Submitted by Suspicious_Bus_4058 t3_11c1anz in Maine
Was sold a heat pump system and told I would be more energy efficient and would lower my heating bill. Well, after installation my electric bill went up to $650 a month from $250-$350 using my boiler. Maybe more efficient but not even close to cheaper. Something to consider l
Letās gooooooo!
Also CMP can die
What is your ābackupā? Itās a companion heater in very cold weather. My heat pump installer said heat pumps are only efficient within a certain range. They need to pull heat. I have this electric heater: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01J1M61M8/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 Itās efficient and puts heat into the room that the heat pump utilizes/maximizes. I also have a propane fireplace to heat my house when the power fails. What do you have?
I just talked to someone who had heat pump installed and their bill also went way up
Woah, $250-$350/month? Time to switch to LED grow lights. But seriously, you got had. My electric bill got last month was ~$250 with heat pumps providing pretty much all my heat.
Is this with the seasonal heat pump rate from your utility?
High efficiency has boiler
Ok but how much did you spend in fuel?
Heat pump rate hasnāt kicked in yet. CMP keeps charging the standard
Gas bill was around $100
Op out here, replying to themselves.
Well, how much are you running the heat pump? Your energy bill is going to go up, especially if you are running it constantly and running it when it is quite cold.
Yeah this is pretty sus. For one thing, electricity just went up last month for the 2023 standard offer, but thatās temporary for this year and gas is still more expensive. Also thereās just no way the $ for gas youāre quoting lines up with what youāre saying the heat pump added to your electric bill. Either youāre using more electricity for something else too (grow lights lol) or youāre trolling.
This was my January 2022 CMP bill (Heat Pump only for heat). This year I added a pellet stove. January bill was $284. (We burn 5 bags a week @ $6 per bag) and we had the rate hike this January.... Just sayin' ... I feel your pain.
Got it. Iām just playing it by ear and trying to find the sweet spot for my personal preference for comfort and how I supplement my heat pump. Iām also closing curtains and covering a very leaky door. My expectations were clearly lower than yours. Best wishes.
Heat pumps are a fucking joke my guy
Last year 12/9-1/9 unitil bill $359 with gas range.
This year CMP basically same dates; bill with heat pump $659.
Not trolling and no extras since last year.
How many gallons of fuel did you use last year? You canāt compare prices to do this analysis you need to compare gallons and kWH (then convert to this years prices) to see if this makes sense or not.
For the whole winter? Where you getting your gas? I gotta get in on that.
I think per month
Not all heat pumps are equal... what brand and model did you buy?...
Thatās not true, as ac they are incredible. And they provide good heat on the shoulder seasons.
I have a similar issue. I have four heat pumps and I keep all four at 68 degrees but my electric bill from Versant has a averaged about $350 the past two months. That's on top of oil for my furnace.
I made a mistake removing my propane heater and replacing it with a heat pump. Fantastic at ac not such much for heat if the temps get below 10 degrees. I bought a pioneer unit thatās rated for ultra low temp. For this winter Iām using an unvented propane heater when it gets cold. Wife hates the smell. Next year Iām going to have to add a better secondary heat source. My calculations show for this winter that Iāve saved about 50 gallons per month in oil $200. And because of the new rates the heat pump has cost me about $180 extra per month. Though I expect that to improve now that Iām turning off the heat pump below 20 degrees. But oh well the ac is incredible
I switched my account info for autopay a few months ago which made it skip the autopay for the first month and saw similar numbers - it was due to a missed payment which I immediately payed. Take a look at your bill and see if that is the case.
68 degrees! It must be nice to be so rich. Just joking btw. Iām keeping my house around 64. High efficiency forced hot air on propane. Seriously though whatās your kwh usage?
Heat pumps have an efficiency curve that is directly tied to the outdoor air temperature. As the temp drops, so does the efficiency. At some point, the efficiency of the heat pump will drop far enough that the comparable cost to heat with gas or oil is actually lower.
