People with intelligence, principles, and convictions rarely last long in politics;
People lacking those skills but the ability to charismatically reiterate the talking points of politically connected charities, action groups or lobbiest are well sought after....
Think tanks exist to come up with policy prescriptions. There are just so many topics, internationally, locally, nationally, that no one can be a deep-dive expert unless they focus specifically on it.
I find it very weird that their heat pump leaked and the efficiency is only at 150%.
It's not clear at all if this is an crazy outlier or reality.
IF this is not just an outlier than the next proper step from him would be to get the ball rolling with the right people to investigate the status quiet and fixing it.
Fixing is called physics... I am not sure magic words on a page (regulation) will "fix" physics....
My only real critique of him is that he had too much faith in the MBTA getting battery electric busses up and running when voting to get rid of our trolleybus system (MBTA 71 and 73).
Of course it's extremely important to switch people to electrified heating systems, regardless of their efficiency. However it's a little disingenuous to pretend there is nothing but upside here. The upside is for humanity as a whole; for individuals there may be very little noticable changes or improvements, and the systems may be worse than what they are used to.
You could use a gas fired heat pump. It won't work as an air conditioner, but it won't stress the grid and could even work when the power goes out.
AFAIK gas furnaces still need electricity for the fans to work. When you have no electricity you at best have a glorified fireplace. It's probably going to be a worse than a regular fireplace because it's not designed to output heat to its surroundings.
A 278% estimation turning out as 150% real world performance, certainly was not done very carefully.
The real heating demand can be observed up front and with the typical (or even exact) weather you can easily determine the efficiency of the heat pump.
Yeah expect some inaccuracies, but not this huge
My heat pump is 5 years old and has never leaked refrigerant. I also collect the condensate for the gardens.
How cold are the coldest months?
The averages do not illustrate the extremes very well, we see many days where the nighttime temperatures never rise above 0F.
[0] https://support.accuvio.com/support/solutions/articles/40000...
[1] https://highperformancehvac.com/heat-pump-leaking-refrigeran...
[2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Note that most of these leaks are caused by installation. In the factory they have things they can do for quality control to make such things not an issue, but the refrigerant needs to get from inside each house to the outside and that means custom install which makes quality control harder.
Worse, it is hard to find leaks. Often the pipes are buried in walls and so all the tech can do is put some sealer in and hope that fixes the issue. There is the ability to put some leak detector in the lines, but then you need to spend a lot of labor and still not guarantee.
I don't know what can be done about it, but I know it is a real problem.
Heat pump technology has been advancing rapidly particularly in cold weather performance. I don't know if that was entirely accurate 5 years ago. But it was certainly MORE accurate then particularly for NW Massachusetts.
And we certainly do have a lack of good installers right now, unfortunately.
Daikin makes an Altherma line that is excellent an was removed from the US market a few years ago. Not becuase it doesn't work but becuase the US believe it doesn't work. I often toy with the idea of buying one in Canada. I need a Harry Tuttle of heating engineers.
Just as in switching to an EV isn't going to make things significantly better, switching your heating to heat pump isn't either:
Some basic tips from a fellow Bay Stater:
1. Any new or replacement mechanicals should be use heat pumps (water heater too)
2. Make sure your house is well-insulated to get the best bang for the buck
3. The grid has the ability to use greener energy as time goes on, and you can also opt in to renewable suppliers (in MA, at least)
4. Add a solar array and with net metering it becomes a no brainer.
Of course you can. You can use nat-gas-like gas mixtures from decomposition of different kinds of waste, e.g. biomethane and the like. You can also use hydrogen (within limits) and methane produced from green hydrogen (though usually inefficiently).
just a small nit pick:
In theory you can produce methane from electricity, so it is possible. However the efficiencies are abysmal, which makes this almost always a very bad solution.
I will say, my heat pump dryer, while it has removed some buttons from shirts, has exceeded my expectations on energy usage. It's night and day compared to my toaster I had before.
And possibly this senator got a bad heat pump setup. Sample size of one although the leaking being common is not good.
I would think that with a closed loop system the risk of a serious problem would be quite low.
If you are the type of person who goes "oh crap I need to wash every piece of clothing RIGHT NOW" then heat pump isn't for you because of the time penalty.
My current one is as gentle as air drying, no destruction at all.
For instance a heat pump have much less raw materials and need far less high costs alloys than a gas heating system, essentially is cheaper to be produced, and if we can stay on electricity only we can spare the maintenance and expansion costs of gas/oil/* distribution networks.
Try to compare classical mechanical clocks vs modern electronic ones: the mechanical one it's far more costly per single unit, the electronic one cost next to nothing per single unit. For EVs it's not different: they have much less parts, less special alloys, less precision needed to produce them.
Heat pumps and EVs have both evolution margins, while classic ICEs and gas heating systems have already reached a sort of evolution plateau.
Those are the reasons of the Green New Deal: ecology is advertised as the only reason, in reality is a MARGINAL reason, the main reason is reduce much the demand of raw materials (once the transition will be done, of course) and lower much overall production costs. I imaging such reasons are not advertised because most of the benefit will go to those how steer the transition, not to those who pay it. But that's is and understand it and it's need means also steer the actual transition in a way more interesting to the people than a very small cohort of cleptocrats.
I feel like the author may be letting the installers off too easily here. It seems like there are two main possibilities: either no one understands how heat pumps actually work in the real world and none of them meet their claimed efficiencies (possible, but in my estimation not that likely) or the heat pumps he has installed are unsuited for their purpose (or badly installed). I'm inclined to suspect that he was sold the wrong heat pumps.
Confirming this suspicion, in an earlier post (https://willbrownsberger.com/our-heat-pump-experience/#comme...) he gives the specs for his heat pumps. I don't know this particular model, but a commenter after him claims they are not the sort of "Cold Climate Heat Pumps" that would be appropriate for Massachusetts. Since this matches the symptoms (adequate heat production but low efficiency) I'm guessing this is the real issue here.
I think heat pumps are a great technology, but worry there is going to be a backlash against them unless we can rein in the hype. And something is has gone really wrong if local installers can't be trusted to install a heat pump that is appropriate for the climate they are being installed in. Maybe the best thing he can do as a Massachusetts state senator is to enact more stringent laws preventing the installation of non-cold-climate heat pumps in Massachusetts so others don't suffer the disappointment that he did!
Like buying any major appliance, unless you shell out a commercial fee for a commercial product and contract, you're just gonna be rolling the dice. You can do it yourself but the heat pump unit itself may still vary dramatically from sales specs.
These days I'm even wondering if wood heat with a high efficiency furnace makes sense. There are so many dead trees around me. The carbon is going to go back either way. In the case of decomposition, there may be other negative effects of leaving it on the ground compared to burning it.
I haven't given much thought to a way to capture the heat in a way that can be used later. Ideally I can build some giant container of sand with some cinderblock, run some copper through the sand, and heat both using the wood being burned. Then, I could pump water through the copper which is being passively heated from the sand into my existing hot water baseboard, but it's unlikely to be hot enough - oh well.
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I actually looked at some old quotes I found for mini split installs before and after the tax credits Massachusetts introduced and *big shock*, the price of the installs increased about 90% of the tax credit.
Is that a similar idea to the sand battery in Finland? It was on HN last year.
[1] http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph240/holmvik1/docs/d...
