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Notes -
My heat pump just got here, and once I've got it installed would anyone be interested in a post on some of the things I learned planning for the build? I did the usual unnecessary turbo-autism level of research, so it'd be nice for people to get some benefit from it before I close all the tabs and forget the whole thing.
There was a lot of discussion on the last heat pump thread, but nobody drew any conclusions. I think I've done enough to make some solid ones.
Related side question: what are people paying for electric rates these days? We've gone from 8 to 11 cents/kWh, which is fucking ridiculous even for the extra costs incurred here. Natgas isn't available here, but in most places the electric/gas price ratio is a huge factor.
29 c/kwh working price plus some flat fees. yay.
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I pay 9 cents/kW h. Energy primarily from oil.
Not in the US :P
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Per the power company I pay 10.6 cents/kWh, but once one tosses in the minimum fee and whatnot it winds up being between 15-17 cents/kWh.
Fortunately, my apartment is an upper-floor unit that stays remarkably warm during the winter with minimal (heat pump or electric, Hell I don't know; as far as I'm aware it's a heat pump with an emergency electric strip that never gets used) heating.
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OP of last heat-pump discussion here.
Yes, I'm really interested in learning what you learned. I still haven't made any decisions yet, but I'm leaning towards going for a natural gas solution, not a heat pump, due to already having a gas line in the house, and also living in a place that I think is slightly too cold for a heat pump. But any further data would be really useful!
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I am very interested in hearing how much it is going to cost you. My 15 year old heat pump broke last winter, and I was considering replacing it instead of fixing, but the quotes were in $16-20k range, compared to $1000 to repair, so I decided to punt it. This is in expensive liberal coastal city.
How is that possible?
It’s just an air conditioner?
(Although to be fair I’ve never bought an air conditioning system either and don’t know how much they cost).
Prices for air conditioning / heat pump units have skyrocketed along with efficiency requirements.
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Sometimes the repairman really does not want to do the job and gives a "fuck you" quote. (edit they show the full quote in another thread)
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I think the difference is between a system that is powerful enough to heat/cool the whole house and a single unit.
The unit they quoted him was only 24kBTU, so he can't have an enormous house given how they like to oversize.
Yeah, sounds like a scam. The most expensive 24BTU unit I can find costs $2800.
Expensive coastal city in the US, I suspect. We had one put in recently for about $12.5K -- 36K BTU, three install points inside.
We got two quotes and negotiated, and it was the best we did.
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It's standard practice in the residential HVAC industry to mark up by several hundred percent and then another several hundred percent for installation, and to refuse to quote it out separately.
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$0 after local rebates and fedcreds. The unit was $1100: 12kbtu 22 seer 11 HSPF4 with capacity issues below 17F. Not a high end Mitsubishi hyper-heat. This was fine because of the incredibly mild climate (lowest temperature ever recorded is 13F, 99% temp is mid 20s), wood backup heat, and the grid likely failing anyway during cold snaps. More on that math in the post.
These things are pretty trivial to install, especially if you already have the line set routing and electrical in. Installation ripoffs are ridiculous, and usually you can just DIY and hire the local HVAC guy to pressure test and vac the lines for you to satisfy warranty requirements.
Any new unit is going to have major improvements over a 15yo one. What're your current setup and local temps like? Do you have some complicated 10-head multi-zone thing bumping the quote up, or are they just fucking with richlibs?
Starting Jan 2023 there's going to be a criminal 30% "inflation-reducing" federal tax credit for these things, albeit with some high-income reductions that you'll probably blow right past. Now's a good time to grab one if they make sense for your area.
The $16k quote included the following hardware:
Install and permits were listed as ~$1500. I was trying to find out how much these actually retail for, to see how much I'm being overcharged, but apparently the suppliers hide the prices from end-users for some completely inexplicable reason.
The heat pump I have also works as AC in summer, in case this is relevant for pushing up the price of the device (which I don't think it really should, given that pretty much all that is required to make a heat pump work as AC is a reverse valve).
Oh, you have a ducted central air system, the expense makes more sense now. But the rated performance of that unit is still ridiculously bad for a scroll compressor that should have vapor injection improving its cold weather ability. The damn thing isn't even variable speed, which is an absolutely basic standard now.
Depending on how many rooms you need to heat/cool, see if you can get anyone offering a ductless mini-split install. Compare the specs with, say, a top of the line Mitsubishi MXZ-SM48NAMHZ, which is significantly cheaper with much better performance at twice the btu capacity (you definitely don't need something that big)
If you have a house with rooms rather than a studio apartment, a ductless mini-split doesn't make a lot of sense.
Depending on how many rooms you have, a few units or a multi-head one can. They're so much cheaper and easier to install than a central air system that it takes a lot of tiny conditioned rooms to tip the balance (and you really don't need it in every room)
And a lot of the central air ones are horribly outdated and overpriced, like what they quoted him.
Certainly you need it in every room. Unless there are rooms you don't use when it gets hot. Perhaps you don't need it in a bathroom; OTOH, I have one bathroom which has no A/C duct and it gets quite uncomfortable in the summer. An n-bedroom house will need at least n+1 units, most likely more than that.
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My power company charges about 15.5 cents/kWh. Lately I got solar panels with financing. It's going to fluctuate, probably a lot, but in September it came out to about 15 cents/kWh if I divide my financing costs by the energy produced. However my state has an SREC market, and the TLDR on that is I get paid approximately 4-7 cents/kWh on the solar energy I produce. Which pushes me well and good ahead of the power company.
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Is that expensive where you are? I pay 16 US cents per kWh and I stay on top of good bargains over here in Australia.