I recommend anyone heating with multiple heat sources set up a quick and dirty spreadsheet to show you what your crossover temperature is. The efficiency curves for heat pump outdoor units are published by the manufacturer, as are all the other values you'll actually need to create the spreadsheet.
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I tried to log into Versant to look at the usage but their site is going through maintenance
They should be called if conditioning pumps. Great for AC in the warm months. Not great for heating.
Electricity $650 (w/ heat pump) - 350 (w/o heat pump) = - $300
Gas $350 (w/o heat pump) - 100 (w/ heat pump) = + $250
So for one month youāre down $50? Better to look at the cost difference over the course of a year.
Did you get a Mr. Cool brand heat pump? Because those are garbage. Had a friend that bought one online from Mr. Cool, and it just ran like crazy, power bill went way up and then it died.
We have two Daikin pumps and they work great. 3100 sq ft house is heated well, we have a oil boiler we really use for hot water now. Its only been a few weeks, but they have handled the cold well.
We've got solar so we banked tons of credit last summer, so our CMP bill is steady at $13.73/month every month.
Same here - we havenāt had a bill above 200 all winter with ours running as only heat source
Also the way electricity is metered, you may have one phase that sees most of your usage and the other is running very light. Cmp is reading the higher phase and billing you according to that, assuming both are the same. (Electrical metering is a joke and a scam in my opinion)
You have 2 phases of electricity fed into your home.
It may be as simple as some simple breaker/circuit labeling and some monitoring of usage of circuits and rearranging on the circuits in your panel.
I keep mine at about 70, itās my only heat source. This winter Iāve averaged $300/mo. My house is about 1400sq/fr. How big is your house?
My house is a little bigger than yours at 1640 sq ft
...you must have an AMAZING boiler if you are only burning 60 to 80 gallons a month.
I burn about 1200 gallons a year. I'm on a budget plan with the oil company. Last year we paid about $300 a month. This year it's almost $600 a month.
A solar farm or?
So much of this depends on specifics.
What was the size and model of your boiler and of your heat pump system? Not all heat pumps are created equal and they need to be sized correctly and installed correctly for your individual space.
Personally Iāve got a split level with 3 zones for the boiler and a 5-head mitsubishi low temp heat pump system. The heat pump does use a lot of energy when it gets cold as my system is slightly undersized for the heating use-case. A lot of installers still only think of these as air conditioners and seasonal heaters so they donāt size them properly for the full winter months.
I think you have bigger issues than your heat pump. What are you doing that your electric bill is that high to start with?
What fuel company and when did you guy it, how many gallons, how much per gallon? That doesn't even sound real.
My living room heat pump will make our large open concept living room, dining room, kitchen area with a cathedral ceiling go from 68 to 75 in under an hour according to the wall thermostat. It is fantastic to have. Can't wait to see how it cools in the summer.
You mean boilers don't solely run on electricity?
Have you compared it to your oil use. I always assumed the point of electric heat pump was to cut down on oil.
Daikin air-air or air-water?
Lol did you really think your electricity wouldn't go up installing a giant electrical unit
Not sure why Iām down voted but whatever. I agree, after living in AZ for a few years; I donāt think I ran the AC all but maybe a couple of times during the summer here. Iām more worried about the HEAT part of it which unless Iām running them constant full blast they are lacking in efficiency. Then I get hit with a sweet electric bill.
Yeah it is pretty true. Summer yeah, the AC is fine. I only had to run it a handful of times. In the winter I have to leave it on and at full blast all day for it not to be frozen in here. Even then itās still pretty cold.
Thatās insane
In more ways than one...
Keep in mind, this dude was doing $300 a month in electricity before the install and running a boiler with whatever fuel source that used per month.
I did the same cycle with oil as our primary heat for the first year here and switched over to a heat pump. We had a $200 a month electric bill in the winter with oil heat and a $400 a month bill using all electric heat pumps for the entire house the next year at the same time with similar weather. The cost of oil, assuming it hadn't gone up at all over that time, would have been double that electricity cost.
