Air conditioners nowadays can and should be bought as reversible heat pumps. It adds nothing to the purchase price and it replaces gas heating as a much more efficient way to heat a building.
We should be installing heat pumps everywhere. Power consumption may go up in summer but would go way down in winter as efficiency is greatly increased. Unless your point is that poor people don’t deserve heating any more than they deserve cooling…
Last I checked a heat pump is considerably more expensive than an air conditioner. And a regular air conditioner can probably only heat when the outside is not freezing.
I would actually want to get a heat pump but it's basically prohibitive. Would be nice to replace them with a "cheaper" air conditioner unit.
Hm, doesn't look marginal to me. A heat pump is like 5X-10x more costly and requires quite specialist install. An air conditioning unit is pretty easy to install by normal technicians.
> A heat pump is like 5X-10x more costly and requires quite specialist install.
When I shopped heat pumps, the actual unit was about 1.5x the cost of an equivalent air conditioner, and after installation the difference was even less.
> power consumption … would go way down in winter as efficiency is greatly increased
Not sure where you live, but in my experience living across the USA, I don’t think switching all heating to heat pumps in winter would reduce electricity usage. Most homes heat with propane, fuel oil, kerosene, or, in places like NYC, steam. There are certainly some homes out there with electric element heating but they are so expensive to run that they’re not very common.
It might be better for emissions if we used renewable energy to generate all of that power. But we don’t right now.
They are more than 100% efficient until you reach stupidly low temperatures; in which case, then you can break out the furnace or whatever. Or put on a blanket.
We should be installing heat pumps everywhere. Power consumption may go up in summer but would go way down in winter as efficiency is greatly increased. Unless your point is that poor people don’t deserve heating any more than they deserve cooling…