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What I spent 20 years at is finally starting to catch on with my industry....

TorontoBuilder

TorontoBuilder

Ultra Member
The HRAI, that's the Heating Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Institute of Canada never listens to Canadian Experts... not until some European comes to speak at a symposium about what their country did over the course of close to 3 decades does our industry start to wise up...

He didn't tell us anything new, or anything our experts haven't been saying for almost two decades. He also misrepresents what state of development we are in... we're past the first stage and past the stage where as Martin Forsén, the president of the European Heat Pump Association says ""Not even the HVAC [heating] industry is convinced it's a good idea to go in that direction" and may discourage customers who want to install a heat pump."

In fact, most contractors who try to discourage a homeowner find they've just lost a customer. Cold climate heat pumps flipped the switch... carbon taxes are now just an added incentive to shift to residential heat pumps.

The article is wrong about subsidies to incentivize switching fuels... NRCan knows this and they even had a fuel neutral policy towards incentives for the past 30 years. We learned that incentives are mostly providing free ridership to those who were going to upgrade anyway. We have incentives because it makes political parties look good not because it is sound economic policy.

The real barriers are trades training. We've always been limited in the number of trained contractors who can install and service heat pumps. The way to transition is regulations on efficiencies of equipment sales, training, and TOU electric rates. Fuel pricing and carbon taxes will do the rest.

How Sweden Electrified its home heating
 
increased EV adoption will help trigger TOU rates

One of our vehicles is an older Nissan Leaf. In one of the Leaf forums a guy from England reports that due to difference in TOU rates he's able to charge his Leaf off-hours, drive as needed, and then tap his battery to sell back to the grid during peak ours. On days that he doesn't drive far he claims that he makes a profit by charging off-hours and selling back during peak hours.

Waiting time for Heat Pump contractors to provide quotes is very long near Victoria.
 
In Ontario they dropped the 11pm to 6am rate to 2.7 cents so its already here, rich people charge their tesla's cheap while less off people are washing clothes at midnight just to get by.

curmudgeon said:
increased EV adoption will help trigger TOU rates

One of our vehicles is an older Nissan Leaf. In one of the Leaf forums a guy from England reports that due to difference in TOU rates he's able to charge his Leaf off-hours, drive as needed, and then tap his battery to sell back to the grid during peak ours. On days that he doesn't drive far he claims that he makes a profit by charging off-hours and selling back during peak hours.

Waiting time for Heat Pump contractors to provide quotes is very long near Victoria.
Click to expand...
 
So it costs more money to generate electricity during the day? Is the water in the hydroelectric storage lakes lighter during daylight so it makes less power? This type of artificial pricing drives me nuts.

It’s like listening to experts tell us we need to unplug our phone chargers so we’re not wasting power, but the pet food shop across the street can light it’s business sign 24/7/365 with no concern.

On the heat pump topic, cost me $23k (before rebates) in September to remove my electric water heater, forced-air gas furnace, and replace with on-demand gas water heater, electric heat pump/ac, and secondary gas furnace. Prior to conversion, $40/mo gas, $160/mo electricity bills. Now $100/mo gas, $80/mo electricity. A bit of a savings. The house is much more comfortable, and never run out of hot water. Also got $10k in various rebates. And as @TorontoBuilder mentions, I would have done the install whether the rebates existed or not.

Completely apolitical. It made sense to do the HVAC upgrade, and having the incentives just meant it was a bit easier on my wallet.

My house is very well insulated, we had a power outage for two days in January and the house only dropped three degrees. If BC Hydro decides to impose TOU pricing I‘ll just set up the HVAC system to run AC only during off-peak hours.
 
whydontu said:
So it costs more money to generate electricity during the day? Is the water in the hydroelectric storage lakes lighter during daylight so it makes less power? This type of artificial pricing drives me nuts
Click to expand...

think of it this way, if the utility provider has to provide say 24gw of power through the whole day, 1gw of power per hour, they need a infrastructure (generators, sub stations, transmission lines, etc) capable of providing 1gw or power per hour....say you need 1 million $ worth of infrastructure to provide 1gw per hour.....thats 1 million$ worth of infrastructure

Now if the demand is still 24gw per day, but 20gw of that power is needed between 8am and 6pm, your infrastructure now has to be capable of providing 2gw per hour......now you need 2 million$ worth of infrastructure to provide the same 24gw, and of course with infrastructure there is maintenance, repairs, replacement

So yes, it is actually more expensive in a way, as the demand grows with the higher adoption rates of electric cars, to produce that power during the day hours

On to hydro electric power...

To throw a wrench into things....many hydroelectric providers (Manitoba hydro for instance), throttle hydroelectric production WAYYYY back during the evening and purchase power from other sources (coal, LNG turbines) to allow the reservoirs to replenish .... maybe in the future they will rely more heavily on solar production during the day and hydroelectric during the evening, who knows
 
I will admit that Swedish manufacturers are far ahead of Canadian ones when it comes to developing HVAC equipment to match the housing typologies commonly found in their cities.

They're also light years ahead in district heating based on widely distributed low temperature water loops where the heat is condensed and concentrated to between 10-20c by central geothermal heating plants and then packaged heat pumps to serve individual dwelling units.

Like this example of a manufacturer using propane as a refrigerant

www.pv-magazine.com

New propane heat pump for district heating

Swedish manufacturer Qvantum has developed a 6 kW heat pump for apartments connected to district heating systems. It uses propane (R290) as the refrigerant.
www.pv-magazine.com www.pv-magazine.com
 
Main problem with heat pumps in Alberta is that it is way too cold most of the winter to use them. Also AC use is rather limited to maybe few weeks a year. Most houses do not have AC installed and use portable AC or small AC installs.

