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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

This is talking about cold-climate heat pumps. A $200 window AC isn't going to heat your house when it's way below freezing outside.

$20k USD is insane though. I live in Ontario and we paid $12k CAD (pre-government subsidy) for a modern heat pump with a backup high efficiency furnace for when temperatures dip down to -40 or lower.

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True. We have natural gas and an existing steam radiator setup though, for the two months a year window heat pumps can't keep up. The upfront investment alone would heat my house for 10-20 years.

Honestly, just piling more insulation in the attic and doing an energy audit will probably put the ROI out another 10+ years...

I'm hoping the newer window units that are being rolled out to the NYC market will be good enough to put downward pressure on the outrageous prices in the installation market. Or maybe I'll just dedicate a weekend to DIYing :P

There’s another alternative: a mini-split. Larger than a window unit, with a refrigerant lines you run yourself but with the actual refrigerant pre-charged inside the unit, so you don’t need to handle it yourself (which usually requires a license).

Mini-splits tend to be much cheaper than full installations.

2k NZD to install minisplit vs 160KWh per winter month to heat my bedroom. Thats about $150 in power or 16 yrs to pay itself at COP 5. Or install 1 additional $130 solar panel to make about 650 KWh per year.

Makes sense for living room tho.

Oh you live in New Zealand! Where I live (Canada) if you don’t heat the entire house then the pipes freeze and burst and then the whole house floods.

I do heat house main (using hp) just for comfort (and because it’s cheap). And I come from further than saaskwatch so I know what freezing pipes mean haha.

My point tho is - hp’s are not panacea in my use case.

Heat pumps are not inherently expensive though. It depends on how competitive (or not) your HVAC industry is. Sounds like New Zealand has issues with this (probably due to being a small market).

High cost of labour is what screws us here in NZ. Tons of cheap heatpump from china sans tariffs and pretty much every house is required to have one.

I’d imagine similar in Canada. Either way whenever we discuss energy we should clarify where we post from since circumstances differ wildly.

I looked into the precharged DIY option and the lengths just didn’t work out for what I needed in my space. I ended up paying a licensed installer C$12k to put in a three head system (two conventional, one ducted), and then a separate guy $5k to do the ducting for the bedroom level.

It would have been nice to do it as one, but the HVAC firm didn’t want to get their hands dirty with my wacky ducting plan, and the duct guy wasn’t licensed to charge the refrigerant lines.

The systems where you need to get a epa license are cheaper. The license is appearently easy to get.

The license is a trivial obstacle in the US. Study for an hour or two and take an unproctored online exam.

Similar for me, also in Ontario. I got a three zone mini split this year that I’m hoping can cover most of the shoulder seasons and keep me from using the gas boiler, though it remains to be seen if that’ll actually pan out; so far the kids have complained that their rooms are a lot less evenly heated when it’s the heat pump running rather than the rads.

Actually its probably most efficient way because you have best control. That said having whole house ducted you also get benefit of fresh air via ERV (arguably more important than heating).

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