Area woman can't stop talking about heat pumps, family and friends are worried

Can’t stop will stump heat pump

Hello gentle readers,
There are a lot of things I think I talk about too much: chili crisp, Oxford commas, perimenopause, heat pumps. But recent experiences have made me change my mind a bit on the last one — last week I helped launch Quilt heat pumps in Canada. And many a brilliant, well-informed journalist asked me: What’s a heat pump? Why should I care? How did you get this number? So perhaps I can’t talk about heat pumps enough? Let’s find out! (I won’t be offended if you abandon ship to watch TikToks of puppies listening to jazz now, just meet me here next week).

To answer all these heat pump queries, I’ll interview myself. And do a funny voice.

What’s a heat pump and why do you talk about them so much, Sarah?

Simply: A heat pump is a device that heats and cools your home. It replaces your furnace and your AC, so it’s the Pert Plus of home heating and cooling. What’s most important is that it does this all super efficiently, and without burning any of those pesky fossil fuels. It’s 300-400% more efficient than a gas furnace, and it’s safer.

I talk about heat pumps all the time because I’m a big believer in one-and-done-ish, high-leverage climate actions. That is to say, the larger decisions we make that really impact our emissions. The reason I am so jazzed about heat pumps, and residential electrification more broadly, is that a) these big climate actions provide meaningful emissions drops while reducing decision fatigue, and b) replacing machines when they break is something we are going to have to do anyway. It’s not a climate-thing so much as a keep-my-house-functioning-thing — which really matters in these days of rollercoaster policy and the increasing politicization of…everything climate.

Heating your home is not a discretionary thing: If your furnace dies, you need to get a new one, and it’s important that we help make those new heating and cooling systems be ones that won’t burn fossil fuels for another twenty years. That’s meaningful, necessary work that exists in a completely independent realm from whether whales are being killed by wind turbines. They are not.

I also talk about heat pumps a lot because on the self-efficacy meter they are pretty darn high. For climate-caring individuals, bringing down your household emissions by 70-80 percent feels good, and makes you want to do more good for the planet. Electrifying your whole home is a thing you can do over time that reduces emissions hugely, makes your home safer and comfier, and in the long run, saves you money.

How does a heat pump work?

You should just watch this fun video if you have a few minutes and enjoy good dudes with great hair (Follow Dan too, he’s the best!). But if you don’t have three minutes: a heat pump pulls cold air from the hot air outside to cool your home in summer, and hot air out of the cold to warm your home in winter. Even when it’s so cold your nose falls off, there’s hot air inside that frigid air, and vice versa. This is why people say heat pumps are magic. And by people, I mean me.

But Sarbear, if these things are so much better, why aren’t they just everywhere? Answer: people!

Lots of things take a while to catch on because of a pesky old thing called status quo bias. And also, because there were heat pumps back in the 80s that weren’t very good. Contractors got burned. But today’s heat pumps are incredible. They work in cold climates, they come in portable styles that can be installed in apartments in fifteen minutes, they’re… pretty! But contractors like to install what they know. They don’t want to come back to fix something — a callback means money lost, a callback in Canada in winter means bone-rattling cold. Heat pump installation requires a bit of upskilling and, sometimes, some electrical. All these things cause friction. Friction slows things. For example, in high school, the friction of not studying enough hampered my physics class grade.

Home heating and cooling is something we tend to leave to the professionals. Like medicine and good haircuts. If I’m sick, I listen to my doctor (mostly). If my furnace breaks in the middle of winter, I listen to the guy (it’s often a guy) who shows up with the truck and the clipboard and the knowledge. If he says ‘don’t get a heat pump,’ I probably won’t get a heat pump. So we have to make sure he doesn’t say that (I’m working on this with an excellent team, more on this soon!). In the meantime, we have to respond with: ‘I trust you, I respect you, where did you get those cool overalls, and please give me a motherbleepin’ heat pump.’

If these things are so much better, why aren’t they just everywhere (part deux)? Answer: cost!

Well, another reason why heat pumps are not as ubiquitous as we want them to be is cost. In some places it’s an absolute no-brainer to get one: if you’re switching from delivered fuel, or there are massive rebates in your lovely town or state. In other places, the economics are less of a blowout and more like this year’s World Series: a pretty even match where the underdog absolutely should have won — the upfront costs may be a bit higher, but ultimately operating costs will come down in a carbon-constrained world. Of course, if every dollar is being counted, some people will need to go with gas, which is totally understandable, but also unfortunate, as it means locking in fossil fuels for another 15-20 years. Bummer.

But even if heat pumps do cost a tiny bit more, there’s something to consider: the resiliency and future-preparedness of your home. There will come a time, very soon, where people won’t want to buy a house with gas appliances. The public is increasingly realizing how bad gas stoves are (despite manufacturer hijinks like this), how much better heat pumps are, and how lovely it is to have a resilient, all-electric home. Instead of flipping homes to put in gas stoves, we’re already seeing realtors pulling out gas to put in induction. An electrified home will be a very sellable home.

So…how are we going to get people excited about heat pumps, when most people just want their house to be warm (and cool) and don’t give a flying furnace how that happens?

Well, ultimately, we’re not. The ideal scenario is that a contractor shows up and sells you the best and most efficient system, a heat pump, while you keep watching Is it cake? and doing the Wordle. But in the meantime, customers need to make sure we’re finding those slightly-ahead-of-the-curve contractors who will not try to sell us a gas furnace.

