We’re officially in the comma club (best Christmas ever).
DR Richardson, Co-founder of Elephant Energy, shaking hands with Justin Bailey, Lafayette Homeowner, who just received the gift of a cold-climate Mitsubishi Heat Pump. Photo creds: Bri Adair
This week, Elephant Energy celebrated a milestone we’ve dreamt about since day one: our 1,000th heat pump installation.
It took us 15 months to install our first 100 heat pumps. Today, we’re installing 100 heat pumps every month. Reaching 1,000 installations is a huge milestone – not just for Elephant Energy, but for the climate. Homes contribute 20% of climate-related emissions annually, and heating and cooling are the biggest culprits. Thanks to these 1,000 installations, our homeowners have collectively prevented more than 4,000 tons of carbon emissions that would have come from gas-powered furnaces (that’s equivalent to the emissions from driving more than 17 million miles in a gas-powered car).
At Elephant, supporting our communities is at the heart of what we do, and it was a no-brainer to celebrate this 1,000th milestone by giving back to our community during the holiday season.
We were thrilled to donate a brand new cold-climate Mitsubishi Heat Pump to a deserving family in Lafayette, Colorado – an upgrade that will bring them year-round comfort, lower energy bills, and a smaller carbon footprint. For us, this wasn’t just about hitting a number. It was about showing what’s possible when we prioritize accessibility and affordability in electrification.
Colorado homeowner Justin Bailey had been living without central cooling, and hoped to switch to a heat pump to reduce his fossil fuel use, but was waiting for the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) rebates to roll out in Colorado. Here at Elephant, we know that electrification has been inaccessible or unaffordable for far too many people for far too long, and we have made it our mission to change that. That’s why we stepped in to make his heat pump dream a reality.
Justin Bailey, Lafayette Homeowner, cutting the ribbon to his holiday gift: a brand new cold-climate Mitsubishi Heat Pump. Photo creds: Claire Duncombe, Boulder County’s Office of Sustainability, Climate Action and Resilience
“I’m a huge believer in electrification – for the climate, for your health, and for the comfort and efficiency it brings. A year ago, I started looking into getting a heat pump, but quickly realized I couldn’t afford it. I explored all the rebate programs out there, and then this amazing surprise opportunity came along from Elephant Energy. My heat pump has only been running since yesterday afternoon, but it’s completely silent, and I couldn’t be happier.” says Justin.
You know we love ribbon cuttings, so in true Elephant fashion we grabbed our Elephant-sized scissors and gathered with our local partners from the City of Lafayette, Xcel Energy, Go Electric Colorado, Rewiring America, Sierra Club, and Boulder County to celebrate this milestone and hear from the leaders on the important role they’re all playing in the home electrification movement.
We’ll continue to shout it from the rooftops: Electrification is a collective movement. This milestone is a testament to what can be achieved when people and organizations come together to make electrification a reality. Big thank you to our valued partners, Treehouse and Mitsubishi, who generously covered the cost of electrical work and equipment to help make this installation a reality.
“We’re thrilled to be working with our partners at Elephant Energy to make the implementation of clean energy technology, like heat pumps, more accessible. Through our joint efforts, we hope to make the home electrification process simpler and enable homeowners to embrace sustainable technologies with greater ease and affordability.” says Eric Owski, Founder and CEO of Treehouse.
As we look ahead to our next 1,000 installations, we’re inspired by the collaboration and shared vision that got us here. Here’s to a future where every family has access to the benefits of clean, efficient technology – and to building it together.
We’ve seen it – and been through it – countless times. You want a heat pump, contact eight different contractors, half of them won’t install heat pumps, and the other half give you quotes that vary by thousands of dollars, likely without the rebates or incentives factored in that can substantially reduce the cost. It’s overwhelming, and leaves you feeling uncertain about what to do next.
We’re here to change that, and make transitioning to a climate-friendly home easy. That’s why we built a new tool: a free calculator that estimates the upfront and operating costs of installing a heat pump or heat pump water heater in minutes. It’s designed to take the guesswork out of the process, giving you clear, straightforward pricing to help you budget for electrifying your home and understand what to expect – no surprises, just transparency.
How It Works
Our calculator simplifies what would otherwise be a long, complicated process. Instead of asking you for tons of technical details, we ask you a few simple questions like your square footage, ductwork, and weather sealing and take over with our expertise in heat pumps from there.
How We Built It
We didn’t just guess at the numbers. Our team drew from the extensive database of heat pump installations we’ve completed in Colorado and Massachusetts over the last two years. We use real data from homes similar to yours – factoring in house size, heating needs, and even local temperature history to provide the most accurate estimate possible without talking to you first.
