Major Advances with Heat Pumps in the Extreme Cold

So do you want one of these newer heat pumps for your home? Any experience with them? Get Surfshark VPN at surfshark.deals/undecided - Enter promo code UNDECIDED for 83% off and 3 extra months for FREE! If you liked this video, check out: The Challenges of a Wind Turbine on Your Home https://youtu.be/nPvTH7Siclg?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7cadIj6qpCWkg-tPzN1sgj

My sister had a heat pump installed about four years ago. Last month, in our area of Canada, we had a temperature drop of -25c for a couple of days. Her heat pump is her main source of heat. She has never had an issue with getting heat.

I spent about 1 1/2 years working on a 'ski shack' that was heated by two large geothermal heat pumps, fed by a single vertical well. In the winter, there was a thick layer of frost on any section of the fluid pipes in the mechanical room where there were gaps in the insulation, including where the 'warm' fluid came out of the ground. Even though the source fluid was well below freezing, the three-story building was kept very comfortable.

I have had heat pumps for 30 years in various houses The biggest problem is unskilled technicians who can not charge a split system properly. Pre charged connecting lines are a solution but are some times messy to install.

I installed a geothermal hvac system 3 years ago and it has been flawless. We live in the Denver area with temperatures down to -20 F. Obviously, with the geothermal setup, cold weather doesn’t affect the performance so it does fine in winter. What I’ve been most surprised by is how great it is at air conditioning and how cheap it is to cool the house in summer. It costs next to nothing to keep the house in the mid to upper 60s in the summer (our bedrooms are all upstairs and I sleep better when it’s cool). Overall a great investment.

Convinced my parents to switch from propane to a pair of mini-split heat pumps at the start of this winter and it reduced their monthly heating cost by about half. Payback on the cost of install is going to be about 6 years, though probably a little less than that, but we don't have solid numbers for summer cooling vs the old terribly installed central air-conditioning that the mini-splits are also taking the place of.

I live in Canada, so days of -20C or colder are not a freak occurrence; and yet our house is heated and cooled exclusively with a heat pump. The one that was installed when the house was built in 2000 struggled when the temperatures dipped below -5 or so, but the new one is able to push out air that's even warmer than what the old auxiliary furnace did on the really cold days (previously had a dual energy setup due to the inherent limitations of last-gen heat pumps). We've reached a point in the technological advancements where there's really no good reason why every new construction building doesn't have a heat pump as the entire HVAC solution.

My parents installed a vertical one around two years ago here in the Swiss mountains. Together with our solar panels our house is now basically self sufficient and both the heat pump and the panels have worked fine in the two years even during cold days in winter

I live in South Dakota and have used an air-exchange heat pump to heat my home to air temperatures down to -20F. The heat pump will send hot compressed freon into the home regardless of the outside air temps. Where they fall short is eventually your heat loss will exceed the heating ability of the heat pump. Heat pump heated air temp = 105F, forced air gas heat is much hotter.

I had a Fujitsu cold climate heat pump installed at my place in northern Vermont back in 2017. I have had days where it's been well below -20°F and it ran fine. The temperatures where it has the most trouble is when it's around freezing with a high relative humidity. That's really the only time I notice it because it has to go into the defrost cycle fairly frequently. The only other times I have a problem is when a tree takes out the power but I hope to get solar and batteries to deal with that at some point.

Matt, I have been using ground sourced geo-thermal (liquid to air) systems for the past twenty three years. The first system was a WaterFurnace (pump and dump) that was installed in 2000 and is still operational today. The second system installed was a HydroDelta in another new build that finally gave up the ghost last spring after sixteen years of operation. My replacement unit is a WaterFurnace again. This unit is far superior to the unit installed in 2000 and is 50% more efficient than it’s predecessor (HydroDelta). Even with energy prices being more expensive than when we built our home seventeen years ago, our monthly bills are half of what we were paying two years ago. We are heating and cooling exclusively with the geothermal system, our bills range from $ 108.00 to $ 238.00, our home is 4,200 sqft. We are not passive home certified nor compliant, though we removed as much of the thermal bridging we could. Always like your content! Keep up the good work. Paul

I grew up with heat pumps, and we never had an issue in our cold climate. My dad was a HVAC technician. In my house I installed one that will heat down to -5F have yet to have an issue.

The only issue with these is if there's a blizzard going on and you have a power outage for days, the heat pumps simply won't work and can cause life threatening issues like hypothermia.