Wood stoves are cheapest, but require work. Pellets are easier, but still work.
A single pellet stove will burn a 40 lb bag of pellets in a day and use electricity to run the blower. That average's out and about $8 for one pellet stove to operate a day. You'd have to run fans or something throughout a large house to get the heat from a central location to your separate rooms. If you're using ducted fans then that's an extra electricity cost on top of the pellet heater. Assuming my heat pump runs constantly on a 0Ā° day, it uses 48 KW a day. At CMP rates with their normal billing option, that is about 12 bucks a day. Thanks to CMP's new cost per kilowatt it is not the cheapest solution for house heat in Maine, but it will heat your entire 1600 square foot house.
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In theory, if your heat pump is your only heat source, you're running it like you would air conditioning during the summer. All the damn time.
Yes, and that's just an old house using an oil burner and not having more than 4-in thick exterior walls with inconsistent insulation and plaster.
Something's fishy, $100 in natural gas or propane would not heat a two bedroom house at 60Ā° temperatures for a week. If it did, then you need to look and see if somebody left a window open upstairs in your attic or something this year.
I have a 1600 square foot house built in 1910 on pier and skirt foundation with block and brick at points, insulation is key here. We keep the house at 64Ā° in the winter time and things get a little chilly due to insulation inconsistencies in the old walls. If OP is throwing real numbers here, then insulation or potentially an open air gap is causing his loss of heat and increase in bill. The electric company also doubled the cost of electricity between 2019 and today.
How do you go about getting a heat pump rate from CMP?
How do you do your solar? Is it on your property, or some buy+in program like the junk mail ads keep recommending?
Could be running a desktop computer 24/7 and adding $50-$100 a month just for that.
(Edit) keep in mind CMP rates with delivery are now around $.25 a kWh.
If you can, look at a small pellet stove for extra heat. Propane's double the cost or more per day of use and the wife will probably like the fire heat smell better.
Heat pumps are designed to operate with a 40Ā° change in temperature as their primary operation for those efficiency and price per month costs listed on the packaging. If it's negative 20Ā° outside and you have to triple their primary operation power to pull heat from outside then, yeah, it uses pricey electricity. Even with the CMP rate hikes, it's still a less expensive source of heat in a well insulated location than any other automatic option.
Burning wood is cheaper.
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Ah, now that is interesting. Do you have suggestions for further learning?
It might be due to where you are, propane is one of the most expensive options in my area. Cost per million BTUs as a point of reference, propane is like three times more expensive than my electricity usage even if I were using coil heaters, which I'm not. I use propane out in the barn and just the heat a 20wx20lx10h insulated loft for the weekend costs about as much as heating the entire house for the month.
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For sure. Itās all about the insulation. Someone said something about $600 a month for oil. Thatās absurd.
Interesting makes sense thank you
Best thing you can do is some in depth circuit metering. If you comfortable with electricity, itās pretty straight forward. If your uncomfortable with it, an electrician will be able to set it up for you. Itās not an overnight project, I would recommend doing it for a month and calculating your loads.
It wonāt be a 2 pole breaker, it will be your single pole breakers that are doing it.
I just checked and in Feb I used 1,285
Excellent resource. Iām a mechanical engineer and actually made my own heat loss and fuel consumption calculator and can confirm that this will get you very close answers! I honestly wasted my time with the analysis thinking the Efficiency Maine calculator wasnāt good enough for my purposes and needing to be precise! šš
Try calling them. I posted a link to some of the info below. Apparently they also give a better rate for people with EV cars.
Special rates for electric cars would be nice for people with electric cars. Right now it is just as expensive to drive the average electric car as it is to drive a vehicle that gets 35 miles to the gallon.
Way2L8AND1 t1_ja10t25 wrote
This will be a fun comment section.... šæ Good Luck OP.