

There’s no official “cold climate” standard for heat pumps just yet. (See our heat pump buying guide for additional advice on what to expect in the installation process.) Chances are, if you pick the right equipment for your home and your climate, make any recommended weather-sealing upgrades, and hire a reputable contractor with experience installing heat pumps, you should have a good outcome. But that’s more likely to happen only if you end up with a contractor unfamiliar with heat pumps. Of course, you’ll also find people who say that after spending tens of thousands of dollars on the installation, they’re left with a chilly home and sky-high utility bills.

“The performance has been great,” Traxler says.

He posted a video to YouTube, captured with a thermal imaging camera, demonstrating exactly that. According to Dave Lis, director of technology and market solutions at Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnerships (NEEP), air-source heat pumps can work as a home’s main heating system in almost any climate.ĭerek Traxler, a computer repair technician from Minneapolis, told us that after his steam boiler broke, he installed a heat pump that has kept his home warm for the past four winters, including during extreme cold snaps, when temperatures dropped as low as minus 29° F. While Consumer Reports hasn’t tested any whole-house heating and cooling equipment, including heat pumps, studies and real-world testimonials paint a clear picture that heat pumps can work. Many homeowners will save money with a heat pump, too. When properly installed, plenty of today’s air-source heat pumps (simply “heat pumps,” for the rest of this article) can keep your home toasty even amid bone-chilling cold, using far less energy than other types of heating systems. If you want high-efficiency electric heating in a cold climate, they say, you’ll need an expensive, hard-to-install ground-source heat pump, which absorbs heat from underground.īut that’s old news. They’ll struggle to keep your house comfortable even in a mild cold snap, the story goes, and they won’t run efficiently in that kind of weather, anyway.
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Since they work by absorbing free heat from the air outside your home, then transferring it inside, their job gets tougher when it’s chilly out.
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for decades, the conventional wisdom was that air-source heat pumps (the most common type, because they’re easy to install and cost less than ground-source heat pumps) don’t make sense in places where temperatures drop below freezing. While they’ve been common in the warmest parts of the U.S. critical clean energy technologies,” including heat pumps. In fact, President Joe Biden in June even authorized the use of the Defense Production Act to “rapidly expand American manufacturing of . . . Heat pumps are emerging as an important tool for helping to thwart climate change-not just in the south, but all over the country: They’re much more energy-efficient than traditional heating and cooling systems, and will almost always shrink your household carbon emissions-often substantially, especially when they run on clean sources of electricity.