Let’s break it down:
Sizing Your Home: We’ve built the calculator using our expertise in building science and system sizing. Your home is matched to one of our 800+ completed installs, with careful attention paid to square footage and heating needs.
Energy Usage: We use a simplified home heating model to estimate how much energy is needed to keep your home comfortable at last year’s daily temperatures, and then to get accurate costs for energy usage. Our tool integrates with local weather data and adjusts based on specific conditions, like whether you’re at a higher elevation or experiencing extreme temperatures.
Rebates and Incentives: The calculator also pulls in all available rebates and incentives for you – including tax credits and income-based incentives. We make sure to show you the maximum savings you may qualify for, taking the hassle out of finding these benefits yourself.
Assumptions: While we’d love to give you an error-free quote down to the dollar without talking to you, technology isn’t quite there yet. The calculator was built on standard assumptions like your floor height, insulation quality, how many windows you have, and the efficiency rating of your existing furnace.
Let’s be real. Heat pumps aren’t cheap, and neither is your time. That’s why we built this calculator: to save you hours of research and back-and-forth with contractors, so you can have a general understanding of what home electrification should cost you.
Ayla and Otto Maher, enjoying their newly-installed Mitsubishi cold climate heat pump.
It started with freezing rooms. Then an oil tank leak. Then countless contractors who said heat pumps won’t work (and boy, were they wrong).
Breaking Up With Fossil Fuels
Tim, a high school math teacher, and Amelia, a public health researcher at Boston University, purchased their home in 2017. The house, which “hadn’t had a lot of love recently,” was a fixer-upper, and the couple, with the help of Tim’s handy dad, tackled various DIY projects. However, it wasn’t until things started breaking down that they seriously considered updating in a bigger way.
“Our oil tank started leaking,” Tim recalls. “That was the impetus to change.” The couple decided to take a leap and fully electrify their home, starting with the installation of a heat pump in mid-2023.
When Tim and Amelia contacted their local contractors and HVAC professionals about installing heat pumps, they were met with serious doubt about heat pumps even working in Boston (and cold climates in general). Luckily, we were there to swoop in and show them the magic of heat pumps – through rain, shine, snow, and ice.
The Heat Pump Effect
After working with Elephant Energy to install their heat pump, Tim and Amelia immediately noticed the perks of breaking up with fossil fuels – both in comfort and efficiency. “The precision of control is something that has been super nice,” Tim explains. “When we were on our oil furnace, there were rooms that were freezing and rooms that were boiling. It felt like you had to change clothes just to move to a different part of the house. Now, each room is exactly the temperature you want it to be.”
What can we say, heat pumps make quite the impression! Shortly after the couple installed their heat pump, they decided to fully electrify their home. They started by replacing their broken water heater with a heat pump water heater, followed by an EV charger and an induction stove.
The Elephant Difference
In Massachusetts, incentives and rebates play a key role in making home electrification affordable and accessible. Tim and Amelia were able to save $10,000 upfront and $2,000 in tax credits, thanks to Mass Save® and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
“The help with the incentives was key. When buying our EV, it felt like there were incentives we were missing out on and we would have to find them ourselves. With Elephant, they worked with us to make sure we got all the Mass Save money”.
Tim and Amelia’s electrification journey is a great example of how switching to sustainable home energy solutions is possible even in cold climates like Boston. Their journey shows that with the right support, you can enjoy a comfortable, efficient, and climate-friendly home.
Interested in starting your home electrification journey?
Homeowners want to do the right thing for the planet, and it’s much easier to do the right thing when the economic case is clear and compelling. Through our partnership with WattCarbon, we’re offsetting the cost of installing a heat pump at home by monetizing the carbon reductions that stem from that decision. The result? Making the climate-friendly choice even more financially appealing for homeowners–and creating a unique mechanism that further accelerates the pace of the energy transition.
The Vision: Paying It Forward for the Planet
Imagine installing a new heat pump and cutting your carbon footprint while also getting paid for doing so. Too good to be true? Not at all.
While fossil fuel firms profit from pollution, we believe in financially rewarding decisions that avoid future emissions. By directing corporate spend on carbon credits into residential home electrification, our partnership aims to democratize access to sustainable technology. The cost of installing a heat pump at home is supplemented by corporate investment, making the green choice no-brainer.
Here’s how we do it: Homeowners who choose heat pumps over gas furnaces receive an additional $500 rebate at installation, thanks to energy attribute certificates (EACs) funded by clean energy buyers on the WattCarbon platform. This rebate is on top of other available incentives already at the federal, state, local, and utility levels—often amounting to thousands of dollars in aggregate.