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My wonderful capitalist success story of a utility company is charging about double what yours is, but then there are so may flat rate fees and bullshit add ons that I end up paying equivalent 40 cents k/wh, about.
This is annoying as shit because they also send out a little chart where they show you your ranking in energy use per meter, and I am in the 00.1th percentile for my zipcode on both of mine, which means I am paying mainly fees instead of usage rates.
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Should this be in another thread?
It's also likely here, since my original heat pump thread OP is referencing had a culture war angle to it, namely that I wasn't sure whether to trust heat pumps, which are being talked up in my area only by green energy people, and potentially unrealistically pitched: https://www.themotte.org/post/56/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/7321?context=8#context
Btw, the TL;DR to that is "yes they are lying, but less than usual". They're definitely trying to con/force people with 40c/kWh electricity costs into giving up cheap natural gas heating and not caring how much it screws them over. But if you do your own research there are some fantastic applications, like my own situation.
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For what it's worth, there are some things that can only be posted in the Culture War thread, but we've never restricted anything from being posted in the Culture War thread. Partly because it seems like a lot of trouble for not much gain and partly because it's kinda funny.
So yeah, this is fine here.
Thanks for clarifying, I definitely had the wrong impression!
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Not once I start getting into energy policy it won't be. Going to have to invent some new euphemisms just to avoid getting banned, let alone make it safe for the fun/questions threads.
Also, the previous heat pump discussion was in the culture war thread iirc, and got pretty political.
Maybe you should explicitly bring up energy policy in your top level submission?
Also, nice cheap dig at the mods. As if they don't do enough for us pro bono.
Minimodding has to be the most annoying thing that can happen in a forum. Stop being a weenie.
What does this mean? Have never heard this term before.
If you're referring to tone/witch policing that's extremely common here and one of the things that makes this forum excellent. We generally self police against low effort baiting.
You're acting like a hall monitor. You're carrying water for authority despite authority not caring about you. You are licking the boot. You are kissing the ass.
It's all the same thing with different phrasings. He is accusing you of being a groupie and intrinsically low status.
He's acting like a member of a community, who cares about the general atmosphere.
...Other than running this place for years, preserving norms despite intense pressure to the contrary, and building an entire new site when the last one was in danger of getting banned, sure. But apart from all that...
I've had some remarkably spirited disagreements with some of the mods here. Despite serious disagreements over values and occasionally facts, they've treated me completely fairly and with a surprising amount of respect. The rules here actually work. The mods are not perfect, but they are some of the best I've had the honor of posting under, and they're a huge part of what I and many others value about this place. I'm going to put forward that if there's a problem, it's a "you" problem, not a "them" problem.
I'm not actually sure if you're new here or if you just switched names; I'm not the best at IDing based on style. If you are new, you should know that that the mods enforce a fairly high standard of decorum. If you can stay above that floor, you can make just about any point you might wish to, and you'll get a fairer hearing and better discussion than you'd get pretty much anywhere else on the internet. But part of what makes it work is the universal demand that to participate here, one keeps the more atavistic elements of one's nature on a short leash. You seem to be able to handle this most of the time, but then sometimes you just lash out over stupid crap. Keep that up, and you'll eat bans, and the rest of us will not complain because you will have earned them.
For people complaining that moderation is too strict, pre 2018 moderation was more strict than now, I can attest. The no 'boo outgroup' rule was closely enforced. 4chan is an example of what minimal moderation looks like. So why doesn't minotaur go there. Maybe because it's just full of annons . Going from annons to a community necessitates some boundaries, hence moderation. I think on net the mods are going a good job.
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The norms have seen all the best posters banished, keeping the place running requires no effort (a community is its members, not its leaders), but I will give full credit for paying this site's hosting costs and setting it up. Everyone on the mod team who contributed to that is free to take a bow -- with the understanding that this uniquely useful function they performed had nothing to do with moderation.
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Like you, I have had some frustrating disagreements with the mods in the past, but think they deserve respect and appreciation for their efforts here. But they chose to be mods knowing full well what that entails, and knowing the compensation they would receive would be ephemeral at best. And if that was a dig, it was one of the mildest digs at the mods I have ever seen. If it upset them they are fully capable of defending themselves.
In this place taking a mild and ambiguous dig and spinning it as out of line because the mods don't charge us for something no one has ever paid for seems especially odious, because if even something like that is not on, what is? This is a place where witches argue, I'm not saying the mods should tolerate any abuse they receive, but surely they can tolerate whatever abuse was perceived in that dig.
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This depends heavily on whether you think the authority is legitimate. Personally one of the most frustrating things I see leftists do is equate right wing Christians to groupie bootlickers who crave authority because they worship God.
Are you actually anti authoritarian as a philosophy or just towards authorities you find illegitimate?
Edit: to be clear I don't deny carrying water in this instance, because the mods are an authority I respect. I think the status of the behavior depends on your perspective.
I'll also admit that I misunderstood how the rules fundamentally work so this one is on me.
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What dig?
Baiting the idea that you will get banned for some opinion. Not relevant for the CW thread and is low effort to my eyes. Maybe you see it differently.
I think we are at a dangerous position with regards to modding, moving offsite means modding becomes more involved and more crucial than it has been.
No, I literally mean it will be a major effort to turn my incoherent rage over national energy policy into an essay that's calm and reasoned enough for this forum. Let alone take out all the culture war elements for it to go in a non-culture war thread.
Just my explanation of the dam-destroying campaigns in WA would be a long string of expletives up to the character limit without some serious editing.
I had assumed you were from germany - genuinely curious to hear energy critiques from a US perspective. Feel free to PM me with an expletive filled rant. I'll even sanitize and post it for you if you want.
If I was German my discussion of national energy policy would get me arrested, if they even managed to take me alive in Minecraft.
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