If ducts are sealed at all seams and joints with mastic, duct leakage tests are a waste of time and money.
Your experience with blackouts is very different than mine - but I have no idea which is closer to typical for NY nor why yours is different from mine. If my very urban area has few lengthy outages even in summer and yours has more, that suggests to me that demand is not what is causing the difference.
And yet they’re the backup on heat pumps… Also plenty of electric baseboard heat left from the Seventies.
When i was shopping for a house i found one that had electric baseboard heat of the ~40 i looked at. I really don’t think it’s common in areas that need heat.
Well, I’m in construction in 2 area that need serious heat (Telluride CO and Bozeman MT), and you’d be surprised. It was cheap and easy to install when housing was cheap. A run of electric baseboard to heat a room might be $150, versus $30k for a boiler and distribution. Long term costs be damned.
Considering how sloppy and cheap a lot of contractors are, I disagree. The testing ensures they don’t just slap on mastic too thin to actually work, or only use it where the ductwork is visible.
Yes, it’s high cost.
Fair enough, my experience is with commercial construction where we inspect the work during construction. Though if the contractor is so bad that he fails at duct sealing, he’s probably installing flexible duct and not sheet metal in first place.
It’s actually fairly common here in the Northwest. But those mostly date from the years when we had plentiful cheap hydroelectric power. We still have the hydro, but the demand has gone way up while the amount of hydroelectricity has remained flat.
But windpower has gone WAY up. Drove through the gorge this fall and the wind capacity is nuts. Also drove by an AWS plant with house-size generators lined up 20 in a row, also nuts.
Short sighted on the part of NY. Certainly they realize that getting rid of fossil fuels completely is not going to happen. Their goal is to reduce the use of fossil fuels and installing a heat pump with fossil fuel back up would likely cut your use of fossil fuel by 60% or more. Sure, some people might game the system and not use the heat pump, but that would be stupid of them if the heat pump costs less.
On the other hand, I don’t really know what the goal of the program is. If it is to get rid of residential oil storage tanks, then the requirement makes sense. If it’s just to reduce fossil fuel, then it doesn’t. I don’t live in an area where oil is used for heat, but I think I have read where oil tanks are a problem by themselves.
I’m pretty sure there are multiple reasons - and my guess in that in at least some areas, one of the goals is to get oil trucks off the street. I don’t think getting rid of the oil tank is a reason , because they neither pay to remove it nor required me to remove it to get the rebate. ( Mine is not underground, it’s in my basement and it will cost a couple of thousand to remove it) When I got the rebate, the installers had to take pictures of my disconnected burner to send with the paperwork.
I live in an area with weather similar to what @Northern_Piper describes. My house was built in 1981 with electric baseboards only. In the 1990s they added ducts and installed a heat pump (air source) and an oil furnace as a backup. A few years ago we changed the whole system to a newer heat pump (still air source) with an electric furnace (5 and 10 kW elements) as backup. We’ve kept the old baseboard heaters in the basement, they’re are active for the parts of the day when we’re typically downstairs.
In practice, our heat pump can maintain a steady 21,5 degrees C (= 71 degrees F) when the outside temp is a few degrees below freezing. Below that, the backup resistance heating is needed.
But Québec has cheap and (for now at least) plentiful hydro electricity; a very large majority of houses here are heated electrically, and the network has been built accordingly. The utility does use gas-fueled generating stations to handle the worst winter peaks.
I don’t know how it would work in NY state, but I figure it’s a step towards weaning everyone off fossil fuels for heating. Some of the extra electricity may come from fossil fuels right now, but over the next 10-20 years it will hopefully be possible to move that to renewables.
(Missed the edit window)
I wrote “a very large majority of houses here are heated electrically” but it’s actually around 65%. So let’s settle for “a majority”.
The owners of our house in the 1990s got a subsidy to install their heat pump, and some incentive-driven electricity rates where everyday power is cheaper than average most of the time, but when it gets below -12 degrees C (= +10 degrees F), a bright orange LED lights up next to the thermostat, the backup heat source (oil in their case) takes over and the price per kWh more than doubles. This encourages people to avoid using the clothes dryer, etc. at those times; a crude form of demand shaping.
In 2019, we got a subsidy of a few hundred bucks to switch to non-fossil. (We also dropped out of the dual-rate system.) When we were shopping for the equipment, I enquired about ground source (geothermal) heat pumps. This could have been used as a single heat source, but it’s expensive and involves digging a well. All the companies told me that the equipment was good for about 15-20 years and it wouldn’t pay for itself in that period, at least with our cheap electricity rates. (It may have been ignorance or a sales strategy on their part, I don’t know.)
To the OP: Yes, if everybody in your area switched to heat pump + electric element, there might be a supply problem when it gets very cold. But in practice only some people will take advantage of the subsidy. It still may be worthwhile for you to add a heat pump without the subsidy.
Quite a simple device: just produces an airline ticket to your nominated selection from a range of localities with hospitable southern climates.
Some more news on heat pumps. Washington state will require heat pumps on all new houses, apartments, and large commercial buildings as of July 2023. This is mandated by the Building Code Council, not the legislature.
For those asking about the grid mix in NY or elsewhere, you can browse and visualize data here:
There is a push at the moment for UK houses to switch to heat pumps.
Problem is, the models being suggested require an up-front of £20k+ depending on the changes required (may need insulation work, underfloor heating, bigger radiators water tanks etc.)
They also cost more to run than gas and output water that isn’t as hot. I’m not sure what the attraction is for retrofitting these. I can see the sense of including them in new builds that are optimised for this type of system but it is going to be a hard sell for the vast majority of current homeowners.
A quote for a friend of ours in a similar house was £22k with an increase in their yearly energy bills of 15%. As I said, a tough sell.
That assumes gas/oil/other fossil fuels stay the same price. Granted electricity isn’t necessarily going to remain stable either. California has been pushing to ban new gas installations for heating and cooking, and for a state that doesn’t really get that cold, heat pumps are surprisingly rare. The reason is that electricity there is expensive compared to gas, and they have widespread gas infrastructure. So for now there’s been no economic incentive to switch.
If your goal is to reduce fossil fuel use, then a heat pump will do that even if the electricity comes from the same fossil fuel that’s being replaced. I think the break-even point is somewhere around a coefficient of performance (COP) of 2.5 or so, which overcomes the inefficiency of the power plant, transmission, etc. It’s similar to how an electric car reduces carbon emissions even if the electricity used to charge it comes from coal power plants.
15% extra on your heating/cooling seems to me like a small price to pay to make a worthwhile dent in the fight against climate change.
Not for the life of me can I understand how this would save me money. You’re just describing an air conditioner. Where I live, an air conditioner is way, way more expensive to run than a natural gas furnace. It’s not even close.