28
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Norway brought heat pumps in from the cold – device installed in two-thirds of households suggests switching to greener heating can be done
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- Title
- 'You can walk around in a T-shirt': how Norway brought heat pumps in from the cold
- Authors
- Ajit Niranjan
- Published
- Nov 23 2023
- Word count
- 1215 words
This part interested me:
Around here, the only negative I hear about heat pumps is that "they don't work when it's cold, but otherwise I'd buy one." But -25C is -13F. That's pretty cold. The majority of people live in vaguely temperate areas where it rarely gets colder than that anyway. Where I live I think it has historically gotten to -24C (-11F), literally a hundred years ago, but never below. In the last 10 years my city hasn't gotten below -17C (2F), and the mean winter low is more like -13C (9F).
If they work in Norway I bet they can work in lots of places in the US too.
I live in Minnesota. It can sometimes get below -34C (-30F).
I installed an air source heat pump last year (for a forced air system) and I've gotten through one winter with it. The heat pump has 100% efficiency down to -20C (-5F), but even at colder temperatures it still works up to ~75% efficiency.
My backup (for the coldest days) is electric resistance coils, which are expensive to run, but doesn't happen all that often. There's a discount my energy provider gives you if your heating is all electric, and as a result my heating bills are actually cheaper than when I had gas.
Basically - you can go all electric in real cold climates these days. It's totally doable and will only get easier as the technology improves.
This is what we do in Finland too. The very very northern bits might be different, but for places where most people actually live air source heat pumps are definitely the way to go.
My grandma's place got one 2 years ago to supplement an oil burner and I think the burner has had to kick in like 4-5 times because it got too cold for the heat pump.
Even without any fancy home automation that would optimise the heating to cheaper hours, it's saving a ton of money every month.
Also for all the people with gas or resistive heating already this could exist as your primary heating solution with the old one as a backup. If it really does get too cold you can fire up the backup. But almost all of the time you’ll use the much cheaper heat pump.
We had a polar vortex situation in the past... Five years? (What is time) but other than that this sort of system would probably work perfectly.
And on days like that you're probably firing up the space heaters and electric blankets anyway.