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From the source to the registers.
The term “heat pump” refers to any system that can extract heat from a colder space and transfer it to a warmer one. For example, refrigerators use heat pumps to remove heat from inside the fridge and expel it into your kitchen. Air conditioners use heat pumps to remove heat from inside the house and dump it outside. In this guide, the phrase “heat pump” refers specifically to HVAC equipment that is capable of both heating
and cooling the air inside a home. In other words, we’re talking about air conditioners that can also run in reverse, pulling heat from outside on a winter day and pumping it inside.
We’ve created this guide because when it comes to getting off fossil fuels, it does matter what you replace them with. Climate advocates tout electric heat pumps because they can create two to three times more heat per unit of energy than other heating equipment. Electric resistance heating, by contrast, is extremely wasteful, and if people start installing those systems en masse, that could actually increase emissions in the near term and make it more difficult to decarbonize the economy in the long term. By getting a heat pump, you won’t just be cutting emissions, you’ll be reducing the cost of cleaning up the electric grid because we’ll need less electricity overall.
That said, a poorly designed or installed system can negate many of the benefits that heat pumps have to offer. Whether you’re reading because you want to cut emissions, or save money on energy, or take advantage of the steady, quiet comfort heat pumps provide, it’s essential to do your homework and find a good contractor to work with. In this guide, we’ll cover how to know when it’s the right time to get heat pumps, the basics of understanding what your options are, common misconceptions about heat pumps, how to find and vet contractors, and more.
Larry Waters is the founder and president of Electrify My Home, a heating and air conditioning contractor in Northern California that specializes in heat pumps. Waters has worked in the HVAC industry for more than 40 years.
D.R. Richardson is the co-founder of Elephant Energy, a Boulder, Colorado-based startup that helps homeowners in Colorado and Massachusetts electrify by using building science and proprietary software to ensure good system design, and by managing all aspects of the project.
Jake Marin is the senior emerging opportunities manager for VEIC, a clean energy nonprofit that administers Vermont and D.C.’s energy efficiency programs among other decarbonization work across the country. Marin ran VEIC’s HVAC program for nearly 8 years and was recently given a “Champion of Energy Efficiency” award for his pioneering work bringing heat pumps to Vermont.
There are many, many kinds of electric heat pumps used for space heating and cooling. At a high level, there are two main categories that homeowners can typically choose from:
Within each of these are a handful of installation options:
The above designs aren’t mutually exclusive. You can install a system that’s fully ducted, fully ductless, or a combination of both. You can also combine a heat pump system with a fuel-burning furnace or boiler, known as a dual-fuel system. If aesthetics are important to you, there are also companies like Quilt that offer versions that can better integrate into the look of your home.
“Ductwork in unfinished space is easy. Ductwork in finished space is so expensive and hard that we typically don't recommend it,” said Richardson.
Heat pumps also come in models with different “speeds” or “stages”:
There are also some technical specifications to be aware of, such as seasonal efficiency ratings:
The highest rated SEER2 device may have a lower HSPF2 rating, while the highest rated HSPF2 device may have a lower SEER2 rating.
Finally, heat pumps also come in many different sizes. Having a properly sized system is one of the most important factors for ensuring your heat pumps run efficiently and last a long time.
A good contractor will be able to walk you through different system designs and equipment options to find the answer that’s best suited to your house, your goals, and your budget.
“There’s a lot of companies out there that offer just what they have in the catalog and their salespeople can’t sell anything outside of that,” Waters told me. “That means the customer is going to get matched with that cookie cutter option if they go with that company. So how to choose a contractor is one of the most important things.”
Many people are used to setting their HVAC systems to different temperatures at different times of day — one temp for the morning and evening, another for when they leave for work, and another for bedtime. This makes sense with many furnaces and air conditioners because they’re usually designed to cycle on, blast hot or cold air at full capacity until they achieve the temperature you want, and then turn off, so turning down the system when you’re not home can save a lot of energy. But the most efficient “variable speed” heat pumps work differently — they use a lot of energy to reach a certain temperature, but once they hit it, they sip small amounts of energy to maintain it. Experts say a “set it and forget it” approach will give you the most efficient performance and the most consistent energy bills.
“Don’t worry about the number,” says Marin. “Just find your comfortable temperature, and then leave it alone, forget it’s even there.”