I lived in Breckenridge,CO and I had a split unit mainly for summers. I used it to augment my hydronic floors. It always blew hot hair when I needed it which would be on cold mornings. We often got -20 to 0 weather. I love that you can run them in reverse!

I live in SoCal where we have been having the coldest, wettest, snowiest winter in a long time. There is a Fujitsu Halcyon inverter based heat pump at my place and it is zoned out, which is really helpful. What I have found with this unit is if you play with the temps and the unit kicks into high gear to warm the place up, runs rather inefficiently to do that. So if you are hoping to save energy by letting the place get cold for a short little while, say you go out for a bit, and then warm it back up, that doesn't save anything due to the subsequent huge draw to warm the place back up. You need many hours of letting the place be cold before that 'trick' starts making any actual sense. But if you just let it cruise at a set temperature with a good thermostat reading source (if you know what you are doing, you can switch between reading from the AC head and wired in remote control with these units), it is super efficient. Pointing this sort of thing out in your video briefly doesn't quite do it justice in how important it is for a heat pump to be able to cruise at a more or less constant low pump speed. Also zoning is great at night for just keeping the bedrooms warm and thus less load on the unit as I don't heat the whole house at night, but the unit is setup so it can if all the zones are on. At least in SoCal in the valleys where it is not too terribly cold, granted I did see snow outside on a couple of different days where I live, which is basically unheard of for decades now as temperatures have warmed up due to global warming and the concrete urban jungle heating effect from population growth covering the land, this unit is amazingly efficient, even on the days where I saw snow falling onto the house. I mean significantly colder outside with thick cloud cover blocking the Sun completely over a 24 hour period, but only a modest, incremental extra use of electricity. I have talked to others and found an example where someone had their thermostat set to the same as mine and their overall living conditions not that different from mine, however they have been using a natural gas heater to hold that temperature. I spent ~$80 on electricity for my heat pump for the billing cycle. They spent $600 on natural gas for their furnace over the same billing cycle. When you are talking about a $500 savings in a single billing cycle using a commonly available inverter based heat pump in SoCal, well maybe there needs to be more focus in getting this tech in everyone's home out here in SoCal. The technology is definitely ready for this place and with sky high bills for not doing it, it is a must just to be able to have a chance to afford to live out here without freezing to death in the process.

My house probably among the first heat pump in the city. we had to import them from Japan because they don't make them here at the time, 2010 actually. It does hydronic heating for the floor, hot water heater for the shower and Heat Recovery unit in the bedroom. Just one machine is needed, the rest are balance valve and thermostat. We removed the gas boiler in 2016 because we realized we don't need that to be there as backup.

I had a geothermal heat pump system in Grande Prairie Alberta for 22 years. It got me through -45 temperatures at least 4 times, with no problems. (Remember that this was a geothermal system, so I had 3/4 of a mile of pipe 10 feet under ground, circulating a glycol solution) So, it did work, however saying that it doesn’t use much energy is not true. I was using considerable amounts of electricity to run the system. I was using more money to keep my house warm than neighbours using natural gas, by up to $200 per month. Consider, for a moment, what would happen if even only 30% of the buildings use heat pumps, and at the same time, 30% of the people use electric cars. People are already saying that people should charge their cars over night, but that is the exact time when house heating would be needed. Think of everything!

We installed mini-split air-sourced heat pumps last fall, and have been heating with a combination of wood + mini-splits this winter (in NH). Getting a smaller system (sized for cooling, not heating) saved on up-front costs. Our mini-splits are rated down to 5F, and are great without wood down to about 25F. I doubt we'll need supplemental wood once we re-insulate and re-side.

My aunt has had geothermal for over 30 years, you freeze in the summer and sweat during the winter, the only time they ever used additional heating was when it dropped below -30 for about two weeks straight in the ohio river valley. I have always planned for geothermal heating and cooling when I get around to having a house built.

I have to chuckle at the sudden uptick in air source heat pumps. About 30 years ago I was involved in making a prototype one using a control board from Ontario Hydro research. We installed it in my 20 year old home (at the time) and found that the minimum break even temperature was about +2 deg.C. Not bad for R22 fluid, as I had absolutely no background in the field. During a visit to the yearly big US heating and AC show I asked Copeland (the compressor manufacturer) if they had ever thought of using a variable speed motor for better control, only to be told that their motor company had never suggested it. Going over to the booth of the motor company, I asked the same question, only to get the answer that Copeland had never requested this. The funny thing was that they were both divisions on Emerson electric.