 when my house was built. It failed when it was 6 years old, and the lineset had to be replaced because there was too much acid in the insulation and it corroded the copper.

The problem was that the lineset was in my walls, so replacing it would require ugly lineset in a highly-visible place on my house. All the quotes to fix / replace it were absurdly expensive.

Because the mini-split was for a room that I use occasionally, I just use a portable air conditioner and a space heater.

Cool to see a Heat Pump article near the top of HN! I'm the founder/CEO of Quilt (https://www.quilt.com/), which is mentioned in the article, and a decade+ daily reader of this fine site. At Quilt we've run the Nest playbook for ductless heat pumps as our first product. The plan is to do what Tesla did for automotive to the built environment infrastructure category (HVAC, plumbing, etc) and create the first major American manufacturer in a ~century.

The article has bullet #1 in problems to solve as "Contractors who default to what they know." This was one of my founding hypotheses to and it turns out I was wrong, this was the hardest won learning yet at Quilt. We originally were fully vertically integrated and had our own installation force because of this reason – we wanted to solve all the big problems, thought contractors were one of them, and so had to become a contractor. But we quickly saw we were getting in the way of our own mission to accelerate the energy transition (because we had far far more demand than we could scale operations to reach it). So in March we (initially cautiously) switched partnering with existing contractors and I have been delighted by the industry reception. There are so so many existing contractors who want modern tech and see working with us as a breath of fresh air. I definitely sold them short and in retrospect it was naive and even a little elitist.

Happy to answer anything more. Also I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that we're growing super fast and just posted an Embedded Software Engineer role: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/quilt/jobs/4952684007 :)

Nearly 2 years ago, we had a small tornado come through, taking out our electricity for a week. During that time, it was snowy and the outdoor temperature was well below freezing (it reached about -10°C (12°F) at night).

Keeping my family warm was a real struggle that week. The next spring, I went to Costco and bought a big tri-power generator and wired up a generator interlock on the electric panel. Now if we lose power, we can run the natural gas furnace & blower with no problems. I can also power the generator from my home's natural gas supply instead of making frequent trips for gasoline.

So I'd say heck no to swapping the natural gas furnace for a heat pump. I'd much rather use natural gas to power both the generator and the furnace/blower than risk needing more electricity to keep my family warm than my setup can handle.

with mr drill baby drill in the gold house this all seems obsolete

When I needed a new air conditioner I looked into heat pumps. 3x the price.

I moved from gas boiler to electric years ago and would like to move to an electric heat pump hybrid, but it doesn’t exist. Moment lost.

We should add more tax credits because one Elon Musk is not enough.

We love helping folks save on heat pumps with our free, expert analysis and live advice service https://www.QuitCarbon.com - check it out?

It’s very hard to say whether heat pumps are cheaper than NG for heating. I pay about $0.25 per 100k BTUs which is about 3kWh. 3kWh costs about 50 cents. As long as the COP is above 2, it’s cheaper to run the heat pump.

Once you factor in an electrician and pipefitter for installing a heat pump, plus the cost of the heat pump, refrigerant, and furnace coil, I’d imagine you lose money in the long run.

If you then additionally include the strain on the grid from all these new data centers without enough generation capacity, I’ll stick with natural gas for heating air and water.

Our local installers seem to be taking advantage of the moment quite a bit, install costs are have skyrocketed over the past decade... double what I paid when the market started heating up. But at least the techs seem more knowledgeable, when I first had my system installed it seemed like they had no clue how they even worked.

I'm thankful to live in the Bay Area. One time we took a trip in the dead of winter. We turned off our heat completely. We were gone for a week. The coldest it got inside the house was 55 degrees.

I’m super psyched about heat pump washer/dryers. I live in puerto rico and humidity and electricity are issues that it seems to address. Plus I am going to try installing it in a closet where it wasn’t designed for it all. I think it could change the way houses here are made.

Question: I have just bought house and deciding heatpump vs oil. We have an autistic person in the house hold that is very sensitive to high frequency noises and perpetual sounds in general. He is used to an oil furnace turning on and of.

I fear for sound pollution from a heat pump.

Will anyone share their experiences with this? Even just a shuttle humming would be a disaster for our spectrum case.

Can we get a completely silent setup ?

Is Heat Pump the same as what Australian's would call a Split System?

Where do I put the wood-burning stove/heater?

Trying to translate this terminology into normal Aussie speak here. :P So a “heat pump” is reverse cycle aircon, I’m guessing it’s usually a central unit ducted to each room? Am I right in thinking that “mini split” is what we’d call a “split system” (ie. wall unit inside, heat exchanger outside, refrigerant pipes running between)? Is there a power cutoff above which it’s no longer mini, or is anything non-ducted a mini split?

I installed diy ductless heat pumps for around 3k at my parents. They love it and burn less wood now.

Recently went with heat pump water heater and cloths dryer, very significant energy savings and they both work great using around 1/3 the energy.

Most of my energy is for HVAC cooling in the south and that is already a heat pump. The house is well insulated and also have solar so along with the water heater and dryer I am around net zero in mid summer and and now that temperature is more mild I am producing much more than using even with one EV as well.

It really nice to have an all electric house along with at least one car and a large solar backup system I am pretty self contained and don't really have to change anything if grid goes down.

> The barrier isn’t the tech. It’s people.

Maybe? Or maybe the tech is not superior enough (considering the overhead) so nobody cares.

Missed opportunity to discuss GSHPs and instead pushes electric HPs because it's a business blog masquerading as a .org to push product.

And also, contractors and maintenance shops push products that minimize their costs and maximize their profits. It's also why private equity owns effectively every high voltage motor capacitor manufacturer in the US and why those capacitors have such short lives now. It's not about minimizing TCO, it's about maximizing customer dependency upon service and parts without seeming there is any other choice balanced with the stochastic equilibrium of potentially more reliable alternatives threatening this "cottage" industry.

PS: clean your coils, change your air filters (without excessive MERV flow restriction), surge protect ECMs, and check your caps.

I don’t believe they last as long as a natural gas boiler, so the total cost of ownership needs to take that into account.

They now make really efficient refrigerators for your kitchen that you get to throw out every 2-5 years.

Did ChatGPT write this?