[to11mtm]

Heat pumps are becoming more common but almost every home or apartment I have lived in used Natural gas for heating and maybe a wall mounted or central A/C unit.

Some homes in Detroit don't quite have modern HVAC ducting, instead using 'water circulated' heating. Theoretically they can 'cool' but IDK if I remember seeing that in a commercial/municipal building/school or if that was just a fever dream. That said, some buildings will use a 'shared steam' system (My college had Shared Steam for all the class buildings, IIRC lots of buildings in downtown Detroit have one.)

But those examples are in a specific part of the rust belt.

Up in the far NE (i.e. Maine, NH, etc) the remote areas use 'heating oil' and that may be harder to change; putting NG lines in would be unprofitable, and when the power goes out a heat pump is going to be, relatively, larger capacity drain than a blower on whatever's burning the heating oil. Only way to mitigate that would be an even larger generator, or an even larger bank of batteries.

Which is a long way of saying, 'it depends'. And Heat pumps are 'relatively new' commercially. People won't be driven to replace until the cost of a repair vs cost of a new heat pump unit 'makes sense' financially (i.e. it's possible just getting a heat pump in may be 'cheaper' than whatever repair is needed within a certain timeframe... but to make the determination, someone first has to bother to do the math.)

[Filligree]

> Heat pumps are becoming more common but almost every home or apartment I have lived in used Natural gas for heating and maybe a wall mounted or central A/C unit.

A/C units are heat pumps. Are you saying yours can’t do heating as well?

We just installed an air-air heat pump at the cottage up in northern Norway. 4kW of heating (or cooling) for 800W of power, all on an off-grid solar system. :)

[saltcured]

Yes. A very common setup in the US would be a central, forced air system with a natural gas furnace and an air-conditioner in the same circuit. Until quite recently, the air-conditioner would not be reversible.

I think these were very common in new residential construction from perhaps 1970 to 2010. These would then be seen in a lot of the housing stock people would be reporting about. There also tends to be inertia where the same type of system just gets repaired or replaced rather than switching a house to a new system design.

Earlier than 1970, you might less central forced air. That might be radiators or electric resistive heaters in individual rooms, as well as some retrofitted window air-conditioning units.

After 2010, you start to see more heat-pump options but they still were not that common.

First, lots of residential construction is housing tracts done all by one builder and they make penny-pinching "standardized" decisions rather than deferring to buyers to make decisions about their unit. It was cheaper for them to install gas furnaces.

Second, the local energy market made natural gas heating quite affordable and this diminished the monetary value of potential heat-pump efficiency. You might not make up for the extra system cost in reduced energy bills. Also, a gas furnace would likely have a longer operating life than an equally powerful heat pump.

Lastly (chicken-and-egg), the lack of a strong market meant that the available heat-pumps were niche products. There were fewer options, higher costs, and few installers who knew how to deploy them properly. There was also less clear reliability info for a consumer to decide whether it was a worthwhile choice, and FUD from early adopters who encountered those under-skilled installers.

[to11mtm]

Another concern in many cases is the lack of reliability of overall power thanks to our provider.

Last year I bought a couple 'battery backups' because the day or two without power was causing spoilage/etc.

Not saying a NatGas furnace is easy to hook up in that case, but the overall 'usage' of a battery slew or generator is going to be far better if it's a winter outage.

Cause, let me tell you, DTE -sucks- and I know people who have gone up to a week without power with medical need for it in very populated areas. (oh bonus points there was a live wire at least once.)

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This truly is the biggest 'missing link' to adoption in my area. We all dealt with the Northeast blackout, we have the dumb stuff DTE does where even some gas stations have generators and walk state gouging lines, so until they can easily 'hook up a power source to their car to charge in an emergency' (i.e. to go up north to the cabin or on a mini-vacation till it all blows over) without it being a PITA and dependent on the state's power infrastructure working...

but I digress;

> Lastly (chicken-and-egg), the lack of a strong market meant that the available heat-pumps were niche products. There were fewer options, higher costs, and few installers who knew how to deploy them properly. There was also less clear reliability info for a consumer to decide whether it was a worthwhile choice, and FUD from early adopters who encountered those under-skilled installers.

Between the Influencer market, The 'SEO Optimized Marketing Video', and every other marketing technique, no player has found a way to just get some competent installer teams in a network? FFS based on my recent experience with furnace repair, it would be easy for them to try and vertical it.

As I mentioned in my original post there's a lot of parts of the US where people do even worse things than natural gas, due to the general lack of reliability of service lines, or abhorrent cost to install reliably. Those places still need heat when the power's cut in a nasty storm and they are days/weeks down on the roll.

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I wager the reliability of the US power network and maintenance SLAs thereof are the biggest hurdle to mass adoption of heat pumps vs natgas/etc.

At the same time I'll note that NatGas -heating- is, last I was aware, still more efficient than CGCC->Heat Pump in my area. Happy for alternative info as we may need to shop soon.