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Heat pumps twice as efficient as fossil fuel systems in cold weather, study finds
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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Technology
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Makes sense. Heat pumps are one of the few heating systems that can achieve greater than 100% efficiency. (energy in vs total heat output)
As long as you can keep the evaporator above the evaporation temperature of your compressed refrigerant, you're golden. Burried lines are excellent for that in colder climates, but the space for it isn't always easy to find.
The coldest temperature ever recorded in the UK is -27. That's right around the inflection point for where heat pumps become less efficient than electric heaters. Until the gulf stream fails, the UK is pretty safe to use heat pumps everywhere.
So yeah, going 100% air-source heat pump if you're area regularly spends time around -30°C (-22F) might not be the best idea. Though even the last report you cited said it might be 1.5-2x as efficient as resistive heating. And that Site 1 with bad COPs was because they manually lowered the fan speed...
There are vanishingly few people who live in areas with weather consistently below -30C. I've been seeing that kind of concern trolling all over the place in the past year or so, and they always have the same song and dance about low efficiency in extreme cold - technically correct, but taken as part of the bigger context, so niche as to be practically irrelevant. Yeah, if you live in Yakutsk you won't want to rely only on a heat pump. Big fuckin' deal - the other 99.5% of people on earth can benefit greatly.
Edit: I wouldn't be susprised if this is the exact same guy I once argued with on Mastodon, actually. He was German too.
Get a heat pump with resistive (electric) defrosting, not one that defrosts by running like an AC.
But only for the 4 weeks a year you spend in unusually cold weather, the other 48 it's more efficient.
It's not like truly arctic places are a reasonable application but the overwhelming majority of our population lives south of Quebec and north of Wellington. So it's not a relevant point, everyone in the Arctic can just use resistive heating or burn fuel, and if we get everything else on heat pumps we reduce our enegy use by a factor of 2-3 regardles.
Sure, for a few days a year it might get as bad as resistive heating. How horrible! So you don't get 3.2x total throughout the year, you get 3.1x. It's a non-issue.
The Guardian is a UK publication.
I'll chime in here since I own 2 heat pumps and live in a cold climate (often below 20C). Our house is heated with 100% electricity and after installing heat pumps our power bill dropped by about 18%. That includes all electricity, not just heating, so the gain in heating efficiency was very considerable.
"Generally" is the wrong way to approach this. What you should be looking at is the specific capabilities of the actual system that you are considering installing. Some of them can go much colder.
If the Mitsubishi FE18 isn't efficient in your climate... then don't buy that unit. Simple.
If it's really cold where you are... then you could consider a ground source heat pump instead one that uses air as a heat source. The ground doesn't get anywhere near cold to have efficiency issues no matter where you are in the world and ground source heat pumps don't cost all that much... though they do require a bit of digging.
Also, if your heat pump is inefficient for a couple really cold weeks a year... oh well. You're still coming out ahead because it's very efficient the other 50 weeks a year. It's not like they stop working at extremely cold temperatures, they just produce a bit less heat than you might like for the amount of power consumed. Maybe they're "only" 80% efficient instead of 600% efficient... you know what else is 80% efficient? Heating with gas.