Technology

I think it does, and it seems to work because of a defrosting feature that earlier models didn't have. But I wouldn't say it does so very clearly. Unless I missed it.

2600 is dirt cheap even by Euro standards, trust me.

Here in Italy a single room split would cost you around 1k to 2.5-3k depending on the brand.

A whole house system you're probably looking at 10k and then some.

I got a quote in rural America for a single room minisplit, $10,300.

Absolutely bonkers.

$2600 is utter bullshit. I had several quotes for a 1000sf house, not a single one was under 16000 installed, after rebates. My payback period was going to be almost 20 years even against a medium efficiency gas furnace.

Yeah, no. German here, if your house already is all prepared, ideally with large radiators or heated floors and you really just have to switch out the source of heat from whatever to a heatpump, then you're maybe looking at 15k€ including work. The man probably collected a properly dimensioned subsidy.

Electricity monopoly in the US = they can price gouge, and this is literally the only reason I installed a dual fuel system with a less efficient heat pump. The Eversource electricity price hikes last year probably would have meant I couldn't afford to heat my home in the worst parts of winter here in Massachusetts.

This is how policies are killing the planet. Socialize electric utilities, upgrade the electric grid, subsidize the use of electric heat pumps so they're actually affordable for all end users, and of course more people would adopt them.

As it is, I run my heat pump as much as I can, which is like 9 months a year. Better than only having gas heat at least.

What's your heat pump? I've been looking into them and I can't find one that's willing to say it works past about -15.

This is not a myth but a fact, heat pumps don't work at extreme cold temperatures.
What temperature exactly depends on the coolant used.

The efficiency also degrades at lower temperatures.

This is a random example of first hit I got on a heat pump.
https://heatnow.dk/produkt/altech-sirius-9-varmepumpe/

Notice the effect drops dramatically below -20 C°.

But this is a pump sold for the Scandinavian market, therefore it is of course designed to work at low temperatures. It doesn't state the minimum, but I'm guessing it would be around -40 C°. Which is very good compared top older models.

The heat pump I just had installed in SW Ontario hands over heating duty at -10C to the gas furnace

It really depends on the type of heat pump. Air-sourced heat pumps generally don't produce heat below -30C and below -10C they generally lose enough efficiency that you're better off using electric baseboard heating.

It's not that people think they don't work in the cold, it's that they are less suited for the areas or days of extreme cold.

EVs work fine in cold weather. I live in Minnesota and drive an EV. It loses about 10-20% of the total range in the winter, but most of that appears to be from generating heat for the passengers.

The problem isn’t that EVs don’t work in the winter, it’s that their range gets significantly reduced. We had issues with people literally up and abandoning their vehicles because their batteries ran flat.

In these cases the issue is less that the range is lost, and more that with snowy and cold weather traffic gets unpredictable. You can end up in long queues and that’s where the issues start.

When I went on a work trip up in the far north I never saw a single EV. Asked my colleagues about it and none of them thought EVs particularly feasible as a primary vehicle.

All that said, EVs work great for most people most of the time.