This topic can be divisive among HVAC experts, but in most of the continental U.S., you should be able to find a heat pump solution that will heat your home efficiently on the coldest winter days. The key is that the system has to be sized correctly. Richardson’s company, Elephant Energy, works in Colorado, where he says they’ve had two years in a row with days that got down to -13 degrees Fahrenheit, “and our fleet of hundreds of heat pumps have cranked out heat to keep homes nice and warm on those coldest days.”
There still may be scenarios where you
want to keep your furnace as a back-up, even if it’s not strictly necessary.
If you’re switching from fuel oil, propane, or electric resistance heating, you’re pretty much guaranteed to save money on your bills with heat pumps. But if you’re switching from natural gas, it really depends on where you live.
Richardson says that for a lot of his customers in Colorado, making the switch from gas to inverter heat pumps is cost neutral — they end up paying a bit more for heating in the winter but less for cooling in the summer, since the heat pump is often more efficient than whatever air conditioning they were replacing. At the same time, those who don't have air conditioning to start with could end up paying a bit more year-round.
Do you…
Short answer: Hold off on a heat pump, invest in weatherization.
Long answer: You may have arrived at this guide because you’re interested in decarbonizing your home, but if you have a relatively new heating and/or cooling system, it could actually be worse, emissions-wise, to replace it, due to the embedded carbon that went into manufacturing that equipment. Unless you’re really desperate to replace your existing system for comfort or financial reasons (if you have electric resistance heaters, for example, switching to heat pumps could save you a lot of money, since they use about a third of the electricity), we recommend getting a bit more life out of it first.
In the meantime, put your enthusiasm for decarbonization into making your home more efficient. Insulating and air sealing your home before you get heat pumps will help you save money in the near term and get you the best results from heat pumps later on.
Short answer: Consider a dual fuel system
Long answer: If you really need a new air conditioning system but your heater still has a lot of life left in it, consider installing a heat pump to work alongside your existing furnace or boiler. That way, you’ll get efficient cooling capacity that will save you money in the summer, and you’ll also be able to cut down on your fossil fuel consumption in the winter. You can set the heat pump to warm your home until it gets down to a certain temperature outside, at which point your furnace or boiler will kick in. (Many heat pump models can operate in very cold temperatures, so having a backup heating system like this is not necessary, but it may be a good intermediate step in certain cases.)
Short answer: It’s the perfect time to think about heat pumps!
Long answer: HVAC equipment typically lasts for 15 to 20 years, so 10 years is probably the earliest you would want to start thinking about a replacement. It’s probably safe to wait a few years longer, but you definitely don’t want to wait until your existing system breaks to start your heat pump journey. A heat pump retrofit can be a months-long process, from finding contractors, to evaluating quotes, to refining your plan, to getting permits and scheduling the work. If you’re in an emergency situation where your boiler broke and you really need heat, you could be forced to settle for a less-than-ideal solution. At the very least, start your research now and consider weatherization upgrades.
Short answer: Get a mini-split!
Long answer: Ductless mini-split heat pumps are a no-brainer to provide heating and cooling to a single room or zone. They can be very affordable — and in some cases free — with rebates and tax credits. If you want to retrofit the rest of your home to use heat pumps down the line, this will help you get familiar with the technology and will not preclude you from adding more later — though it is helpful to tell your contractor that now so they can take it into account.
Heat pumps can be a major investment. If you just want to add heating or cooling capacity to one or two rooms, it can cost $5,000 to $7,000 per room, on average, before incentives, Richardson told me. A whole-home solution averages $20,000 to $30,000 before incentives, but depending on the home and the system design can go much higher.
Do you have some rooms that are hotter in the summer or colder in the winter than others and you want to make your home more comfortable overall? Or is your goal to get better air filtration and ventilation? Or do you simply want to get off fossil fuels? It will be helpful to think through what you want to achieve and communicate that to your contractor so they can take that into account when they design your system.
The federal government offers a 30% tax credit for heat pumps, up to $2,000, not including labor, for certain energy efficient models. (Note that you can only get the full tax credit if you have $2,000 or more in tax liability the year you install the heat pumps.) The credit can’t be rolled over to the next tax year, but you can claim it in multiple years. Your state energy office, city, or utility may offer additional tax credits or rebates.
