Why Heat Pumps are now leaving people COLD

Fujitsu Halcyon in Boston - No fail. Worked for three years just fine!

Heat pumps are best for coastal areas where it can get really cold but rarely sub zero in Celsius cold.

I love pretending that a heat pump works below 35%. 1000 Gal of Liquid Propane in the back and my house is instantly hot on 1 degree Days.

Sir, thnx. A question for you still. What is a "high pressure lockout"? And could a defective thermostat caused the defrost board to show this code. My heat pump board is currently showing this code. The OUTDOOR unit DOES NOT, start up at all, in heating or cooling. There is 24v on the R and C terminals. In the "emergency" mode, I am not getting enough heat. It only heats up to 72degrees only, and runs all night. And never shuts off. This is a RHEEM system. 6yrs old. I am really frustrated now, because i am having all these issues at the same time. I am thinking the thermostat is mal functioning, then I think its the defrost board. then i think the heat strips has issues. I am a wreck with these issues. The indoor unit runs fine, but NOTHING from the OUT DOOR UNIT. I just can't figure it out. Hope you or any other can assist me.

I want manually operated heat strips

Think about it, it's been -40 Celcius in some part of Canada, so a heat pump is a no go but our liberal government actively try to ban all wood, propane, diesel and fuel oil, 100% insane. In my part it's been around -20 Celcius to -5 Celcius so regular resistance electric heating is alright. I'm a firm believer that every house should have the two followings options of a heat pump and a wood stove for when it gets under -10 Celcius and during power outage which happens a lot in my area.

My Senville works great in ND with no supplemental heat. ???

Here in northern Canada we just went through a few days of -41°C (-41.8°F) and our heat pump with its large buffer tank and supplemental electric boiler worked as expected, our house was perfectly comfortable and warm. I have to emphasize that we renovated and greatly improved the insulation and that is the key for any heating system. If the house isn’t well insulated then you’re just heating the great outdoors. Don’t blame the heat pump for poor insulation and air leakage, any heating system would have a difficult job keeping up then.

You spelled Seneville wrong....its spelled Senville...

Heating OIL is still the cheapest form of heat. Period.

heat pumps dont work

This is why you oversize for heating requirements with variable heat pumps. You can oversize for heat while not having to worry about short cycling for cooling. Also my 3ton system has a 2.0 COP at 0F. Mine had no issue keeping up with the heating requirements in an 80 year old house with aux heat off.

We installed 2 mini splits, and we use them most of the year in ME, but sometimes we run oil heat, but only on the coldest days. We don't find the electric bill to be too high.

I just moved to the gulf coast. My house here has "heat strips" aka, EMHEAT on the thermostat. When I got my whole house generator, that was part of the deciding factor to get a 26kw unit, everything in my house is electric so I needed the extra power to run it if needed.

I'm in SoCal, and we don't require supplemental heat here for heat pumps.

Heat pumps should only be used for cooling. Used as the only source of heat is a really horrible idea. IMO.

The bottom line is, heat is energy. No matter how you generate heat, it takes energy, and energy costs MONEY. Yes, some heating systems are more efficient than others, but all convert energy, (electrical, or chemical), to heat, and that costs MONEY, and the more heat you need, the more money it will you.

This all used to be true, but not 2024. A new generation R32 with special plated exchangers with new type of defrosting will allow useful >2.5 at -28C.

Running three heat sources in central Quebec. Heat pump (4 tonne lennox) until -6oC, oil below that and wood all the time!

Tell our Canadian government this ! They are trying to kill the fossil fuel industry and say the heat pumps are the answer. I guess they are counting on global warming to help out 😂

My wife and I love our heat pump, but we have a pellet stove to take that edge off and put that nice cozy heat in the house. Heat is all different, the 70 degrees that the heat pump makes on cold days is not nearly as nice as the 70 degrees that the pellet stove makes. Good video.

Why wouldn't you put insulation in a poorly insulated house? That's the first thing I did.

We have to use "emergency heat" which is heated electric coils to heat our house here in Montana, it seems that the heat pump can maintain the heat for most of the day but not warm up the house. Lennox ducted heat pump system. Great for cooling the house in summer.

He's using farenheit temperature units.

we in australia sydney hit 46c out side you getting -12c you so lucky.

Very good information, I was going to build a 24x26 Garage this year and the builder was going to use ceiling heater but i was thinking of a heat pump. Floor heat would be nice but is too costly for me and I would be washing my car all year round. This has me thinking again, perhaps it may not work so well as here in Canada we sometimes get down to -40

We always go three times higher than your cooling needs and that usually gives you that extra heat because the new heat pumps have a variable speed compressor so it's valves itself right in if you only need 12000 BTUs for cooling you put 36000 BTU unit and then you'll have enough heat in the heat pump cycle for the cooler weather it works every time you just got to weigh oversized it I've been doing this 50 years I will start on heat pumps when before they were popular

We just went through the polar vortex and stayed warm and toasty with our 3 minisplits. We live where it is super cold in the winter and super hot in summer. We are all electric. Electric bill averages 70-90 a month except in winter when it can get up to 150. We are thinking of getting a wood stove for supplementation.

I've had no issues with my Mitsubishi Hyper Heat mini split system as my sole heat source in winter. I'm in New York City so it's not super cold, but we just went through a week of not breaking freezing and were mostly in the 20s in the day and teens at night. The system kept us 67-70F without issue. My house is old but it's attached on both sides with newish windows. I will also say my friend in northern NJ installed Mr Cool for his cabin and it also worked very well by itself. I'd say you can do without a supplemental system unless you're in the coldest climates. Overall the system has been MUCH cheaper to run than the gas boiler it replaced.

