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Comment by aidenn0 | Hacker News Reader

Anyone know what sort of electrical requirements there are for these? We currently have a gas furnace and gas range. My electrical panel is full (we used up the last of it installing 220V for the clothes dryer), and the furnace is on the opposite side of the house from the electric panel, under a different roofline.

I'm going to at some point get an electrician in to look at things and see what the options are, but my house just isn't wired for it currently.

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Assuming your home has 200 amp service you should be fine. Typically if your panel is out of space and more circuits are needed, you'll need a subpanel installed (just a smaller panel that handle some of your circuits). Alternatively an electrician may just recommend you upgrade to a bigger panel. Either way most of your costs are likely going to be on the labor side.

If you have AC, this replaces the AC and so uses that breaker. If you don't have AC you need space for a breaker in the panel - but this is easy to get (add a sub panel - $500)

The real question is what kind of service you have. If the power company cannot deliver enough power then you need more power and this will cost you at best $4000 to replace your panel, and could be in the tens of thousands depending on what your power company wants.

If you have lighting circuits that previously were incandescent but are now all LED, you might be able to combine some of them on a single 15 amp breaker.

You don't need space in the panel as clearly you already have a circuit breaker for your existing air handler. It will be a bigger line though, my house in Portland got a central heat pump and handler that wants 40A.

I would not put it past the people who wired this house to have shared circuit for the furnace blower with the bathroom right next to it, but we'll see.

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