But also, we are getting people excited. We need, to some extent, for some people to know what heat pumps are, and to want them. It sends the demand signal that helps policy makers, contractors, and manufacturers put a little pump in their step. And to do that, we need to lead with comfort, ease, and efficiency. Because electric stuff is just cooler stuff. There are a few standouts in every electric category of appliance that help make this case. With heat pumps, it’s Quilt, purveyor of the world’s most efficient ductless heat pump. With induction stoves, it’s my friend Sam’s gorgeous version, Copper, which also happens to come with a battery. Pila makes smart home batteries. And there are new additions to the cool-electric-stuff-gallery all the time — Reservoir, a smart heat pump water heater just came on the market. And beyond EVs and E-bikes there so many neato modes of E-transport.

Quilt + Spoonflower wallpaper = yes please.

I’m in like Flynn, Sarah. How do we do this?

While contractors are key, we also need content creators to make HVAC desirable. I won’t say make heat pumps sexy because that’s just gross, but we have to make the unglamorous world of home ventilation salient to an audience of tastemakers. This is what I worked on a bunch in my former role at Rewiring America, and what I’m pleased to be working on now with clients like Quilt and the Building Decarb Alliance. I can talk about heat pumps til I’m red or blue in the face (depending whether I’m heating or cooling), but it’s Elena Lohse of ThisHouse5000, who is gonna make people want these things.

But Sarah, what about all the other stuff that warms the planet? Isn’t that more important than consumer adoption of heat pumps?

It’s all important! The good delegates in Belém are doing the hard work of multilateral agreement building at COP, because we need upstream policy change. But for most of us, that stuff is abstract and far away. In Canada, home heating is responsible for 13% of our emissions. So while I may not have the power to tell the Pathways Alliance to stuff it, I do have the power to power my home electrically. Understanding just a small part of one’s role in the global energy system is super key to getting folks to care about climate writ large.

As I’ve written here umpteen times, I hate when people get all whataboutist about carbon footprints (spare me the ‘it was invented by BP’). The point that responsibility has been shunted to consumers is absolutely valid. At the same time, the endpoint of that argument is wholly disempowering: It leaves the responsibility with powerful people, who are not, last I checked, doing much. And lots of us don’t have the resources or power to fight these immovables anyway.

We’re not going to consume our way out of the climate crisis, but we do need temperate water, warm homes, and hot food. So we gotta swap, as each appliance breaks — when it dies, electrify.

A thing I didn’t really think about til a former colleague put it thus is that every gas appliance in our home is a mini fossil fuel plant, burning gas. Once you see this, you can’t unsee it. I’m working to retire all the little fossil fuel plants in my home. As I do so, others are working to do the same at a global policy level, like the incredible Tzeporah Berman and the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty folks, who negotiated a huge win this week.

Got it. Can you promise that you won’t natter on about heat pumps now that you’ve gotten this all out?

What do you think? I’m a lady who dances around in a heat pump costume.

What are your thoughts on chili crisp, Sare?

How much time do you have? (Our household agrees with Jeremy Allen White, and we always have two backup jars of this in the house.)

Stay pumped! (more resources)

• My friend Drew Tozer is an installer of Quilt heat pumps, and many other fine brands here in Ontario, and he literally wrote the book on heat pumps. Here’s an interview I did with him a while back.

• Shreyas’ great newsletter, Heat Pumped.

• A really thorough piece from Joseph De Natale for Climate Drift.

• Quilt makes the most gorgeous things, and their installers are helping shift things. I love love love this little piece about Doug of Wilsons Mechanical in Halifax. We need contractors like this to push things forward:

This planet: Pump up the volume

Got heat pump thoughts, experiences, dance cycles? I’d love to hear them.

Last planet: Billionaire glurge

WaPo: Most Americans dislike billionaires.

Was the language of COP strong or weak? Simon Evans of Carbon Brief analyzes the squirrel words. The International Institute for Environment and Development has a pretty, ninety-page guide to this fussy language. Too much work to parse. Better to read the commentaries and distillations to get a sense of the energy, or lack thereof. For example: Catherine Abreu provides a shocking report on what delegates were actually talking about: regressive, transphobic, racist, sexist stuff — and yet this doesn’t really show up in the plenary. Not great, active verbiage or no!

Stuff and things

Canadian heat pump adoption…help!
Hey! Since this newsletter is all about heat pumps…wanna fill out this heat pump survey for my friends at Summerhill and Clean Energy Canada? Thank you Thank you Thank you!

COP breakaway
Read Chris Hatch’s newsletter for an overview from COP (with its inactive verbs) about that global convening to break away from fossil fuels!

National Building Decarbonization Forum this week
I’ll be there talking electrifying campaigns, and listening to the likes of Chantal Hébert and Jan Rosenow. Are you in Ottawa? Come.

EV no thievee? (Sorry not sorry)
Yet another reason to get a Volt! Writes my husband in this week’s Toronto Star:

The National Portrait Gallery of Canada of Bloorcourt is coming. 20 years after I started the National Portrait Gallery of Canada in my garage…we still don’t have a National Portrait Gallery. So we’re bringing it back! This January! It’s a joke but it’s also dead serious. Portraits tell the stories of a place. Call for submissions coming soon, so git arting!

Thank you

Thank you, as always, for reading. Let me know what I get right or wrong. 💚 the good editions, and feel free to use my graphics when they’re helpful. (Thank you, subscribers!!!)

Hope you are happy, healthy, safe,
Sarah

People dancing

I have a strong affinity for anyone who hires a Mariachi band. Ever.

@jacobbalshin

Jacob Balshin on Instagram: "Happy 15th Birthday Day Eglinton L…

PS. They say heat pump in the new Alicia Silverstone holiday romcom! Thanks Kate for sending to me!