Why not design a system where the outside unit is inside an extract air duct? The house is never that cold so the efficiency should be optimal all year long.

Great video about heat pumps and very timely. We recently installed a heat pump and connected our boiler as supplemental/aux. We are patiently learning how the system works. The fan runs allot longer compared to the old boiler because it does not provide the same heat output. Can you make a video on your thermostat configuration and settings. I think this is very important to understand. Great content, love the channel.

For as frequently as heat pumps fail you'd be crazy to not include some sort of backup heat

My woodstove is HOT down to -40. Real green heat.

I live in North Carolina, but do have electric coil supplemental (Aux) heat. There are 2-3 days per year where it gets very cold (single digits), and am grateful my builder decided to add supplemental.

This video is quite misleading. This is not a heat pump problem, but a regulatory/sales problem. What's not mentioned in the video is that the hotter the air or water your heat pump needs to output, the lower its capacity is. In other words, if at 25 F temperatures outside you need really hot air/water to keep my house warm, you could have an issue as the heat pump will be less powerful this way. In the video insulation is mentioned as the solution for this, but he forgets the more obvious solution: higher capacity convectors. I simply installed really high capacity radiators (you can also opt for water based underfloor heating). This way I only need the heat pump to supply 95 F water when it's well below freezing. My system is water based, but if you have an air based heating system you can use a higher capacity water based duct heater. In the end you should still have a (preferably built in) backup heater that uses resistive elements, but from a costs perspective it makes sense to design the whole system that you only need to use the backup heater during extreme cold.

If you are around or above the 39th parallel across the United States heat pumps are a joke.
For the most part these things are not being installed in new construction with heavy insulation in the walls.
They are retrofitted into older homes so you do not have a need for HVAC ducting.
You will never get your home anywhere at or around 70° if it's very cold outside.
Very cold meaning 30 or below.
Why do you think the big pushed to get rid of natural gas?
Once everyone is electric the rates will go through the roof! And you will have no choice but to pay it, hell they are even want to get rid of fireplaces and wood burning stoves.
And everyone watching this vid need to look up the pricing of those hybrid ducted systems.
It's ridiculous!

Extreme weather highlights the limits of refrigeration technology.
For a heat pump to work, it has to be able to bring the temperature of the outside coil well below ambient temps. If it's 50° F that isn't a problem. If it's 10 below zero, then that unit is going to struggle. You'll get the least heat when you need it most.

It seems these air to air heat pumps have advanced very little since the 80's, because the same problems with them exist. Of course they're less effective in cold weather, that''s physics!

The grid almost failed in Alberta when we went down to -30 celcius and below. The Amber alert system send out a message to turn off all nonessentials. If we were all on electricity, people would die in droves.

So your heat pumps less efficient for a week out of the year, but it’s so much more efficient on the other 51 that you still come out way ahead. Just because it’s not the best choice in every scenario doesn’t mean it’s still not the best choice overall.

Sounds like your installer didn't size your system properly/only looked at AC loads and not heat... Mine is an R22 unit from 2004 in a 1970s home and it keeps up into the teens.

I wish heat pumps (and air conditioners) had a easy way to add a ammonia heat exchanging loop to the refrigerant lines so you can use a unmetered water source for a heat / cooling source.

SE Pennsylvania. About 1400sf ranch house. Full basement. House is well insulated and tight. Heat pump is used for summertime cooling and heating to 20f. Below that we have a oil fired boiler, our emergency heat source selected via the thermostat. The boiler was installed originally to heat 2 rooms in the basement , baseboard hydroponics, and heat pump backup.
We also run only oil heat if we go away for an extended time in the winter. That way if any snow accumulation on the compressor does not matter.
And the original electric backup is on a manually selected switch just in case the boiler dies or heating oil get very expensive. As it is we use maybe 130 gallons of heating oil in a year mostly for winter trips. We fill the tank in summertime, usually 125 gallons.

Wow people are ridiculous. Heat pumps work fine! CAPACITY is the problem, people don’t know how to size them correctly. A small sized AC unit is being asked to cool air from an average of 90*F to 68*F, while a small sized heat pump is being asked to heat the air from -20*F to 70*F, are you kidding me lol? CAPACITY is the problem, not the heat pump. Try an INDUSTRIAL sized heat pump for your home, it’ll keep your home toasty in ANY cold weather, but be prepared to pay tens of thousands for it. So since nobody in their right mind will buy an industrial sized heat pump for a single family home, places like Maine NEED a wood stove in conjunction with a heat pump. A wood stove will bring the house to 70*F immediately, and the small sized heat pump will maintain it until the next night. Wash, rinse, repeat. It’s the ONLY way when using a small heat pump in cold climate. Otherwise buy an industrial sized heat pump like the buildings in NYC which cost big time money.

One other problem I have experienced is mice moving into the outdoor unit and setting up home in the control module box. Chewed all the wiring harnesses and ruined the main board, check your unit for openings big enough for mice and cover them somehow!

My daikin unit has a COP of ~3. something down to around 5F. Since it doesn't get that's cold here it's pretty good!

Wish geothermal wasn't so dang expensive upfront cost!

Creating a society were Cascade failure is more and more likely especially through the electric grid. A Cascade failure is a bad thing and we should be building a lot more resiliency and remember efficiency at any cost isn't necessarily a good thing