Hidden behind all these words, the guy installs an air conditioner and then starts using it frequently and then complains that his energy usage is higher than before when he didn't have an air conditioner.
Using a heat pump in cooling + heating mode is not a drop-in replacement for a furnace like the author seems to imply, it's also an AC that comes along for the ride!
The actual title is "I made my home fossil-fuel-free. Why did my utility bills nearly double?", and the heat pump is part of making a home fossil-fuel-free.
That's why the OP is commenting that replacing a heater, with a heater _and_ an a/c, is a big part of why the bill will double.
heating + cooling > heating alone
That said, its also important to point out, that the author is in Berkeley, and electricity costs in California are among the highest in the US.
Three major utilities service pretty much the whole state (1/8th of the US population). Regulating them has been a major failure of the California democratic party controlled state governance. The CPUC is a major rant rabbit hole, industry capture is rampant.
Disclaimer: I say this being registered "no party" and considering myself left of most people.
Gavin's administration in particular has been extremely industry friendly, with a steady reduction in citizen/consumer protection in the face of ever increasing utility profits.
Ever since first seeing this article yesterday, I felt it was clickbait. This outcome was 100% known in advance. It's not new news in California that electric heating is more expensive than gas heating.
The conversion to heat pump was a great first step (and should also include increased insulation). The next step is battery and solar, in that order. Part of the affordability erosion in CA is the removal of net-metering credit for solar generation.
A battery that charges _from_the_utility_ off-peak, and is available to consume during the day, pays for itself faster than solar now! But adding solar in addition to the battery, completes an investment that pays for itself in about 1/2 to 1/3 of it's service lifetime.
I know several modest sized homes that generate all of their own electricity consumption, including charging EVs. In comparison, I don't know anyone with their own on-site natural gas production.
Electrification is the straightest path to energy independence, and from utility price gouging.
Rejection of electrification by the US right is one of it's biggest self-inflicted wounds (except for those that own petroleum companies).
People waste small fortunes on hvac stuff. I’m gradually coming to the conclusion that most homes just need more insulation and sealing and then a relatively inexpensive hvac system.
Same thing with solar panels, people will drop 40k on solar just to save $200 a month on electricity when insulation would have reaped half the savings for 1/10th the price.
I think you're seriously underestimating the cost of redoing insulation. If you have an unfinished attic and your walls are fine, then yeah, laying down some new fiberglass is easy, but otherwise, it basically requires gutting all the walls and top floor ceilings. The cost (here anyway) is significantly more than $4k, and the disruption to daily life will make it feel double.
Totally agree! The first month I had my house I had large amounts of insulation blown into my attic. I also reduced various heat sources by getting the most efficient LED lights, PC parts etc. The other big thing that helps is keeping the upstairs much warmer during the day and only keeping the downstairs where my office is frigid until the evening when I go upstairs.
My all time high electric bill so far was ~$220 for a 2500sqft house when it was 110+ outside for most of the month and I was WFH and keeping the downstairs around 70.
I was really nerding out about solar panels and home batteries for a while and desperate to justify that toy, but I would barely break even before they failed or I needed a new roof. Start with insulation, it’s CHEAP compared to high tech options.
Absolutely correct. Given that they're in California and the house wasn't new construction, we can pretty safely assume that it was under-insulated compared to what's possible. Doing a proper audit and fixing air leaks and insulation is usually the most cost-effective improvement you can make to a house (getting it right to begin with is even more cost-effective, but lots of builders still don't know what they're doing).
As sibling notes, it can be invasive and disruptive vs. just replacing some appliances in a few days, but it's still more cost effective (and will allow your eventual replacement HVAC system to be sized smaller, netting additional savings when you do that).
Not surprising. There's a handful of states with severely perverse electricity markets and rates and the author lives in one of them. Results in Florida or Indiana or whatever will differ.
Though going from no A/C usage to frequent A/C usage as the author did is likely going to up your overall bill just about anywhere.
What a crazy world we live in. Instead of finally upgrading your electrical system to something that can handle the 5kW needed for a high end induction stove, you buy a device with a battery that will probably need to be replaced in a few years and might turn out to be a huge fire risk.
How is that cheaper than running a few meters of copper cable?
- Installing a battery powered stove is probably less than 30 minutes of work, and the electrician selling it makes a lot of money from the sale of the expensive stove.
- Running a new cable from the kitchen to the distribution board will probably take two hours or potentially even more if there is a lot of furniture in the way, but the electrician will make a lot less money because they can't sell the expensive device.
So I think the answer is that battery powered stoves are just a more profitable product to sell, so that's why electricians push them instead of traditional devices.
