

Many homeowners will save money with a heat pump, too. When properly installed, plenty of today’s air-source heat pumps (simply “heat pumps,” for the rest of this article) can keep your home toasty even amid bone-chilling cold, using far less energy than other types of heating systems. If you want high-efficiency electric heating in a cold climate, they say, you’ll need an expensive, hard-to-install ground-source heat pump, which absorbs heat from underground.īut that’s old news. They’ll struggle to keep your house comfortable even in a mild cold snap, the story goes, and they won’t run efficiently in that kind of weather, anyway.


Since they work by absorbing free heat from the air outside your home, then transferring it inside, their job gets tougher when it’s chilly out. for decades, the conventional wisdom was that air-source heat pumps (the most common type, because they’re easy to install and cost less than ground-source heat pumps) don’t make sense in places where temperatures drop below freezing. While they’ve been common in the warmest parts of the U.S. critical clean energy technologies,” including heat pumps. In fact, President Joe Biden in June even authorized the use of the Defense Production Act to “rapidly expand American manufacturing of . . . Heat pumps are emerging as an important tool for helping to thwart climate change-not just in the south, but all over the country: They’re much more energy-efficient than traditional heating and cooling systems, and will almost always shrink your household carbon emissions-often substantially, especially when they run on clean sources of electricity.
