By David Dodge, GreenEnergyFutures.ca
We’re calling 2024 the year of the heat pump. It’s fast becoming the number one method of heating in northern countries like Norway and in 2023 we found them in net-zero homes, water heaters and clothes dryers. The reasons are pretty simple: heat pumps are the most energy efficient way to heat and cool a building and it’s easy to run them emissions-free by powering them with renewable energy.
As Jean Marie Robert of NAIT explained in our Heat Pumps 101 episode:
“For every one unit of electricity, we’re able to get something like four units of heat back into your house. In cooling mode, it’s even more efficient. We may be able to get seven units out of your house for every one unit of electricity. We call that 700% efficiency.”
Yup, heat pumps are crazy efficient and as we found in our story
343. EnergieSprong Deep Energy Retrofit transforms 1951 home to net-zero heat pumps were everywhere. Sandercock’s 1950s home is now heated by a 400% efficient air source heat pump, his water is heated by a heat pump and his clothes are dried by a heat pump.
Ok, so that’s in a home retrofit, but what about a 175-unit building?
Architect Michaela Jones used ground source heat pumps also known as geothermal to heat her Salvation Army 175-unit supportive housing complex in Edmonton.
What made this project so amazing is it only cost a few percentage points more to make it net-zero ready and it’s going to save the charity millions on heating and cooling.
“For electricity and natural gas, we’re looking at $240,000 a year of savings. And over the lifetime of the building, say 25 years, that’s about 6 million dollars,” she told Green Energy Futures in our 2023 story.
Heat pumps also played a starring role in two amazing home retrofit projects we produced stories on in 2023.
Jena and Jesse Tufts retrofitted their 1950s home to net-zero using an air source heat pump. They utterly transformed their old home into a dream home and even used recycled insulation to beef up the values in their walls to amazing levels. Check out the story and video below.
And then also from the Changing for Climate series came this story on Darcy and Darren Crichton who retrofitted their 1960s bungalow to net-zero DIY! When they began their project 20 years ago they had no idea what net-zero even meant, but by doing careful research and undertaking the right retrofit projects in the right order they transformed their family home to net-zero.
The piece de résistance came in 2021 after the heat dome brought temperatures of 37 degrees Celsius to their northern City home in Edmonton, Alberta. In their final project they added a ground source heat pump (geothermal system) to their home which no heats and cools their home very efficiently.
It’s becoming quite clear that the heat pump is the answer to low or no emissions home heating and cooling and that we are going to be seeing a lot more heat pumps in our future.
I was also smitten by the heat pump in 2023. We spent the previous winter in our wood-heated cabin which was very romantic, but not so practical. We added a Tosot heat pump last summer that is rated to -35C and we now supplement the heat with wood. We’ll let you know how this turns out in a future episode.
Lastly, we wanted to share our episode on ground source heat pumps, an episode we call Geothermal 101.
Best of the holiday season to everyone.