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Comment by BatchJob | Hacker News Reader

And they all suck. All i have to do is deprioritize my needs and pretend all things are equal and I can sleep well at night in my cold house, waiting to be able to use my car which is still charging while my wife burns my food on a bad stove.

Go take a hike.

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Or you could die of carbon monoxide poisoning while you're looking for a jerry can because you have to walk to the gas station because your car has no gas and you cannot fill it at home, but first your wife doesn't notice that the stove didn't ignite so the whole house explodes. At night, you welded the safety shut on the hot water heater, and despite the fire taking out the electrical, the natural gas is still running, so the water heater turns into a missile, takes out a passenger plane which crashes into an oil refinery, creating a poison gas cloud that takes out a neighborhood.

You somehow survive all this and are forced to work in a coal mine so they feed you in the terrorist prison you now live in.

To add insult to injury, they make you use whale-blubber lamps for lighting.

I’m continually amazed by how well the O&G marketing and propaganda has worked on people. It’s the only way I can explain comments like this

https://youtu.be/hX2aZUav-54

You are so conceited. I had to replace a heat pump system at great expense in my brand new house with a gas furnace so my family would not freeze in the winter. This was a direct tax on my home purchase for which the home builder was given tax incentives to install a useless heatpump and electric backup furnace which had an element the size of a kitchen toaster that if it ran enough to heat the house would cost a thousand dollars a month.

This is not Oil and Gas marketing. This is REALITY. Its the conceit of people who refuse to accept reality and their willingness to make everyone else suffer for their phony promises of saving the planet.

If you were to confront these lack of choices yourself you would get a chance to live in the prison you see fit for everyone else.

So you got a crappily installed heat pump / furnace and decided the entire technology is flawed based on this one point of anecdata. Got it.

(Also wow does running your kitchen toaster really cost thousands a month? Maybe move somewhere where power company is not trying to gouge you?)

> Its the conceit of people who refuse to accept reality and their willingness to make everyone else suffer for their phony promises of saving the planet.

Sounds to me like you're the one unwilling to accept reality.

Have you watched the Don't look up movie?

There’s a challenge in that different heat pumps have wildly different performance characteristics, and they’re not widely understood by people. Some can’t heat effectively below 47 degrees F, others happily keep pumping out lots at -13 degrees F.

Even worse is that it seems most HVACs are totally incompetant when it comes to heat pumps too. Bunch of guys who closed the book after getting out of school and never bothered to learn anything new again.

I would be willing to bet OP got bent over by an idiot HVAC and now will never go back thanks to it. Meanwhile with a competent tech they would instead be here glowing about their experience.

Yeah, a lot of HVAC guys don’t install anything but the big chonky outdated single/dual stage domestic brands. I read this comment as he got one built in with the house, and unfortunately, since they tend not to be understood by buyers and therefore command any premium in the sale process, there’s not much of an incentive to install anything but the crappiest pump on the market. This happened to us, the last homeowners wanted to replace their old furnace right before selling, so they installed the lowest efficiency heat pump that’s legal to sell. It’s trash in cold weather. I DIY installed a cold weather rated mini split myself later, it’s incredible in cold weather, and sips power.

I went down a big rabbit hole when I installed it a couple years ago and made a little calculator to compare heat pumps based on the weather in your area and the pump temperature-efficiency curves: https://heatpushers.com

It needs some revisiting, though, I’m guessing half the links are broken by now.

My heat pump in upstate NY is doing great. Maybe you just had a bad one?

BTU's are BTU's regardless of their source. It sounds like your brand new house was not built to spec, or poorly designed. Any certified ASHRAE technician should be able to meet the required demand load with properly sized equipment. The consequences of fuel type should manifest in differences of up-front and ongoing expense, not comfort.

Haha I mean of course if you do shitty installs you’ll suffer but that’s also true with combustion-based appliances.

> my wife burns my food on a bad stove.

This reads like something from The Honeymooners.

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