this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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There is a really, really big caveat here.
While all of this is true, and while heat pumps are definitely more efficient than gas/oil/electric heat, you MUST have a well-insulated home without drafts. If your home is not well insulated, or is drafty, then heat pumps likely will not keep your home at a comfortable temperature.
A standard furnace works by kicking on when heat drops below the set point of your thermostat, and then it blasts heated air until the whole space is a certain temperature above the set point on your thermostat, and then shuts off. The most efficient heat pumps are constantly trickling a little heat at a time, rather than cycling on and off. If your home is poorly insulated or drafty, then you can end up losing heat faster than the heat pump can bring it in. The better your insulation and the better sealed your home is, the better your results with a heat pump will be.
Unfortunately, my home is largely uninsulated and pretty drafty; without doing a pretty significant amount of work, at a fairly steep cost, I can't retrofit to a heat pump.
what does insulation have to do with heat pumps?
heat energy is heat energy, where you get it from doesn't matter, if your house isn't well insulated the heat loss will be the same regardless what pumps in the heat.
The home is a container for heat. If it is a poorly insulated container the heat pump does not put out enough BTUs to keep the house warm because the heat is escaping faster than it can be generated.
If that's the case, you simply installed a heat pump with too little capacity...
Heatpumps come in all sizes... I just looked up one that outputs 50 kW worth of heat, and if that isn't enough you can integrate up to 16 of them to output a total of 800 kW of heat.
That being said, if your house is badly insulated and drafty, you should fix that first, it will immediately cut your heating bill, no matter which heat source you use.