It’s important to learn about what’s available in your area before reaching out to contractors because some rebate programs require you to work only with approved partners. Also, the contractors you reach out to might not always be up to date on the latest incentive programs, so it’s a good idea to do some independent research and make sure you find someone who knows how to help you take advantage. There is, unfortunately, not yet any single directory where you can enter your zip code and find out about every possible rebate opportunity everywhere in the country, so it’s best to check multiple sources of information:
As with all home renovation projects, we strongly recommend getting at least three quotes from different contractors.
Heat pumps are common in some parts of the country, but in others it might be difficult to find a contractor who really knows their stuff. Dip your toes in a heat pump Reddit forum and you’ll find scores of homeowners asking what to do after a contractor told them that heat pumps don’t work and they should just stick with gas. Here are a few strategies for finding high quality heat pump contractors, in order of what we recommend:
Finding the right contractor is probably the most important decision you’ll make in this entire process, and it’s not uncommon to get quotes with wildly different recommendations. Here are some questions you can ask to help you get a sense of who really knows what they are talking about and is willing to go the whole nine yards to make sure you get a properly designed system:
Manual J is a formula that helps a contractor identify the right size HVAC system for your home. It requires taking detailed measurements throughout the building, inspecting your home’s insulation and other elements that will affect airflow and heat retention, and performing tests such as the “blower door” to assess how leaky your building’s envelope is. If you’re interested in using your ductwork or installing new ductwork, they should also perform a “Manual D” calculation. Waters told me that despite these calculations being industry standards, very few contractors actually go through the trouble of doing them. “What this does, it tells us exactly what size system I need for heating and cooling, and exactly how much air goes into each room,” he said.
Richards agreed, adding that you may want to ask what technology they use to size the system. “You need somebody who has a technology-driven tool that can actually measure the heating and cooling requirements of your home,” he says. “Are you doing a true Manual J, or are you sort of sticking your finger up in the air?”
If your contractor only works with one brand of equipment, you’re more likely to get a solution that’s convenient for them rather than one that’s custom designed for you.
Waters told me the registers — the vents that release air into a given room — are critical for occupant comfort. If your existing ductwork is designed to distribute air from a furnace, your registers may be designed to push air into the middle of the room. But with heat pumps, you want the air either pushed up toward the ceiling if the vents are down low or across the ceiling if they are up high, so that the house doesn’t feel drafty and you get proper circulation.
If you’re starting with heat pumps but you eventually want to electrify your stove, your clothes dryer, or your car, your home may need an electric panel upgrade or an electric service upgrade from the utility. What you don’t want is to put in heat pumps that eat up the rest of your home’s capacity and then have to deal with pricey upgrades down the line.
The Building Performance Institute and North American Technician Excellence are two organizations that train and certify contractors, auditors, and technicians in the latest building science and best practices. A certification doesn’t guarantee you’ve found the right contractor — it could mean they know a lot about installing heat pumps but still don’t know much about the models that work in the coldest climates, for instance. But it’s a helpful data point that shows they are investing in training.
After you’ve found a contractor or company to work with, settled on a system design, and secured financing, your installer is going to need to secure permits for the work. Then you’ll need to schedule the installation, which, depending on how busy your contractor is, can take several weeks to several months. The actual work should take one to three days, depending on how complicated it is.
Also — talk to your contractor about maintenance. Be sure to clean the filters regularly and do anything else they recommend to get the best performance and longest life out of your equipment.
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And more on the week’s most important fights around renewable energy projects.
1. Ocean County, New Jersey – A Trump administration official said in a legal filing that the government is preparing to conduct a rulemaking that could restrict future offshore wind development and codify a view that could tie the hands of future presidential administrations.
2. Prince William County, Virginia – The large liberal city of Manassas rejected a battery project over fire fears, indicating that post-Moss Landing, anxieties continue to pervade in communities across the country.
3. Oklahoma County, Oklahoma – The Sooner state legislature on Monday held a joint committee meeting on solar and wind setbacks featuring prominent anti-wind advocates.
4. Tippacanoe County, Indiana – The developers of a large-scale solar project are suing the county over being rejected.
5. Dane County, Wisconsin – The Wisconsin Public Service Commission approved Invenergy’s Badger Hollow wind project – the state’s first new fully-permitted wind energy project in more than a decade.