I live in TX and have gas heating my air, water, and food. Gas is CHEAP compared to electricity, my bills are like 1/3 in the winter. A big bonus is that the water heater and stove heat like 3x as fast than electric, saving me time. No more cold showers after my wife uses all the hot water.
And that’s compared to my electricity that’s much cheaper than in most states. My all time high electric bill was ~$220 for a 2500sqft house and that’s when it was 110+ outside for most of the month and I was WFH and keeping the downstairs around 70. I wanted to get solar panels, but couldn’t justify it because I would barely break even before they failed or I needed a new roof.
I do eventually want to switch to electric because I don’t like explosive gasses and their byproducts in my house, but in economic terms electric is a fail.
Are you sure about not breaking even with Solar panels? Here in Europe modern Chinese panels with 450 Wp can be bought for about 50 € a panel. These panels last 20 years without problems. Even just installing 5 of them will lower your electricity bill by a lot (and can be done by yourself if you have little knowledge of electricity).
It was 5-6 years ago when I looked, so it might be closer now. Panels definitely are getting much cheaper, but even back then most of the cost was labor to install it and semi-skilled labor has gotten much more expensive in the mean time. My average electric bill is probably <$150 because I use gas in the winter, so even saving 100% there’s a long payoff time.
I keep hearing of these magical lifetimes. I've had 2 different brands and multiple panels are taken out of the circuit because they degraded too much.
My neighbour has the same panels but never looks at the output. I told him to check them and he was shocked. How many others are there they simply don't check the output and keep spouting that panels have multi decade lifetimes.
I'm in my 13 year and with 10 kWp I'm still generating a maximum of about 8000 W on warm days (which lowers the efficiency). I don't know any neighbours or friends who have had to replace a module.
What what your time vs degradation? I see quite a few solar panels in my area showing up on Facebook Marketplace and other online classifieds that seem to be about 10 years old being sold for a "bigger system". But I'm curious if the real story is that straight forward? Are they significantly degraded? Did the controls or inverters fail, and the owner decided it wasn't worth the hastle? I don't know. The headline price seems attractive, but if they're only putting out 10% of name plate, not worth the effort to install.
It was so significant that one of the 2 strings, 6 panels each, simply shut off especially during peak hours because the inverter's minimal input voltage wasn't met (during peak voltage usually drops due to negative heat coefficient). 1 simply was broken and was bypassed by the.. bypass diodes i guess. And another was at a third. But again, the lower voltage was a much bigger problem than the input.
problem is, you can only measure this very well under load. So taking your multi meter to the place of sale might not say that much. `It might though for the really broken ones.
Wow, that is very expensive. Yeah, we're are having a second solar boom here, I installed a second small 2 kWp system on our garden shed for about 700 €. I'm adding a small 5 kWh battery on top so we can use all this generated energy.
Just one note because I don't think there is wide awareness of this: there are two kinds of electric stoves, and the induction kind is generally faster than gas.
For sure, but as I understand induction stoves are more expensive and you would need to throw out cookware and buy a compatible set that’s also more expensive. It’s really cool, but the poor masses won’t be adopting this kind of cooking setup for a while if it adds cost.
We got a really nice Bosch induction hob for 700€. I installed it myself in less than an hour (the hardest part was cutting the appropriate hole in the worktop).
All of our pots except one was compatible. You will only have problems with very cheap aluminum pans, or with some high end copper cookware. I don't know anyone who has copper cookware, so the problem for most people are their cheap aluminium pans and pots. You should probably replace them anyway. Most stainless steel, all cast iron or forged iron pans are compatible with induction.
Induction is pretty spectacular. It's a bit different than gas, but a good induction hob is both more powerful than gas on the high end, and much better at controlling temperature at the low end.
The only thing I dislike are the touch controls on most units, but I guess you can't have it all.
Not by a lot. At least here in Sweden the cheapest induction stovetop from a brand I somewhat trust is maybe $150 more than the cheapest ceramic stovetop from a similar brand. Once you move into the midrange, the price difference is virtually gone. As to cookware, unless you use mostly copper cookware, I found that virtually all my pots and pans were compatible.
If you're thinking about induction and want to test your pans, grab a magnet and touch it to the bottom of your pan. If it sticks, the pan will work.
I don't have an induction stove so I'm honestly not sure, but I have seen people say that the cookware thing is overblown because a lot of what people already have will work with induction. But I dunno, you totally might be right about that.
We just got an induction range and our long-time nonstick pan did not work with it. I couldn't figure out why the cooktop was turning off a few seconds after turning on until I switched to a cast-iron pan and saw that the cooktop worked as expected.