The Impact: Rapid Decarbonization in our Backyards
From certificate purchase to installation, our timeline is rapid, translating to tangible carbon reductions almost immediately. Each heat pump installed represents a significant cut in emissions over its lifetime, in almost all states cutting emissions by up to 93% when compared fossil-fueled alternatives.
Investing in building electrification projects not only delivers immediate environmental benefits but also makes heat pumps even more accessible and also enables corporate buyers to make a direct impact in the communities where they operate, instead of investing in forward-looking carbon credits abroad, such as reforestation.
The Bigger Picture: Why This Matters More Than Ever
It’s critical that we close the affordability gap so heat pumps can scale. By closing the gap, we can incentivize more people to make the right climate choice now, during this decisive decade when every single heat pump matters.
Take the US, for example. Roughly 20% of our annual carbon emissions come from heating, cooling, and powering households. And yet, we’re installing 20,000 brand new gas furnaces every day. These appliances will generate carbon emissions for the next 15–20 years. What if we could stop those installations from ever happening, and replace them with clean electric technology instead?
The WattCarbon x Elephant Energy partnerships do exactly this, providing homeowners with savings up front, offsetting the upfront cost of a new heat pump, and accelerating the deployment of clean energy technology.
A Word from Our Founders
McGee Young, CEO of WattCarbon, emphasizes the innovative nature of our partnership: “Turning off the emission tap isn’t just ideal; it’s necessary. Working with us ensures that investments immediately support new clean energy projects.”
DR Richardson, Co-Founder of Elephant Energy, adds, “We can’t just SaaS our way out of the climate crisis. Decarbonization requires real assets, in addition to software, and innovative business models to support deployment; and that gets lost so many times in the decarbonization conversation where real world infrastructure can be so hard to incentivize. It requires aligning incentives in ways that haven’t been done before, and WattCarbon is doing a fantastic job of pioneering this space.”
Looking Ahead: Continuing the Charge
Our joint efforts don’t stop here. We’ll continue to use innovative financing mechanisms to drive capital towards the energy transition, and accelerate progress by making climate-friendly home upgrades like heat pumps even more accessible and the clear choice.
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Eager to make more climate-friendly choices? Check out our tool, Your Electrification Roadmap®. A few simple questions will get you a personalized plan for a sustainable home. Together, we can make choices that truly make a difference.
If you’ve heard about heat pumps, you may have also heard some rumors: about how heat pumps don’t work well in cold climates, how they are expensive to purchase and operate, and maybe even how heat pump technology is too new for the risk of adopting it in your own home.
We’re here to tell you…
Not everything you hear is true!
We’re here to bust some myths.
Let’s dive right in, shall we?
Myth: heat pumps don’t work in cold climates
Busted! This one is our favorite to debunk, hands down. You could say we’re the experts on it, heck, we wrote the ultimate guide for it! Let’s dive into all the reasons why this myth is simply that.
Enter, the cold climate heat pump
Did you know that there are air source heat pumps specifically designed for cold climates? They’re not much different than a traditional heat pump, except they’re built to produce more heat at lower temperatures than non-cold climate rated equipment. While they look similar to a heat pump you might see in a warmer climate, the specially designed internal components are where the magic happens. This allows cold climate heat pumps to operate down to very low temperatures — as low as -20°F!
Even in the cold climates like New England and the Colorado Front Range, heat pumps are rockin’ and rollin’, keeping homes comfortable all winter long. Their efficiency, rated by something called the Heating Seasonal Performance Factor (or HSPF), can operate at a 10 or greater, meaning they’re transferring much more energy than they consume (and that’s what keeps you warm and comfortable in the cold winter months).
Still don’t believe us? Check out the data we gathered about our fleet’s performance during a brutally cold snap in the Denver area.
Myth: heat pumps cost more to operate than furnaces
Busted! There are, of course, costs associated with installing a new HVAC system. But, when you consider the robust incentives available to offset that upfront cost plus the ongoing operational savings (not to mention the quality of life improvements – we have been told by more than one customer their heat pump was “life-changing”) you have yourself one smart investment.
Ready to learn more?
Heat pumps are more efficient than gas-powered furnaces
When it comes to energy efficiency, heat pumps take the win on functionality against their gas-powered counterparts. Heat pumps in general are much more energy efficient than traditional HVAC systems. Why? Because heat pumps use electricity to move heat, rather than creating it by burning fossil fuels.