A conversation with Courtney Brady of Evergreen Action.
This week I chatted with Courtney Brady, Midwest region deputy director for climate advocacy group Evergreen Action. Brady recently helped put together a report on rural support for renewables development, for which Evergreen Action partnered with the Private Property Rights Institute, a right-leaning advocacy group. Together, these two organizations conducted a series of interviews with self-identifying conservatives in Pennsylvania and Michigan focused on how and why GOP-leaning communities may be hesitant, reluctant, or outright hostile to solar or wind power.
What they found, Brady told me, was that politics mattered a lot less than an individual’s information diet. The conversation was incredibly informative, so I felt like it was worth sharing with all of you.
The following chat was edited lightly for clarity. Let’s dive in:
Okay, so tell me first why you did this report.
Clean energy deployment is getting increasingly challenging for a variety of reasons. What’s happening on the federal level is one thing, but something we don’t talk about much in the climate movement is what’s happening locally, what actually determines the odds of a project being successful and incorporated into the grid.
The side of the story we often hear that’s the loudest is from people at the local level who are opposed to these projects, and it limits our ability to understand the nuances. It’s not always that everyone opposes these projects in their community — that’s often not the case. We talked to several farmers in this report who are using these projects as a lifeline to keep farms in their families’ hands, generate income, preserve their farms. These projects can provide an income lifeline for these farms.
Something we tried to accomplish with this report was to understand the different perspectives, what was driving them. The only way we could do that was by going out and talking to these people in their own communities, on their own land.
The group we worked with has a very conservative background. They work on Republican campaigns. They’re very involved in local government relations. And they were the ones who were able to go out and interview these folks about what this means for their communities.
A few weeks ago, I interviewed the head of the League of Conservation Voters about the way that renewables are perceived as culturally left wing. Are there any takeaways in your research about how to deal with that?
You know, I expected to hear a little bit more of that political ideological leanings than what we actually got in these interviews. Our partners went out and interviewed seven folks; four of the case studies were in Pennsylvania, and three of them were in Michigan. It was a mix of local government officials and landowners themselves, most of whom were farmers. And they asked them, What are you hearing in your community? Where’s the opposition coming from?
I’d assumed this would be a left-versus-right, red-versus-blue issue, but this is not what we heard. We heard a lot about a lack of information or misinformation in these communities and the crucial incomes these projects can provide to landowners themselves. Again, everyone in this report that was interviewed identified as a conservative or said they were Trump supporters. It’s interesting to hear that hasn’t impacted their views of clean energy at large. They were either really happy with the projects they’d sited or still trying to get projects sited years and years later.
When you talked about misinformation, what came up?
The sizing of these leases. We heard about fears in communities that land was going to be completely overtaken over by solar or wind.
Some of these farmers said one of the biggest things they heard from their neighbors was that we’re giving away hundreds and thousands of acres to solar projects and wind projects and taking away land that should go towards crops and food. We’re hearing from these farmers that a lot of this land is no longer fertile, so providing a temporary solar lease allows that farmer to continue generating revenue while letting that land breathe.
People really had this fear of farmland being completely converted to energy production. I don’t know where a lot of that came from. We asked if that was something spread on the internet and we heard, Neighbors talk and there are Facebook groups. So there’s this overblown fear about the size of projects.
When it comes to these interviews, it does seem like you spoke to a lot of people who believe what you say. But did you speak to people who don’t believe this stuff? Because right now we’re seeing cases where opposition is either winning over county commissioners or voting out of office local officials who believe exactly what you heard from some folks.
We’ve heard so much of the opposition. It’s trending, really growing across the country. And understanding the root of why opposition is there is important. But so often we don’t hear the other side of it, these really nuanced perspectives.
There are these folks in the middle who are really thematic in these interviews — this is not about energy but a core American property rights issue. That resonates with people regardless of party.
The other piece is, there’s fear in communities of being the person to speak out against groups that are loud, the ones who want to kick people out of office over energy things. So it was really important to elevate these voices and in the interviews just made a lot of common sense. This was about elevating voices that don’t always get a seat at the table in discussions around these issues.
A list of terminated grants obtained by Heatmap contains a number of grants that will cost jobs and revenue in Republican-led states.
