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…
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.
Modern heat pumps work well down to -20F. If it’s that cold I don’t want to live there.
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.
> requires quite specialist install.
It's basically the same exact install.
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.
If your only space conditioning load is air conditioning, you don’t need to have a reversing valve and defroster.