It's been great, and I've often thought that it would be great to get a second one for my bedroom at the very back of the house. Not only would that remove the need to run a loud, inefficient window air conditioner in there in the summer, but I figured between the two of them, they could handle heating and cooling the ground floor for 90 to 95 percent of the average year--all but the very coldest winter days and nights. Unfortunately, the rebate program running at that time offered pretty meager rebates for second units, so that remained a wistful fantasy.

Fast-forward to a few months ago, when I got a card in the mail from Efficiency Maine that, translated from the polite-quasi-government-agency marketing dialect, basically said, "Hey, are you poor? If you can prove it, we'll hook you up with a free heat pump water heater."

Well, it so happens that I am and I can, so now I have a heat pump water heater. This nifty device heats water by cooling the basement a bit, which in my house's case means the oil-fired heating boiler no longer has to do it. Since I burned, no joke, $700 worth of fuel oil last summer just to heat the domestic hot water loop, this is good. As an added bonus, it sort of automatically dehumidifies the basement in the course of operations.

Fast-forward a bit more, and another card from Efficiency Maine arrives in the mail. This one says they've changed their home heat pump rebate program. Before, they were trying to entice people to get a first heat pump as a supplement to their existing heating system and thereby reduce their fuel costs. Now, they want to incentivize making heat pumps the primary heating and cooling system for homes where that's possible. You know--like I've spent the last three years thinking I could probably do if I had another one?

Anyway, long blathering preamble aside, a crew from the vendor that sold me the first one came back today (well, yesterday now) and installed another one just like it at the opposite end of the house.

Against all expectations, thanks to a revised rebate program and a generous grant from... well, my late grandfather, ultimately, via my father... I now have no reason to burn fuel oil unless the temperature outside is below -20 °F, which, stereotypes aside, really doesn't happen all that often around here.

However! Efficiency Maine is a quasi-state agency, which naturally means the dream could not be accomplished without a bit of silliness, to wit: under the terms of the rebate program, homeowners accepting the rebate for purposes of "whole-home" heat pump heating, like me, must allow the installers of said heat pumps to disable the house's existing heating system.

Someone at my heat pump vendor told me this next part, so take it for what hearsay is worth, but with the understanding that there is physical evidence here in the house for parts of it:

As originally written, this language called for the existing systems to be removed or irreversibly disabled, but--perhaps unsurprisingly--virtually no one was willing to go along with that. Not only would that involve damaging the infrastructure of the home in a lot of cases and reducing its real value in all cases, there are those aforementioned few days a year when it's too cold for air-source heat pumps to do anything.

Faced with the absolute wall of objections this requirement raised, the people in charge backed up and compromised: the existing system can stay, but the heat pump installers must lock up the controls (in most cases, including mine, that means the thermostats) such that they cannot be used by the occupants.

Which means before they left, the guys who installed my second heat pump had to put my boiler thermostats in thermostat jail, like my home is a motel room or something.

Which still leaves open the question of those really cold nights in January, except... have you noticed?

It turns out that here in Maine, as I understand it, it's illegal to prevent the owner of a home from operating said home's various parts. So they locked my old thermostats up in plastic boxes... but they had to leave the keys with me.

This probably makes at least a little sense in homes with, e.g., children who are old enough to work a thermostat without authorization but not old enough to pick a lock, but for someone who lives alone, it's just a weird little bit of bureaucratic slapstick, and I appreciate it as such. :)

Anyway, our goals are ultimately aligned, because I too want to burn as little fuel oil as possible henceforth--not so because I'm worried about my Carbon Footprint, per se, as because the stuff costs more than fucking gasoline these days.

It's funny how these things go. When I was a kid, electric home heating was the Wave of the Future, and my father designed the house he built for our family in 1979 with electric baseboards everywhere--just in time for electricity rates to skyrocket around the turn of the decade and make actually keeping the house warm with those things cost way too much. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, turning on the brand-new electric thermostats we had in each and every room of the house was strictly forbidden except for the one in the bathroom. We burned wood in a stove in the living room, and another one in the basement to keep the pipes from freezing, and the house was never truly warm in winter until my junior year in high school, when Dad finally caved in and had an oil-fired hot-air furnace and some ducts installed.

(As an aside, do you want spiders in your home? I mean, like, a lot of spiders? Then what you need to do is rely on a couple of wood stoves and store your whole winter's worth of firewood in your basement. Boy howdy! You will have all the spiders you ever wanted and more. This is also a great strategy if you want to have back problems from an early age, 'cause a hundred pounds or so of that stuff has to get upstairs to the stove in the living room every single day somehow!)

Of course, that was just straight-up resistive electric heating, which is woefully inefficient. Now mini-split heat pump technology has reached a point where it can heat a reasonably sized home at very reasonable expense once you get past the initial setup costs, just in time for heating oil prices to go nuts, and the pendulum swings the other way.

Mind you, the electric utilities aren't sleeping on this trend; they know about these initiatives as well as anyone else, and they're already before the state utilities commission asking for clearance to hike their rates way up this year, because we can't let people get a break, now can we? But, as we have already seen in this impromptu essay, in order to stay warm in this part of the world, we have to burn one bridge at a time. :/

Anyway, on a purely personal level, I'm looking forward to the absence of that window AC this summer way more than any of that fiddly adult math. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

And yeah, it was installed more or less just in time for the local energy company to (a) say they had to hike rates, because they were going to go bankrupt if they didn't and then where would everyone be? and (b) post record-breaking profits for the third year running. A trend which has not subsided.

My current home has an old* Frigidaire central AC system, which we are carefully keeping going as long as we can because -- surprise! -- the refrigerant it uses is banned now and the only option should it ever leak is a complete replacement, which is haha-ouch levels of expensive.

(* old means it was installed sometime after 2014 but before 2019; we've not had much luck finding out exactly when)

When-not-if the AC gives up the ghost we're going to go with a heat pump setup and glorious zone control (right now it's one zone for everyone, very democratic but also annoying because the house layout means some of us freeze while others sweat). Hopefully that'll be after we get solar installed. Which is also eye-wateringly expensive. Le sigh.

--sofaspud
--that reminds me, I need to go check the filters again

The mind boggles.

-IA.

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