The Trump administration terminated billions in climate and clean energy grants on Wednesday, in what appears to be yet another act of retribution against Democrats over the government shutdown. White House budget director Russell Vought announced on X that “nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left's climate agenda is being cancelled,” noting that the projects were in 16 states, all but two of which — Vermont and New Hampshire — have Democrats in their governor’s mansion. A Department of Energy release published late last night further clarified that it was terminating 321 awards supporting 223 projects, with a total closer to $7.5 billion.
But a list of the 321 canceled grants that the Department of Energy sent to Congress, obtained by Heatmap, tells a different story. While much of the funding was awarded to blue state-based companies, the intended projects would have benefitted communities elsewhere, including in Texas, Florida, and Louisiana.
The list identifies the grants by their award numbers, and includes information on the DOE office overseeing the grant, the recipient name, and state. The document does not specify the project names, the programs under which they were awarded, or the amounts awarded.
That leaves a lot of open questions about the true impact of the terminations. It’s unclear, for instance, whether the $7.5 billion price tag the Department of Energy assigned to the cancellations is an estimate of the total amount awarded or the unspent remainder still in the agency’s coffers. Five of the listed projects, worth nearly $900 million, were already announced as terminated in an earlier round of cuts back in May.
Many of the projects listed have signed contracts with the government, are already well underway, and have spent at least some of their award. For example, the Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnerships has already published copious educational materials related to its community-driven transportation plan for the Northeast, a project supported by one of the terminated grants.
The list does seem to confirm that blue state grants were the hardest hit, with 79 award cancellations in California, 41 in New York, 34 in Colorado (Secretary of Energy Chris Wright’s home state), 33 in Illinois, and 31 in Massachusetts.
But when I began looking up projects by their award number, I found that many would actually have benefitted Republican strongholds. Take, for example, Moment Energy, a Delaware-based company that was awarded $20 million by the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains to build the first certified manufacturing facility in the United States producing battery energy storage systems from repurposed electric vehicle batteries. The plant was set to be built in Taylor, Texas, creating 50 construction jobs and 200 new permanent positions. After receiving the Energy Department’s stamp of approval, the company raised a $15 million Series A funding round in January to help finance the plant.
Also listed are a $10 million grant for Carbon Capture Inc, a California-based company, to conduct an engineering study for a direct air capture plant in Northwest Louisiana, and a $37 million grant to New York-based Urban Mining Industries to build one of its low-carbon concrete manufacturing plants in Florida. Linde, the global industrial gas company based in Connecticut, had $10 million to build hydrogen fueling stations for heavy duty trucks in La Porte, Texas, clawed back. BKV, a Colorado-based natural gas company set to study the transportation of captured CO2 by barge throughout the Gulf Coast region, also had its $2.5 million grant canceled.
In addition to hurting investments and jobs in Republican states, the Department of Energy’s cancellations also target some unlikely victims. The list names 16 grants for General Electric, including 11 for GE Vernova, the company’s manufacturing arm, which produces natural gas turbines and components for wind energy generation; many of those awards were for wind technology research projects. The agency also canceled 24 grants for the Institute for Gas Technology and the Electric Power Research Institute, the research arms of gas and electric companies’ two biggest trade groups, respectively. Several of these awards funded research projects into carbon capture and storage.
Also on the list was a more than $6.5 million grant for a controversial study to retrofit the Four Corners coal plant in New Mexico with carbon capture equipment. The plant is currently scheduled to close in 2031.
Back in May, Wright promised Congress his agency’s review of Biden-era climate funding would be over by the end of the summer. “Certainly in the next few months, by the end of this summer — hopefully before the end of this summer — we will have run through all of the four or 500 large projects that are currently in the pipeline at the DOE,” he said during a House Appropriations Committee hearing.
As reported yesterday by Bloomberg, two regional Hydrogen Hubs in California and the Pacific Northwest — projects awarded funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to develop full hydrogen production and consumption ecosystems — are on the list. That leaves the agency’s intentions for the remaining five hubs scattered throughout the Midwest, Midatlantic, Appalachia, the Great Plains, and Texas unclear. And while the list includes a few smaller grants for early-stage Direct Air Capture Hubs, it is still a mystery whether the Department of Energy plans to support the two more advanced direct air capture projects in Louisiana and Texas that were selected for $1.2 billion under the Biden administration.