Heat pumps sold so fast in Maine, the state just upped its target::undefined

  • Cheez@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    68
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    These things have been completely standard fixtures elsewhere in the world for decades. I was honestly shocked that America, the land of air conditioning, had never heard of them.

    They’re so ubiquitous in Australia it’s what we think of when we hear “air conditioner”.

    When you shop for aircons they have to specify “cooling only” because reverse cycle is the default.

    • tigers@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      31
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      They are completely standard in large parts of the US too–just the northeast and other colder areas haven’t started using them due to their colder winters.

    • nodsocket@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      30
      arrow-down
      6
      ·
      1 year ago

      Typical naive Australian. What you would consider unbearably frigid is warm by northern standards. It wasn’t until recently that heat pumps were efficient enough to compete with wood and coal furnaces.

      • Yendor@reddthat.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        11
        arrow-down
        8
        ·
        1 year ago

        Reverse-cycle ACs have had >100% heating efficiency since the 1990s. America just seems to take forever to embrace anything environmentally friendly (reverse-cycle AC, solar hot water, rooftop solar, etc…).

        • Buelldozer@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          18
          arrow-down
          4
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          It wasn’t until somewhere in the last 15 years that air type type heat pumps, as opposed to ground loop, could cope with the cold temperatures in the northern states without having to fall back to resistive heating for weeks at a time.

          When you have to run resistive heaters the electrical usage skyrockets and makes a heat pump system vastly more expensive to operate.

          If you live in a cold State, Zone 6 or higher, then you need to be careful when purchasing an ASHP to make sure that it has an HSPF of 10 or greater. If it doesn’t then you’ll be paying big electrical bills trying to keep your home warm. Those units are also more expensive to purchase than a regular Heat Pump like you would run down under.

          Frankly nowhere in Australia experiences cold anything like what I do on a yearly basis. The coldest temperature ever recorded anywhere in your country was a mere -9f. Here in the United States there’s quite a few places where that is a common daytime high temperature in the winter, even in the lower 48. There’s quite a few places even in Zone 5, see previous map, that will get to -9 and stay there for days at a time.

          It’s not uncommon for overnight lows in Zone 6+ to hit -20f and temperatures even lower are definitely possible. At my house in Wyoming last winter we touched -40f / -40c for a some hours one night.

          Air type heat pumps simply could not handle those kinds of temperatures until relatively recently. That’s why so much of the US doesn’t have them already. They just didn’t work during the winter in northern half of the country.

          • SpoopyKing@lemmy.sdf.org
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            5
            arrow-down
            4
            ·
            1 year ago

            When you have to run resistive heaters the electrical usage skyrockets and makes a heat pump system vastly more expensive to operate.

            More expensive than a heat pump without a backup/additional electrical resistance heater. Not more expensive than an electrical resistance heater on its own.

            That’s what’s so strange about this, in most cases a heat pump would be replacing a non-reversible AC and an electrical resistance heater or gas-fueled furnace. And in nearly every case, even with the need for a backup/additional resistance heater, you’re still saving money. And it’s not like any of this is new technology, it just took forever for it to become popular in the US.

        • nodsocket@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          14
          arrow-down
          3
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          > 100% efficiency doesn’t mean much when you consider that the generation and distribution of electricity is not efficient. It wasn’t until recently that heap pumps became efficient enough to beat onsite burning of fuel.

    • limelight79@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      ·
      1 year ago

      Lots of houses in the US have heat pumps already.

      This is about one state in the far north pushing to get them into more houses. Older heat pumps would not have been very effective there for most of the winter. Newer models can still produce heat in much colder temperatures, so they are adopting them.