The efficiency of heat pumps is measured by the Coefficient of Performance (COP), which compares the heat output to the energy input. Heat pumps can have a COP greater than 1, meaning they can move more energy as heat than the electrical energy they consume. Traditional heating systems, such as gas furnaces, typically generate less than one unit of heat for each unit of energy consumed, making their COP less than 1.
So, what does all this mean? Heat pumps are using less energy to heat your home, which in turn can lower your energy bills. Importantly, you won’t see all these savings in the same season. We generally find that our customers see the most savings during the summer months. More on that later!
Total cost of ownership
Let’s say you’re in the market for a new HVAC system and that’s how you stumbled upon this blog post. First, welcome! We’re so glad you’re here. Second, you may be wondering “but what is this all going to cost me?”
Good news for you – we’ve got some handy numbers at the ready.
Upfront cost:
Air source heat pump
Gas furnace
Central/window unit air conditioner
Upfront Cost
$10,000- $25,000*
*Before rebates, which usually range from $2,000 – 10,000
$4,000-$8,000
– $4,500-$15,000 (central) – $300-$800 (window)
The plus of purchasing an energy-efficient heat pump is all the upfront savings made possible by rebates and tax credits (available from the Inflation Reduction Act as well as alongside state, local, and utility rebates).
Operating cost:
Okay, so we know there are great incentives available to offset your installation cost. What about actually running the heat pump?
Here’s some data that can give you a sense — for a test run in Maine (brr, talk about cold winters!), the average cost for different heating systems looked like this:
Heating System
Annual Cost
Heat pump
$1,862
Natural gas furnace
$2,536
Electric baseboard
$5,118
Oil furnace
$5,302
It’s worth noting that there are a lot of factors that can change these numbers – think the efficiency of the heat pump you install, the fuel and electricity prices in your area, and if you’re in a temperate or cold climate. For example, mild climates will definitely have lower operating costs than super cold ones.
Alongside this, there are other important factors that affect the cost of operating a heat pump, including the size and layout of your home (the bigger, the more expensive) and if you’re taking good care of your heat pump (cleaning your filters, calling for maintenance twice a year).
All in all, we generally see our customers saving about $250 per year, and sometimes way more (over $1,000), for those switching from more costly fuel sources. Erin, below, switched from baseboard electric heat.
“I was paying about $300-$500 monthly for electricity in the winter, and adding the heat pump cut my bills in half.” – Erin D., Denver customer
Want to see the exact math for your home? You can do a three part calculation as laid out by Shrink That Footprint.
Of course, when you work with experts (like us), we can model the savings you can expect to see so that you’re going in eyes wide open. Click here to get started!
While this is a high-level summary, it’s important to think about the total cost of ownership for your new heat pump, not just the immediate cost. The cost savings from the up front purchase combined with the lifetime savings from choosing an energy-efficient heat pump (and, the other non-financial benefits like super quiet, even heating) all deserve consideration.
Myth: heat pump technology is too new to be trusted
Busted! We don’t need to burn stuff anymore to stay warm, to cook our food, to drive our cars…it’s simply not necessary in 2024 (and beyond)!
Heat pump technology is tested, tried, and true
You may think to yourself, “if heat pumps are so awesome, why am I just hearing about them now?”
There are a few reasons that could be.
First, it shouldn’t surprise you that the big oil and gas industry doesn’t want you to know about heat pumps. Just as gas lobbies are paying influencers to use gas stoves in their cooking videos, they’re also pushing negative campaigns about heat pumps all over the world. Wild, right?
Second, heat pump technology, while it’s advanced greatly over the last ten years, has been around for longer than we’ve been alive. The technology behind heat pumps is actually over 100 years old. The first heat pump was built by Peter von Rittinger in 1856 while conducting experiments to use water vapor’s latent heat to evaporate salt brine. From there, heat pump technology advanced quickly, and in 1945, John Summer built a full scale water-source heat pump. Following that Robert C. Webber heated his home with the first electric heat pump in 1948. The rest, as they say, is home comfort history!
The advancements of building science and compressor and control technology mean heat pumps have taken center stage in the world of HVAC. For the past two years, heat pumps have outsold gas furnaces in the United States. Pretty cool, right?
Wrapping it up
Heat pumps are a smart piece of technology you can install in your home to incorporate cost savings both upon install and through the life of the product. They work fabulously in cold climates and guarantee a healthier, more comfortable climate-friendly home. The myths…have been busted.
Ready to upgrade to a climate-friendly home? Join us in building a brighter future by electrifying everything, starting with homes. Your choice today shapes our collective tomorrow!
