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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Mike Campbell didn’t pay a penny upfront when his new air-source heat pumps were installed this spring to replace his old oil boiler.
As a bonus, PACE Atlantic also provides lots of services to make things easier for homeowners, from helping them navigate incentives like the Canada Greener Homes Grant to recommending contractors.
For many Canadian towns and cities, fossil fuels burned to provide heat and hot water to buildings are a huge source of greenhouse gas emissions.
Announcing a new program in Guelph, Ont., this month, Bryan Ho-Yan, the city’s manager of corporate energy and climate change, said the goal is to “help the community reduce emissions in an affordable way.”
Boyle says each of the participating homes in PACE Atlantic’s programs are cutting greenhouse gas emissions by an average of 45 per cent or 5.72 tonnes a year.
McIlroy also points out that while these programs are popular with homeowners, they don’t reach everyone — for example, they tend to leave out renters, landlords and larger apartment buildings.
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Are heat pumps pretty good in the Atlantic region? In Calgary no installer would recommend one, and only one quoted (high) last year.
You can get heatpumps with natural gas backup(/supplement). But that can affect rebate eligibility.
My wife and I replaced our oil burning furnace with a heat pump in 2021. No natural gas, but we are in Vancouver, milder winters than Atlantic Canada.
Also I did get nervous watching Texans die during their cold snap/ power outage whenever that was.
I run a heat pump for my swimming pool in Calgary. It’s good until it hits about 10 or 11 Celsius, then it falls off the cliff for effectiveness and eventually turns into a little frozen ice cube that takes a day to thaw out. So I always have to remember to turn it off after supper, even on nights like tonight when it’s hot out.
Now keep in mind, these new heat pumps are a lot more efficient and effective. But when its minus 30 out, I don’t care how futuristic it is, it’s not going to be effective OR efficient. Even at -10 that efficiency is going to be flying off a cliff. This is why they tell you to have a back up gas powered furnace on the prairies, which sort of defeats the purpose in my opinion.
The other thing that kills them out here, is the altitude. When I was buying my pool heat pump, there was a whole bunch they didn’t recommend using over 2,000 feet, which wouldn’t work out here. It always makes me wonder when everyone is throwing that -30 number around, just how accurate that is.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m the biggest fan of heat pumps, and I don’t even notice my pool heat pump on my electrical bill, even though it runs all day. That thing is the cat’s meow, and the best (by far) way to heat a swimming pool. But you won’t find me hooking one up to the house, not just yet anyways.
I believe I’ve heard that heat pumps are good all the way down to -30 or so, though the efficiency at that point is pretty bad. That said, geological heat pumps can circumvent that as long as the ground doesn’t freeze too deep where you live. Dig far enough and heat pumps work anywhere that’s not permafrost, and I’m talking about 20-30 meters deep, not something insane like tapping underground magma.
Ground loops just have to be a bit under the frost line, more like 3 meters deep than 30
I thought ones that shallow are only good if the ground doesn’t freeze much? I know there are horizontal ones about that deep or so, and vertical ones that are designed for places where the ground freezes, or if you have little space for a horizontal installation.
The ground does not freeze that deep until you get to very northern latitudes but yea you do need the space for horizontal loops which not everyone is going to have.
New heart pumps are a lot more efficient. That said they really start losing efficiency below freezing. So look at your regional temperature during the winter.
Most of the mid Atlantic doesn’t really get that cold anymore. We have a few weeks of below freezing temps at most when you can expwct the electric heat back up to kick in…
New ones are good to -30C and lower. My electric bill dropped 55% after replacing my furnace ahead of schedule.
All levels of government should be offering this – cities/municipalities should be offering loans that are repaid through property taxes. Provinces should be upgrading building codes to require them, and offering rebates paid for through fuel taxes. The federal government should be using the carbon tax to ensure their buildings are using the latest heat pump tech, and funding research to make them more efficient and reliable, and incentivising manufacturers to meet our domestic supply needs by building factories here.