It worked great once it got going though. I don't think I'm going to miss gas.
My home in the US Northeast was renovated a few years back and we went from gas heating, cooking, and water heating to all electric (heat pumps for HVAC and water; induction for cooking). As part of the renovation, we added insulation and performed air sealing. Our bill has gone up significantly in the winter, despite the home being better insulated.
That said, I've heard gas costs have also increased recently, so I'd likely be seeing higher costs if we hadn't converted.
They take out a loan, splurge on high-end electric appliances, and then act stunned to discover that gas is cheaper than electricity. Maybe do a little math before going all-in on a “green” makeover, not exactly the picture of foresight.
Author lives in Northern California. Not the DC area. So was the cost double for just one month? What were the rates? Guessing around $ 0.30 /KHW and $2.25/therm? What was the heat pump HSPF?
Then you missed the $8,200 water heater. And that they needed a loan to buy all this stuff they didn’t need. And replacing a 2-year-old furnace.
I didn’t get to the part where (presumably, as they mention cooking with gas) they replace the stove, couldn’t take the poor financial choices and waste any more.
I assume these kinds of articles are rage bait for clicks.
Present a story (if it’s even true) of an outlandish situation as if it representative of something, but not outright saying it, leaving it to the reader to feel outrage, or schadenfreude, and then they send it to their friends to gawk at the idiocy, etc.
A common one is “we earn $300k per year but are only middle class and can’t afford to save for retirement”.
Hidden behind all these words, the guy installs an air conditioner and then starts using it frequently and then complains that his energy usage is higher than before when he didn't have an air conditioner.
Using a heat pump in cooling + heating mode is not a drop-in replacement for a furnace like the author seems to imply, it's also an AC that comes along for the ride!
The actual title is "I made my home fossil-fuel-free. Why did my utility bills nearly double?", and the heat pump is part of making a home fossil-fuel-free.
That's why the OP is commenting that replacing a heater, with a heater _and_ an a/c, is a big part of why the bill will double.
heating + cooling > heating alone
That said, its also important to point out, that the author is in Berkeley, and electricity costs in California are among the highest in the US.
Three major utilities service pretty much the whole state (1/8th of the US population). Regulating them has been a major failure of the California democratic party controlled state governance. The CPUC is a major rant rabbit hole, industry capture is rampant.
Disclaimer: I say this being registered "no party" and considering myself left of most people.
Gavin's administration in particular has been extremely industry friendly, with a steady reduction in citizen/consumer protection in the face of ever increasing utility profits.
Ever since first seeing this article yesterday, I felt it was clickbait. This outcome was 100% known in advance. It's not new news in California that electric heating is more expensive than gas heating.
The conversion to heat pump was a great first step (and should also include increased insulation). The next step is battery and solar, in that order. Part of the affordability erosion in CA is the removal of net-metering credit for solar generation.
A battery that charges _from_the_utility_ off-peak, and is available to consume during the day, pays for itself faster than solar now! But adding solar in addition to the battery, completes an investment that pays for itself in about 1/2 to 1/3 of it's service lifetime.
I know several modest sized homes that generate all of their own electricity consumption, including charging EVs. In comparison, I don't know anyone with their own on-site natural gas production.
Electrification is the straightest path to energy independence, and from utility price gouging.
Rejection of electrification by the US right is one of it's biggest self-inflicted wounds (except for those that own petroleum companies).
People waste small fortunes on hvac stuff. I’m gradually coming to the conclusion that most homes just need more insulation and sealing and then a relatively inexpensive hvac system.
Same thing with solar panels, people will drop 40k on solar just to save $200 a month on electricity when insulation would have reaped half the savings for 1/10th the price.
People just like buying gadgets.
I think you're seriously underestimating the cost of redoing insulation. If you have an unfinished attic and your walls are fine, then yeah, laying down some new fiberglass is easy, but otherwise, it basically requires gutting all the walls and top floor ceilings. The cost (here anyway) is significantly more than $4k, and the disruption to daily life will make it feel double.
Totally agree! The first month I had my house I had large amounts of insulation blown into my attic. I also reduced various heat sources by getting the most efficient LED lights, PC parts etc. The other big thing that helps is keeping the upstairs much warmer during the day and only keeping the downstairs where my office is frigid until the evening when I go upstairs.
My all time high electric bill so far was ~$220 for a 2500sqft house when it was 110+ outside for most of the month and I was WFH and keeping the downstairs around 70.