So a heat pump would have rather limited use / benefit for most folks. Unless of course someone comes up with efficient heat pump at -20C.
 
Tom Kitta said:
Main problem with heat pumps in Alberta is that it is way too cold most of the winter to use them. Also AC use is rather limited to maybe few weeks a year. Most houses do not have AC installed and use portable AC or small AC installs.

So a heat pump would have rather limited use / benefit for most folks. Unless of course someone comes up with efficient heat pump at -20C.
Click to expand...
That is no longer true as of the past decade. With each [passing year we are getting more distributors and contractors who can actually provide you with one.

Cold climate heat pumps are being used successfully in the high arctic even. And in a ton of custom homes in Calgary and Edmonton.
 
TorontoBuilder said:
They're also light years ahead in district heating based on widely distributed low temperature water loops where the heat is condensed and concentrated to between 10-20c by central geothermal heating plants and then packaged heat pumps to serve individual dwelling units.
Click to expand...
The West Hills development area to the south of us has that type of Community Energy Service - https://ssl-bc.com/energy-service-2/ In addition to geothermal, they also harvest heat from the local ice rink facility.
 
curmudgeon said:
The West Hills development area to the south of us has that type of Community Energy Service - https://ssl-bc.com/energy-service-2/ In addition to geothermal, they also harvest heat from the local ice rink facility.
Click to expand...
Yeah, AB has several start up companies exploring abandoned oil wells for geothermal district energy plants that will then have multi-use industrial or agricultural complexes around them... as well as a few residential retirement developments.
 
Take it for what it's worth, but When I lived in The Pas, Manitoba, almost 20 years ago both instructors at the college had heat pumps, that's a much more severe winter climate than Alberta, and they worked well as far as I understood
 
phaxtris said:
Take it for what it's worth, but When I lived in The Pas, Manitoba, almost 20 years ago both instructors at the college had heat pumps, that's a much more severe winter climate than Alberta, and they worked well as far as I understood
Click to expand...
The difference between today's cold climate heat pumps and the best heat pumps we had 20 years ago is that below a set temperature the old heat pumps needed to bring on supplemental heating in the form of electric resistance heating coils, which made the overall efficiency plummet. Modern cold climate heat pumps do not require any supplemental heating even in The Pas.
 
TorontoBuilder said:
The difference between today's cold climate heat pumps and the best heat pumps we had 20 years ago is that below a set temperature the old heat pumps needed to bring on supplemental heating in the form of electric resistance heating coils, which made the overall efficiency plummet. Modern cold climate heat pumps do not require any supplemental heating even in The Pas.
Click to expand...

Yea I would imagine they are much improved from then, even with the inefficiency of the old style both said they had drastically lower heating costs

So I could imagine in a New build where feasible it would be well worth the expense with the ballooning costs of energy
 
phaxtris said:
Yea I would imagine they are much improved from then, even with the inefficiency of the old style both said they had drastically lower heating costs

So I could imagine in a New build where feasible it would be well worth the expense with the ballooning costs of energy
Click to expand...
Only 10 years ago I was going to build my retirement home with a large geothermal ground loop system that cost thousands of dollars to install.

Now I can replace that with air source cold climate heat pumps and put the loops in the foundation floor to have radiant floors. Yes I'm pretty high on this tech
 
TorontoBuilder said:
Only 10 years ago I was going to build my retirement home with a large geothermal ground loop system that cost thousands of dollars to install.

Now I can replace that with air source cold climate heat pumps and put the loops in the foundation floor to have radiant floors. Yes I'm pretty high on this tech
Click to expand...
Can you provide any numbers for savings in energy cost against the higher costs for the initial installation plus (possibly) higher maintenance costs?
 
kstrauss said:
Can you provide any numbers for savings in energy cost against the higher costs for the initial installation plus (possibly) higher maintenance costs?
Click to expand...

Each case must be done on an individual basis starting with an heat loss and gain calculation of the structure, including with a blower door depressurization test.

I have a detailed fuel cost calculator that compares energy costs, financing costs and the total cost of ownership that I'd typically present to architects, builders and the people having the home built.

In these scenarios the cost comparisons are made based on a host of energy efficiency upgrades to determine how quickly the incremental capital costs are recoupled. I'd typically compare baseline equipment of the minimum efficiency permitted by code, against hybrid system with air source heat pump and back up gas furnace, and against a ultra efficient cold climate heat pump alone.

Because these cases are always based on having a mortgage it always pays to go with the better system. The monthly energy cost savings may not seem huge in some cases, but that cost is always lower than the small increase to the mortgage payment attributed to the incremental cost of the upgraded system, and the upgrade costs typically pay for themselves inside of 5 years, so beyond that the carrying costs for the home decrease even further.

I've not seen a case where it did not pay off, because I am very careful in selecting the equipment choices presented, and I also ensure that the envelop is improved to a point that permit the choice of certain sizes of equipment that are higher efficiency. We design systems that include energy monitoring technology and validate our results and troubleshoot potential issues.

When you finance retrofits you can do similar. But I would never work with clients who wont undertake major building envelop upgrades prior to any HVAC system retrofit.

If you were insterested in an actual case I'd be happy to advise you

of course it is important to note, we are looking at conditions where the current equipment is at or near the end of life cycle... or new construction, so you already have the cost to install a system to bear. So the costs we're looking to recoup very quickly in order to achieve higher long term (~20 yr) cost savings are only the incremental costs.

The other aspect of doing this right is to know and have relationship with contractors who are not part of the "incentives profiteering" aka those who know the purchaser is getting thousands in incentives so they mark up their prices much higher than normal.

Retrofits we'd perform calculations to assure that the incremental cost of financing was financing c
if the incremental cost is recouped within 5 years, and mostly very worth while if the payback is when the systems last 20 - 25 years.
In the case of retrofit
 
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