Is a Heat Pump Worth it?

Fujitsu Heat Pump

Does your electricity company have Power Smart challenges? The idea is that you sign up and if you reduce your electricity consumption by 10% over the next year, you get $50! We've done it a few years running. The first year, we made our goal! Yay! But then... the next few years it all fell apart. We started running our basement suite as an AirBnb and the extra laundry loads (4 or 5 per booking) sent our electricity usage through the roof. On top of that... we got into the habit of using the dryer for our own laundry instead of hanging it out on the line or on racks upstairs. Double whammy of high electricity usage.

But... on January 6, 2021, we started a new challenge and this time we have an ace in the hole. A heat pump.

What is a Heat Pump?

For those of you in far chillier climes than West Coast BC... the heat pump is a device that sits outside the home and extracts heat (or cold) from ambient air temperature. It then funnels the heat (or cool) into your house via a centrally located wall unit. You can get heat pumps that are good down to -30 Celsius (!). The one we chose is good down to -17 Celsius, which is perfect for our West Coast climate as we rarely get down to -10 Celsius.

The heat pump is supposed to save big time on electricity costs, using only a third of the electricity that traditional baseboard heater use. They are particularly good if you still have an oil furnace since oil heating costs $$$$ during the winter months. We have/had electric baseboard heating and the thought of saving $$$ on our electric bill was enticing.

Worth it?

We did a cost/benefit analysis and figured that it was worth. We bit the bullet and got quotes from Lennox (via Costco) and Fujitsu (via Coastal Energy) and decided to go with a Fujitsu mini-split ductless heat pump. The unit was installed in mid-November 2020 with one outside unit and two interior units, one upstairs (for us) and one downstairs (for the AirBnb).

We paid $9400 for the whole system which comes with a 12 year warranty. We also applied for a rebate from the provincial government (via BC Hydro) for $1000. We had excellent timing, because shortly before we were to have our heat pump installed, the BC Government doubled the rebates! So we ended up walking away with $2000 in our pockets which pushed the actual cost of the unit down to $7400.

In case you're thinking of buying a heat pump at a big box store, that is always an option. But in order to qualify for the provincial rebate, it needs to be professionally installed. The Fujitsu guys were grumbling about having to install some cheapo heat pump on one of islands and basically told the homeowner not to call them for maintenance issues! Forewarned...

We did have a hiccup with one of our remotes for the upstairs unit. The remote would tell the unit to increase the temperature just fine but when we turned the remote down one degree, the unit would not come back on to maintain the temperature after it had gone down that one degree. The temperature in the room just kept going down! But, the guys came and replaced both remote controls and, since then, everything has been working tickety-boo.

Helpful Heat Pump Tips

There are, however, some things to know about heat pumps. When we first got it, we thought we would do what we've always done with gas furnaces or electric baseboards. Program it to go down a few degrees at night and then have it come back on in the morning.

That was an epic fail. The entire unit was shut off when we got up that morning!

While the remotes are good for basic tasks, the programming features leave a lot to be desired. Mind you, this was the goofy remote that got replaced, so that could have been part of the problem.

When the service guy came to replace the remotes he told us that heat pumps are very different beasts from other sources of heating. A heat pump can basically raise the interior temperature 1 degree an hour. So, if we turn the unit down to 17 Celsius in the evening and want the place to be at 20 Celsius during the day, it will take 3 hours to get back up there. Basically, we'd need to program the heat pump to come back on at 2 am, for me getting up at 5 am. That sounded a bit silly. We could splurge and get a wifi system installed with the heat pump so that we could use our smart phones to program the heat pump but... we'll pass on that. The tech recommended a Set It and Forget It approach. We received an email from BC Hydro a few weeks ago which gave exactly the same advice. Ignore the remote's temperature reading and set the room for your comfort with a Set It and Forget It attitude.

Ignore the temperature setting on the remote (it doesn't have a thermostat in it) and use another thermostat to monitor room temperature. We are just using our programmable baseboard thermostats which are still connected (albeit set for 11 Celsius) to get an idea of room temperature. We are aiming for 20 Celsius in the living room and once we have that temperature... we just walk away and leave the unit to do its thing.

This all works quite well for the living areas (the interior unit is in the living room) but... we like to sleep in a cool bedroom. We've learned that while we can leave the other bedroooms open to receive heat circulation, we should keep our bedroom door closed during the day (at least during the winter). The temperature in the room (depending on the outside air temp) goes down to 13 or 14 Celsius during the day which is a nice sleeping temperature. We also tend to open the window a bit at night, just to keep the temperature nice and cool during the night.

This would all work quite well except... the cat wants to come into the bedroom at night... which means we need to leave the door open a cat-width. This has two side-effects: (a) the bedroom gets warmer as the heat pump works away all night and pumps warm air into it and (b) the rest of the house gets cooler as the cold air flows out of the bedroom. We've considered a few options: (a) close the bedroom door to keep the cat out (unlikely) or (b) get a cat door to put into the bedroom door which would leave a much smaller opening through which cold/warm air would move. We're still working out these details.

I've learned that when the outside temperature goes below 0 Celsius, it's best to not open the bedroom window at all! It's a learning curve to be sure.

Electricity Savings

Sooo... where does that leave us with our electric bill? Well... December/January/February are traditionally our coldest months and... we are down 34% in our electricity usage! That is very good news indeed! Our equal payment plan is $190/month and they are already dropping that down to $175 since we are still running a surplus in our payment plan (which renews in early July). I'm going to guess that we'll get a nice refund in July and that our monthly payment will drop to around the $150 mark... or more... fingers crossed!

But... here's the thing. We definitely have not dropped our electric bill by two thirds, mostly because we use electricity elsewhere.

If we look at a typical summer month when we use zero baseboard heaters, we average 700 kwh/month. If we then subtract that baseline off of our winter months... We are left with about 1700 kwh/month being devoted to heating during our worst winter months before the heat pump. And... after the heat pump, we are looking at 800 kwh/month, which is more than 50% savings on our regular heating costs. So... that is nothing to sniff at but it's not a 2/3 saving on our heating costs (66%). Still, we are in early days/weeks/months yet and it remains to be seen how the unit affects our electric bill during the summer when we might want to avail ourselves of its air-conditioning potential! We'll have to keep tracking this...

Our monthly electricity usage from 2017 to 2021. We've only had 3 full months of
heat pump usage but you can already see it's making a difference (green line)

Advice

Sooo... a word of advice. If you're doing a cost/benefit analysis... make sure you subtract off your summertime baseline electricity usage off of your other months. This is for things like fridges, water heaters, dryers, lights, computers, etc. That will give you a more accurate idea of how much electricity goes towards heating. From there, you can do some number crunching and see if saving 50% of your heating bill will generate the savings that you are anticipating by switching to a heat pump. My initial calculations hadn't accounted for our other electricity usage remaining the same which means that a 50% savings on electricity for heat is NOT the same as 50% savings on the entire electricity bill. I had thought that the heat pump would have paid for itself (through less electricity usage) in 7 years but right now, it's looking like 12 years. That all depends on electricity rates of course... if rates continue to go up, then our savings increase.

I'm pretty sure oil heating will see a huge savings! And... BC offers a $4000 rebate for those switching from oil to heat pumps... and that's double right now (Feb 2021).