Top 5 Reasons Your Next Furnace Will Be Electric

Solving climate change is hard. Solving climate change is a whole lot easier if we do 2 things (hint: heating repair):

1. Replace our appliances and vehicles with electric-powered ones – #ElectrifyEverything

2. Replace coal and natural gas power plants with renewable energy (mostly solar and wind)

How big an impact is this? It’s huge. About 50% of our carbon emissions come from these two things. If everyone in the country did these two things, we would be significantly closer to avoiding catastrophic global warming. It’s the most impactful thing you can do.

So, where to start with Electrifying Everything? The two largest ‘appliances’ are your car and depending on where you live, your furnace or your Air Conditioner. EVs are a well known ‘replacement’ for your gas guzzling car. But what to do about your furnace / AC?

There’s a new kid on the block: a Heat Pump. Check out this great video – Why heaters are the future of cooling – if you are unfamiliar. Heat Pumps are awesome – and they should 100% be the next heating repair furnace / AC you buy. Let us say it again, you should never buy a fossil-fuel powered furnace again. Why?

• They’re basically magic.

• They’re super efficient to operate.

• They’re significantly lower cost to operate.

• They can help save the planet.

If you’re getting a new furnace, get in touch to see if we can help you save a couple thousand dollars.

Here are the Top 5 Reasons to invest in a Heat Pump:

1. They are technologically basically magic. You already have a heat pump in your home: your freezer. It takes ambient air and makes it super cold. How? They don’t directly generate heat or cold, instead they extract it from one location (with a compressor/expansion valve) and move it to another (with coils and a fan). A Heat Pump Furnace does the same thing, but it reverse. It takes heat from ambient external air and heats up a room.

To understand this, it’s helpful to understand a little bit of physics. When we think of cold air, we think of 0 degrees Celsius – at that temperature, water freezes, rain becomes snow, and my nose turns bright red (scientific fact). But, 0°C still has heat in it. It has 273° of heat – in Kelvin. And similarly, a 90°F day is sweltering. In Kelvin, it’s 305°K.

And so even though it feels hot / cold in human terms, it’s all just physics. Heat Pumps operate using physics and are able to extract real amounts of heat or cooling from air that to us, feels like it doesn’t have it.

2. This technological prowess extends to its efficiency rating: Appliances are measured in efficiency: how well do they take an input and create a unit of useful energy out of it. Gas-powered stoves are notoriously inefficient. About 40% of the heated created by that blue flame goes into your food. The other 60% dissipates as waste heat. An Induction cooktop is way more efficient: >90% of the heat gets transferred to your food.

Your fossil-fueled furnace is actually pretty efficient. Standard units these days are >90% efficient. But you know what’s 3-4x more efficient? You guessed it: a heat pump! Because Heat Pumps move heat (see #1) rather than create it, their efficiency rating is >300%! What does that mean? For every unit of electricity they consume, rather than producing .9 units of heat, they produce >3 units of heat!

3. They can save you a boatload of money, Part 1. Because they are so efficient, over the lifetime of the system, they can save you thousands of dollars. Don’t take it from us – Mr. Money Mustache (finance and life-optimization guru) recently installed a heat pump and is going to save himself $676/year (for a 15% Return on Investment). That’s real money. And given that they last 15 or more years, that’s over $10k in savings. Where else in your investment portfolio can you generate a 15% ROI?

4. They can save you a boatload of money, Part 2. Heat Pumps for heating repair create both heating and cooling. So by replacing your furnace with a heat pump, you get an AC thrown in for free! Have you installed an AC recently? It typically costs $5-10k for central air. If you have to replace your furnace already, you are getting $5-10k of value for free. When was the last time you got a $5-10k check just for doing nothing?

5. They can help save the planet. Heat pumps run on electricity. Electricity is the only energy source that we’re good at making renewably (wind and solar). So every year we deploy more wind and solar, each heat pump has a lower carbon footprint and a lower impact on the environment. That’s the 101.

There’s the 201 level reason: heat pump usage is highly correlated with when renewable energy is producing electricity. We typically have our ACs on during the hottest time of the day: when the sun is shining. And we typically run our heat systems when it’s coldest: during the nighttime. But that is also when the wind blows the most. So your usage of a heat pump is highly correlated with when renewable electricity is the most plentiful. That’s pretty awesome.

Interested in learning more about heating repair? Contact us for a quote today!