I was really nerding out about solar panels and home batteries for a while and desperate to justify that toy, but I would barely break even before they failed or I needed a new roof. Start with insulation, it’s CHEAP compared to high tech options.
Absolutely correct. Given that they're in California and the house wasn't new construction, we can pretty safely assume that it was under-insulated compared to what's possible. Doing a proper audit and fixing air leaks and insulation is usually the most cost-effective improvement you can make to a house (getting it right to begin with is even more cost-effective, but lots of builders still don't know what they're doing).
As sibling notes, it can be invasive and disruptive vs. just replacing some appliances in a few days, but it's still more cost effective (and will allow your eventual replacement HVAC system to be sized smaller, netting additional savings when you do that).
Yep. I’ve installed $700 ERV myself. Probably less than $400 if you omit NZ tax. Meanwhile people are dropping $10k on ducted heat pumps.
Same with 10kWp of solar. $4k in gear plus $700 for electrician. Easily half of paying someone else for full solution.
(Prices converted from nzd to usd).
Not surprising. There's a handful of states with severely perverse electricity markets and rates and the author lives in one of them. Results in Florida or Indiana or whatever will differ.
Though going from no A/C usage to frequent A/C usage as the author did is likely going to up your overall bill just about anywhere.
> $6750 for an induction stove with a battery
What a crazy world we live in. Instead of finally upgrading your electrical system to something that can handle the 5kW needed for a high end induction stove, you buy a device with a battery that will probably need to be replaced in a few years and might turn out to be a huge fire risk.
How is that cheaper than running a few meters of copper cable?
(Answering my own question)
- Installing a battery powered stove is probably less than 30 minutes of work, and the electrician selling it makes a lot of money from the sale of the expensive stove.
- Running a new cable from the kitchen to the distribution board will probably take two hours or potentially even more if there is a lot of furniture in the way, but the electrician will make a lot less money because they can't sell the expensive device.
So I think the answer is that battery powered stoves are just a more profitable product to sell, so that's why electricians push them instead of traditional devices.
> How is that cheaper than running a few meters of copper cable?
Unions
We have unions in Austria, and we don't have battery powered stoves.
If unions were the problem, you'd see a lot of individual contractors.
More likely the 110V means you need twice as much copper
2x35€ = 70€
I live in TX and have gas heating my air, water, and food. Gas is CHEAP compared to electricity, my bills are like 1/3 in the winter. A big bonus is that the water heater and stove heat like 3x as fast than electric, saving me time. No more cold showers after my wife uses all the hot water.
And that’s compared to my electricity that’s much cheaper than in most states. My all time high electric bill was ~$220 for a 2500sqft house and that’s when it was 110+ outside for most of the month and I was WFH and keeping the downstairs around 70. I wanted to get solar panels, but couldn’t justify it because I would barely break even before they failed or I needed a new roof.
I do eventually want to switch to electric because I don’t like explosive gasses and their byproducts in my house, but in economic terms electric is a fail.
Are you sure about not breaking even with Solar panels? Here in Europe modern Chinese panels with 450 Wp can be bought for about 50 € a panel. These panels last 20 years without problems. Even just installing 5 of them will lower your electricity bill by a lot (and can be done by yourself if you have little knowledge of electricity).
It was 5-6 years ago when I looked, so it might be closer now. Panels definitely are getting much cheaper, but even back then most of the cost was labor to install it and semi-skilled labor has gotten much more expensive in the mean time. My average electric bill is probably <$150 because I use gas in the winter, so even saving 100% there’s a long payoff time.
I keep hearing of these magical lifetimes. I've had 2 different brands and multiple panels are taken out of the circuit because they degraded too much.
My neighbour has the same panels but never looks at the output. I told him to check them and he was shocked. How many others are there they simply don't check the output and keep spouting that panels have multi decade lifetimes.
I'm in my 13 year and with 10 kWp I'm still generating a maximum of about 8000 W on warm days (which lowers the efficiency). I don't know any neighbours or friends who have had to replace a module.
What what your time vs degradation? I see quite a few solar panels in my area showing up on Facebook Marketplace and other online classifieds that seem to be about 10 years old being sold for a "bigger system". But I'm curious if the real story is that straight forward? Are they significantly degraded? Did the controls or inverters fail, and the owner decided it wasn't worth the hastle? I don't know. The headline price seems attractive, but if they're only putting out 10% of name plate, not worth the effort to install.
this was after 5 years
It was so significant that one of the 2 strings, 6 panels each, simply shut off especially during peak hours because the inverter's minimal input voltage wasn't met (during peak voltage usually drops due to negative heat coefficient). 1 simply was broken and was bypassed by the.. bypass diodes i guess. And another was at a third. But again, the lower voltage was a much bigger problem than the input.
problem is, you can only measure this very well under load. So taking your multi meter to the place of sale might not say that much. `It might though for the really broken ones.
