There has got to be a separate thread somewhere about corporate IT, but this goes here for now.
Process fails.
Yes, your process works fine most of the time.
We need to handle the exception cases where it doesn’t.
Yes it can be automated. I have at least three ways for you to consider.
Yes, your process worked yesterday. Yes, we still need to improve it.
[The next day]
Yes, your process worked yesterday. Yes, we still need to improve it.
…
Now taking wagers on how many days they will ask not to do the work.
Yeah. We did ours in October when the weather was fair. Since business was so slow they sent… I think five people to install ours, so they did a furnace and a heat pump in one day.
In your climate, are you just going to do a heat pump? If you have nat gas then it may make sense to get a furnace, not sure of the economics of buying a furnace and using cheap nat gas, versus not paying up front for a furnace buy maybe having higher total cost with a heat pump. Or maybe you’re just replacing the furnace.
Heat pump with nat gas piggyback (for use in very cold.situations) is an option. I started looking at heat pumps to get off nat gas and US products aren’t as advanced as other countries’, probably due to low cost and availability of nat gas.
Current prevalent refrigerant 410a is due to be phased out next year. Lennox, for instance, doesn’t have a product that doesn’t use 410a.
It gets cold enough here occasionally that a straight up heat pump won’t work. People do get the dual fuel models here where the heat pump runs on electricity most of the time, but can switch to gas when it gets cold. I’m sticking with the traditional furnace/AC setup.
IRA 2022 law is encouraging development of heat pumps with low temp ranges, but they are still several years away from US market. UK market has products now that have lower bounds below 0F.
I looked into replacing my furnace with a heat pump, but there’s nothing on the market that will work with my existing hot water heating system, and i don’t want to tear that out and try to find space for air ducts. (That space doesn’t exist, i went with high velocity small ducts for AC, and those barely fit.)
The other option is to do minisplits with units in every room. I considered that when i got AC, too. I have lots of small rooms and lots of windows (which i love) and more ceilings (which i don’t love, but so be it) and as a result, many of the rooms don’t have a good place for the inside unit.
So I’m sticking with a furnace for the time being. In fact, I’m probably sticking with my 1959 furnace, even though it’s not very efficient, because it’s super reliable and low maintenance. One of the guys who was quoting me prices on a new one examined it, and said there’s nothing wrong with it, and he sees no reason i need to replace it soon. All the fragile parts (the water pumps) have been replaced in the last 5 or 10 years
Yep, the ‘heat pump challenge.’ My Bryant unit provides full heat to around 10°, can’t recall exactly. Mitsubishi Hyper Heat units are even better (but didn’t make the five ton unit I needed).
But even when they can work, the cost of electricity would be way, way higher than gas.
I split the difference. Went from an 80% furnace to 97%. Heat pump heats until it drops below 35°. I’m not winning an award from the Sierra Club but I probably use like 50% less gas than I did.
I just replaced an old mid-efficiency model with a high efficiency model. There was gubmint money for heat pumps, but it was still about $1K-2K higher on a net basis.
You could use the high velocity ducts for heat. Would require quite a bit of work to fit it, I think. Plus new equipment. Plus hot water heat is more comfortable than forced air, imo.
I did see a post on Reddit, some people are working on heat pumps for your use case. No idea on when. But as you say, if it ain’t broke.
There are heat pumps designed to replace boilers connected to water radiators, but probably a specialty item. Given what Lucy described, I’d say let the next owner decide on a massive retrofit for her case.
I think the company below is what I saw on Reddit. I thought they had some heat pumps that would kinda work with boilers but we don’t have anything yet that will get the water as hot as, say, a gas-fired boiler. I could be wrong, I haven’t looked at it much since I have forced air (formerly a gravity-fed system).
Super reliable and low maintenance is a pretty good reason for keeping it… from both a financial and environmental perspective. Sure a newer system might use less power to run, but what’s the environmental impact of replacing it every 10 years instead of every 100 years? Of having workers out to repair it all the time? Of running space heaters while it’s malfunctioning?
It’s easy to just compare power usage and stop there but that doesn’t give you an accurate picture of all the relevant factors.
Thank you for keeping your 1959 boiler out of a landfill for the foreseeable future… and for keeping the 3-4 high efficiency replacements that won’t ever be placed into service out of landfills permanently.
Oooh! That’s exactly what I was looking for. I was assured it didn’t exist (and I guess it doesn’t, yet) but I bet if I wait 5 years there will be a couple of brands on the market and a couple of companies qualified to install the thing.
Thanks for finding this!
I’m not sure the ducts I have are even rated for hot air, and yeah, I really like baseboard heating. I think it’s much nicer than forced hot air. Especially drafty forced hot air. My retrofit system was designed for cooling, and drafts are okay (maybe even beneficial) with AC. But I sometimes turn on just the fan part in the winter as a whole-house HEPA filter, and it’s drafty. I certainly don’t want to use it full-time.
Yes, I keep telling myself that when the gas company sends us notes about how our house is less efficient than our neighbors. Yeah, it is. But we score well on “externalities”. It takes a lot of power and other resources to make a new boiler.
Given that I have forced air now I’m content with what I got. I will say that while reading up on heat pumps and talking to people, the old-school folks often complain that heat pumps don’t really give you hot air, but rather warm air. And they say it like it’s a bug but it’s actually a feature. My heat pump has five stages and my fan has a hundred speeds, so when it’s 50° outside the heat pump turns on slowly and my fan barely blows and it’s almost as good as radiators. I can’t hear it, or feel it, but the house is comfortable so it’s working. And maybe it’s a placebo effect but I swear the heat pump doesn’t dry the air as much as the gas furnace.
All that to say, if you ever want to or have to go forced air, I’ve found the heat pump to be superior to the traditional gas furnace (which I also own).
You can buy 1 speed (on/off), 2 speed, or variable speed systems these days. The variable speed fans are very efficient and less noticeable. Upstairs we have it for both AC and heat.
The new downstairs unit will have a variable fan on the heat, but not on the A/C. The downstairs A/C doesn’t have to work nearly as hard so I didn’t think the extra expense was worth it there.
If and when you replace it, you can get variable speed fans for high velocity systems. No idea at what cost. Not something I’d do until I replaced the whole thing.
