You’ve probably heard the pitch for heat pumps: They can cut greenhouse gas emissions by more than half compared with traditional gas-powered HVAC systems. They’ll save you money because you’ll pay less for energy. And, thanks to the tax credits passed by Congress in 2022, they’re more affordable than ever. What’s not to love?
Based on my experience switching to a heat pump this summer, that pitch may gloss over some important points.
One muggy Monday morning in July, I noticed the vents in my house in Washington, D.C., had ceased their usual reassuring, cooling whoosh. An urgently summoned repairman delivered grim news: My HVAC system was shot and would cost thousands of dollars to fix — if it was fixable at all, given its ancientness. Better, he advised, to replace the air-conditioner and furnace altogether. A second opinion, then a third, yielded the same verdict.
I tried to stay positive: Maybe this was my chance to get a heat pump. As one expert put it to Wirecutter, the product review site owned by The New York Times, this month, the devices are so efficient that they’re “like magic.”
The call to reduce household emissions resonated especially strongly for me. My wife and I live in an old house, and our appliances include a gas-powered stove, a gas-powered water heater, a gas-powered barbecue and even a gas-powered clothes dryer. I increasingly felt like I was on the wrong side of history.
What’s more, I have a very specific job at the Times: I write about the challenges of adapting to a warming world. I can’t pretend to be blind to the ramifications of unabated emissions, of lifestyle changes not taken.
This was my chance. I insisted on a heat pump. I couldn’t wait to get a heat pump
Making the switch
My wife and I sought quotes from a half dozen companies. Intriguingly, most of them warned us away. It would require rewiring our basement. It might require us to replace the flue in our chimney. (It’s complicated.) They said it wouldn’t keep us warm enough in the winter, or it would break down faster than a traditional HVAC.
I waved these concerns away. So the salesmen moved to cost: A new gas-powered furnace plus A.C. would start at about $12,000 from a reputable-seeming company. A heat pump would be more: anywhere from $14,500 to $20,000.
That extra $2,500 or so for a heat pump gave me pause. Perhaps I should get more quotes, or haggle further? But a heat wave had descended on Washington, and the temperature in our house climbed past 80 degrees Fahrenheit, then 85, then 90. We borrowed more fans from neighbors, setting them up around our home like buzzy plastic talismans, trying to ward off the heat spirits.
But fans only get you so far. On the third day without A.C., headachy and underslept, we moved out, shuttling between friends’ basements. It was time to make a decision.
A week after we lost our A.C., my wife and I became the owners of a heat pump made in Mexico, by an American company called Lennox International. It consists of a box that sits outside the house and another box inside. The price was $14,540. It’s almost as much as we spent on our first car.
Given the environmental benefits for a heat pump, perhaps it’s churlish to complain about the holes in our basement walls that were cut by the installation team to run wires from the electrical panel to the furnace room. (Fixing those holes added another $500 or so to the cost of the project.) It may also be shallow to note that our heat pump is louder than our old HVAC system. The vents now emit a noise akin to the wind whistling in from the sea, or the gush of a small plane overhead.
But the price is really what stung. Because here’s the thing about $2,500: It’s not a lot of money — unless you don’t have it.
The cost of the heat pump far outstripped our available savings. The company that sold us the unit offered a loan with no interest for the first 18 months, but, as the salesman helpfully pointed out, you really want to pay it off by then or the interest rate becomes punitive.
The maze of subsidies
What about those subsidies? The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act offers tax credits worth up to $2,000, provided your heat pump meets a certain threshold for energy efficiency. The law also offers states money for their own subsidies, but the District of Columbia has yet to set up its program.
D.C. also has separate, ratepayer-funded heat pump rebates, which predate the 2022 law and came to about $350 in my case. (If I had bought a more efficient model, that D.C. rebate would have been twice as high. But the salesman didn’t tell me that, and in my haste, I didn’t think to ask.)
Those subsidies should make my heat pump not much more expensive than a traditional HVAC system. Even if there were no subsidies, after four to five years that extra cost is likely to be outweighed by the accumulated savings on our utility bills, according to Ari Matusiak, chief executive of Rewiring America, a nonprofit organization that works to electrify homes.
(The savings may be more significant for some households. If you’re switching from heating oil, the reduction in your monthly bills tends to be higher. And if your income is below average, you may qualify for larger subsidies.)
Yet somehow, I told Matusiak, my switch to a heat pump didn’t feel like a victory. In hindsight, it felt like extra upfront money I could barely afford, when I was already facing a large and surprising expense, in exchange for savings that will accrue slowly and emissions reductions that seem marginal against the scale of global warming.
Paying upfront for progress
The more I thought about it, the more sympathy I had for people who don’t yearn to be early adopters, or who may even resent feeling social pressure to spend extra money to help the environment, then navigate rebate applications.
Matusiak seemed to have heard these concerns before. He said that most people who get heat pumps pay even more than I did. (The median cost in Washington is about $18,000, according to Rewiring America.) He said history suggests the tax credit is unlikely to be reversed, because voters would complain too much. And he said almost half a million U.S. households claimed a tax credit last year for installing heat pumps.
“There were more heat pumps sold last year than fossil-fuel furnaces, for the second year in a row,” he said.
Mostly, he said, small changes lead to bigger ones.
“I think you did a really consequential thing,” Matusiak said.
I mostly agreed with him. And I urge anyone replacing their HVAC to consider a heat pump, though ideally you do that when you’re not sweltering through a heat wave. And maybe save up some money first.
But the expensive new box in my basement has left me uncertain about America’s strategy for making households greener.
Until now, encouraging people to pay more money upfront, on the promise of saving money later, made sense to me in the abstract, at least in a country that still relies heavily on personal decisions to fight climate change. But when you’re the one paying that extra money, it suddenly feels like a lot to ask. So maybe the most valuable thing I got for the extra $2,500 I spent on a heat pump was some humility.
Something’s Poisoning America’s Land. Farmers Fear ‘Forever’ Chemicals.
For decades, farmers across America have been encouraged by the federal government to spread municipal sewage on millions of acres of farmland as fertilizer. It was rich in nutrients, and it helped keep the sludge out of landfills.
But a growing body of research shows that this black sludge, made from the sewage that flows from homes and factories, can contain heavy concentrations of chemicals thought to increase the risk of certain types of cancer and to cause birth defects and developmental delays in children.
Known as “forever chemicals” because of their longevity, these toxic contaminants are now being detected, sometimes at high levels, on farmland across the country, including in Texas, Maine, Michigan, New York and Tennessee. In some cases the chemicals are suspected of sickening or killing livestock and are turning up in produce. Farmers are beginning to fear for their own health. — Hiroko Tabuchi.
Read the full article here.
And read five takeaways from our reporting on toxic sludge fertilizer.
Climate Change Can Cause Bridges to ‘Fall Apart Like Tinkertoys,’ Experts Say
On a 95-degree day this summer, New York City’s Third Avenue Bridge, connecting the Bronx and Manhattan, got stuck in the open position for hours. As heat and flooding scorched and scoured the Midwest, a steel railroad bridge connecting Iowa with South Dakota collapsed under surging waters. In Lewiston, Maine, a bridge closed after the pavement buckled from fluctuating temperatures.
America’s bridges, a quarter of which were built before 1960, were already in need of repair. But now, extreme heat and increased flooding linked to climate change are accelerating the disintegration of the nation’s bridges, engineers say, essentially causing them to age prematurely.
The result is a quiet but growing threat to the safe movement of people and goods around the country, and another example of how climate change is reshaping daily life in ways Americans may not realize. — Coral Davenport
Read the full article here.