I wish that were an option here. Used 200W or so panels are asking over $100 ea. It is pretty easy to be over $30k for a new 10 kW grid-tie system.
Wow, that is very expensive. Yeah, we're are having a second solar boom here, I installed a second small 2 kWp system on our garden shed for about 700 €. I'm adding a small 5 kWh battery on top so we can use all this generated energy.
Just one note because I don't think there is wide awareness of this: there are two kinds of electric stoves, and the induction kind is generally faster than gas.
For sure, but as I understand induction stoves are more expensive and you would need to throw out cookware and buy a compatible set that’s also more expensive. It’s really cool, but the poor masses won’t be adopting this kind of cooking setup for a while if it adds cost.
We got a really nice Bosch induction hob for 700€. I installed it myself in less than an hour (the hardest part was cutting the appropriate hole in the worktop).
All of our pots except one was compatible. You will only have problems with very cheap aluminum pans, or with some high end copper cookware. I don't know anyone who has copper cookware, so the problem for most people are their cheap aluminium pans and pots. You should probably replace them anyway. Most stainless steel, all cast iron or forged iron pans are compatible with induction.
Induction is pretty spectacular. It's a bit different than gas, but a good induction hob is both more powerful than gas on the high end, and much better at controlling temperature at the low end.
The only thing I dislike are the touch controls on most units, but I guess you can't have it all.
induction stoves are more expensive
Not by a lot. At least here in Sweden the cheapest induction stovetop from a brand I somewhat trust is maybe $150 more than the cheapest ceramic stovetop from a similar brand. Once you move into the midrange, the price difference is virtually gone. As to cookware, unless you use mostly copper cookware, I found that virtually all my pots and pans were compatible.
If you're thinking about induction and want to test your pans, grab a magnet and touch it to the bottom of your pan. If it sticks, the pan will work.
I don't have an induction stove so I'm honestly not sure, but I have seen people say that the cookware thing is overblown because a lot of what people already have will work with induction. But I dunno, you totally might be right about that.
We just got an induction range and our long-time nonstick pan did not work with it. I couldn't figure out why the cooktop was turning off a few seconds after turning on until I switched to a cast-iron pan and saw that the cooktop worked as expected.
It worked great once it got going though. I don't think I'm going to miss gas.
My home in the US Northeast was renovated a few years back and we went from gas heating, cooking, and water heating to all electric (heat pumps for HVAC and water; induction for cooking). As part of the renovation, we added insulation and performed air sealing. Our bill has gone up significantly in the winter, despite the home being better insulated.
That said, I've heard gas costs have also increased recently, so I'd likely be seeing higher costs if we hadn't converted.
They take out a loan, splurge on high-end electric appliances, and then act stunned to discover that gas is cheaper than electricity. Maybe do a little math before going all-in on a “green” makeover, not exactly the picture of foresight.
https://archive.is/WCYgP
Author lives in Northern California. Not the DC area. So was the cost double for just one month? What were the rates? Guessing around $ 0.30 /KHW and $2.25/therm? What was the heat pump HSPF?
People get tricked by heat pumps advertising CoP as "efficiency" and ignore the legwork to calculate BTU/$.
And nowhere to be seen, the figures of the kWh price for gas and electricity, which now have to run an AC they didn't have.
I stopped reading at 'we realized we needed air cooling and converted everything to electricity' ...
Then you missed the $8,200 water heater. And that they needed a loan to buy all this stuff they didn’t need. And replacing a 2-year-old furnace.
I didn’t get to the part where (presumably, as they mention cooking with gas) they replace the stove, couldn’t take the poor financial choices and waste any more.
I assume these kinds of articles are rage bait for clicks.
Present a story (if it’s even true) of an outlandish situation as if it representative of something, but not outright saying it, leaving it to the reader to feel outrage, or schadenfreude, and then they send it to their friends to gawk at the idiocy, etc.
A common one is “we earn $300k per year but are only middle class and can’t afford to save for retirement”.
Ugh, I don't know how I didn't immediately recognize it as one of those.
The Washington Post is about as credible as a tabloid at this point
The story is very likely to be true, it's just stupid
At one point, the Post wouldn't run stupid stories.
Well, they would, just fewer of 'em. And they'd generally be run for entertainment, rather than in pursuit of the owner's domestic agenda.
Sure, but consider the motivation for publishing it after Bezos has basically destroyed editorial control over the paper