this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
124 points (97.7% liked)
Asklemmy
44183 readers
1255 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I like the idea of heat pumps for efficiency, but I fear I would be like you. I'm in a mild climate and my (gas heat) winter utility bills are so low already I have a feeling a more efficient heat pump would actually cost more to run.
A few years ago I created a spreadsheet where I can plug in electric and gas prices. It shows me which is the cheaper option to heat with. And year after year despite my heat pump being ~3x as efficient as my gas furnace the furnace has been hands-down cheaper to run. So I just leave the thermostat on Aux all winter. One day I suspect it will flip but that hasn't happened yet.
My perfect world would be solar and batteries and a heat pump install. Free power and heating.
Unfortunately or fortunetly depending on how you look at it, both gas and electric is relatively cheap in my neck of the woods so it would take forever to pay for itself.
I went down the solar rabbit hole a year or two ago, unfortunately my house is oriented in a crappy direction and coupled with a bunch of old-growth trees there was no scenario where I would even break-even in the 20 year life expectancy of the panels. Maybe some day that will change.
Like you said though, I'm in the same boat where electric and gas are both quite cheap here.