Sales are growing so quickly that some installers wonder whether heat pumps could even wipe out the demand for new air conditioners in a few years and put a significant dent in the number of natural gas furnaces.
Sales are growing so quickly that some installers wonder whether heat pumps could even wipe out the demand for new air conditioners in a few years and put a significant dent in the number of natural gas furnaces.
With the caveat that at lower outdoor temperatures (think below about -20C), heat pumps become increasingly ineffective at heating up indoor spaces.
For places that reach those temperatures in winter (most of the prairies and northern Ontario) you also need supplemental heating of some sort.
Heat pumps often have the option of a heater strip that lets it work at those temperatures.
Well, everywhere in Canada outside of maybe Vancouver does dip deep below -20 once in a while. But for the “Quebec City to Windsor corridor” (which is where about half of Canada lives eg GTA) you theoretically should be able to get away with some electric space heaters as a backup heating source. They’d be expensive to run but it would likely only be for a few days per year.
“Pay for more electricity” might not work very well, if everybody in a region uses resistive heat at the same time. I’m not sure what the solution is… maybe an overprovisioned power grid, cheaper battery tech, or tanks of renewable backup fuel like dimethyl ether?
Local power storage.
If you’re home had a battery bank, it could slow-charge pretty much all the time, then help pick up large on-demand loads like heating/cooling (air, water, food, etc).
Then the power grid would see a relatively steady load from each home with the batteries smoothing out spikes in usage.
Add on local generation like solar or wind to further reduce that load on the grid.