[torpid]

I live in an old furniture factory converted into lofts. LEED certified of course, with mini splits instead of forced air in each unit. This is in the midwest.

For the past 11 years, every season it's failed to maintain minimum temperature of 68 degrees when it hits below 5 degrees outside, or maintain cooling in the summer. Another adjacent building built 2 years after this one with the exact same setup, same story. The complex had resorted to providing residents temporary space heaters up until this year where now they are prohibited by the city from using it to maintain minimum temps thanks to changing the code.

The sheer amount of costs associated they've dumped into the maintenance of this mini split system, along with the electricity costs (electricity is included with rent) is mind boggling and certainly will offset any gains.

[jrockway]

Emergency heat was under-installed. In the midwest, you have to have it, and it will suck down a ton of electricity for the handful of days a year you need it. Being entirely reliant on mini-splits without resistive emergency heating is a very strange choice, and it's not what heat pump advocates are recommending.

The idea behind heat pumps is to eliminate the need for the natural gas distribution infrastructure. As the infrastructure ages, more pipes will crack (emitting greenhouse gasses, not to mention blowing up), and the cost will go up. Meanwhile, more renewable electricity is coming online, driving the cost down. (It is a much harder problem to replace every gas furnace in the US versus replacing every power plant in the US. That's why the process is starting early with "hey, maybe you don't want to replace your furnace".)

Right now, it probably doesn't make a lot of sense to have a heat pump for the average midwestern house unless you have a pretty big solar installation. But in the future, the day will come where "we're going to pipe explosive gas into your house" is simply not done anymore. That will come in the form of gas companies not being able to maintain their infrastructure at the prices they charge, declining fossil fuel reserves, international demand to lower emissions, etc. It's not a crisis today, but today is not a bad day to start looking towards the future.

(I'm looking forward to replacing my gas stove with an induction stove. CO2 levels are through the roof whenever I cook to the point I have to open windows. I don't need to be breathing all of that.)

[torpid]

We have natural gas running into the building but not for the residents. All the first floor commercial tenants, and the hallways have the luxury of forced air. Just the apartment units that are cold.

There's several apartments with broken mini split head units, and last I heard the other adjacent building, they've been working to connect the apartments to the forced air ducts in the hallways they think will take the load off.

[justin66]

> Being entirely reliant on mini-splits without resistive emergency heating is a very strange choice, and it's not what heat pump advocates are recommending.

If you'd followed the topic long enough you'd know that what the heat pump advocates are recommending is suffering. It sounds like the OP's building has that covered.

[waynesonfire]

> it's not what heat pump advocates are recommending.

sure seems like someone is. could it possibly be the heat pump salesmen? the idea behind heat pumps is to sell heat pumps.

In the event you're cold, maybe you should get a furnace too. But that wasn't part of the sales pitch. Regardless, there are now two appliances you have to maintain. Tell me again how much money this saves?

[icehawk]

The builder of the apartment complex likely just undersized the unit, they'll do this with the normal kind of heat pumps-- air conditioners-- too, and hope its not so undersized that it becomes an actual problem.

[jrockway]

I rented someone's condo circa 2004 that did this with the air conditioning. Hot summer day? Just warm air coming out of the AC. (It was the kind where the cooling is done centrally and you just have an air handler in your unit.)

Now that I think about it, that happened in both apartments I lived in in Chicago. I remember going for a bike ride one summer afternoon with a friend. Got home, AC didn't do anything, so I went to the grocery store and bought a bag of ice, poured it in my bathtub, and rolled around in it until I was numb. I was cold the rest of the day. Very effective but do the math correctly when you install building-wide air conditioning systems.

[icehawk]

Yeah, I had a similar issue, and had to solve it by purchasing a portable AC to supplement the main HVAC.

[NewJazz]

Tell me again how much money this saves?

Who said that was the goal?

[clhodapp]

Aren't space heaters and emergency heat essentially the same thing? It seems strange for the city to ban space heaters when they really ought not to be worse than any other resistive heater

[jackson1442]

I imagine the ban on space heaters refers more to their fire risk, since emergency heat would be permanently installed in a location where there’s not any flammable materials but a space heater can be placed right next to any number of flammable things.

[torpid]

It's one step better than people turning their stoves on.

And hilariously, if too many people artificially heat their apartments, it actually crashes the system somehow because if too many zones in the mini split have heat, it flips to AC mode.

[jjeaff]

People do dumb things like put a space heater on their bed or under a shelf full of papers. With heat strips, the resistance portion is built in.

[lazide]

They’re exactly the same efficiency (100% electrical power to heat), with the caveat that space heaters tend to be more of a fire danger as they’re temporarily connected.

Resistive baseboard heating is the permanent option.

[icehawk]

I've had the same issue with an apartment complex, the AC it could never properly maintain <80F during a summer day.

The issue was that builders didn't properly size the AC unit for the amount of heat it needed to reject in a 5th floor apartment when it was 100F outside.

> or maintain cooling in the summer

Here's the key phrase.

This isn't an issue with a heat pump. They just undersized the unit.

[Whatarethese]

Sounds like some pretty poor planning. Modern heat pumps including the ones that I'm familiar with work down to around -5F. They aren't very efficient obviously at that low temp but mine also has a resistive backup that fires up if needed.

[kccqzy]

OP said "for 11 years" in their post. So I assume they have a unit that's at least 11 years old. Not really comparable with a modern unit.

[torpid]

This building opened 11 years ago and I've been a tenant since then. The HVAC is 2013. Each floor has ~20 apartments and each floor connects to a rooftop unit. The hallways are forced air and stay toasty, it's just the apartments that are on mini splits.

[worik]

What are "mini splits "?

[karaterobot]

A split system has two parts, an indoor air-handling unit (the thing on the wall you point the remote at) and an outdoor compressor, connected to each other with a hose. Mini- because it's small.