Doug Quattrochi
As part of the ongoing saga of making my Worcester triplane emission free, I recently replaced two gas water heaters with heat pump water heaters. If you haven’t heard about this before, grab your loofah, you’re having fun.
What’s wrong with gas? Gas is a miracle source of energy in many ways. My gas boilers are “clean” – that is, free of soot – and therefore require little maintenance. My gas stove was fast before I replaced it with induction (which is actually even faster). My gas water heaters were always hot and ready for any wash, shower, or pandemic hand wash I might throw at them.
But that’s how gas has been in the last century. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas when it goes and it escapes over 10,000 broken pipes alone in Massachusetts. Burning gas releases carbon dioxide, even in a 100 percent efficient device, because efficiency is about energy consumption, not by-products. Gas is the reason Merrimack Valley lost homes and a young life. And it’s a slow killer. Gas is a key Driver of asthma, and almost certainly why I rely on an inhaler now.
Heat pumps are the way forward. If you have a refrigerator or air conditioning, you have a heat pump. A heat pump uses the magic of thermodynamics to move thermal energy from one place where it is not needed to another place. You can transport the heat from your refrigerator into the kitchen air. On a hot summer night, heat can be transported outside from your bedroom. And you can transport heat from the cellar air into the water that you want to use for showering straight away.
The installation was a challenge
The gas boiler for the tenant on the third floor failed in July. (It’s always a good idea to replace these preventively. Set a calendar reminder.) We tampered with our owner water heater to provide hot water for the third floor while we were looking for a plumber who could bring us a heat pump . (Note: this is not illegal cross-metering. If the owner pays, it’s fine.)
We were looking for an installer. We became very discouraged. Over the next several months, I’ve quoted five plumbing companies.
The local plumber I keep on the speed dial said paraphrased, “We’ll charge you $ 7,000 each, about four times what we’d ask for gas, and it’ll break instantly. Don’t say we didn’t warn you. ”This plumber didn’t advertise heat pumps on their website, so I called someone who did.
The next plumber said paraphrased: “You have old gas boilers here. I could install a gas boiler and gas water heater combo for $ 30,000 and fix all of your appliances at once. ”I spoke to this plumber about the state’s goals for net zero emissions by 2050 and how a new boiler is when it expires the deadline would still issue. They didn’t seem tiered.
I went straight to the manufacturer of a heat pump water heater in good standing, Rheem, which has been in this market for some time (I have no connection with Rheem). It is also worth noting that the South loves heat pump water heaters because, as a side effect, they provide air conditioning in the room where they are installed.
The first three of Rheems’ four distributors for Worcester wanted to install gas. This is tragic now. Rheem, an early adopter of heat pump technology for water heaters, cannot get its own dealers to recommend heat pump water heaters in Massachusetts.
I was told that it would freeze my basement, that the air was insufficient, the humidity was insufficient, or that they weren’t suitable for the cold. It was all wrong or irrelevant.
Early results show promise
Despite these challenges, we installed two water heaters with heat pumps on November 15th. They have integrated energy monitoring. Over the next 20 days, my device consumed an average of 2.78 kWh per day and transported heat from the basement to the water. I’m effectively paying $ 0.28 per kWh including the account fee for delivery and delivery from renewable sources, so my daily cost is $ 0.80 for zero emission hot water.
It is difficult to compare with gas because we have a meter that supplied the boiler and the water heater at the same time. The Rheem heat pump has a Uniform Energy Factor (UEF) of 3.75. The old Bradford White gas heater had a UEF of around 0.7, which means that I now get around five times more hot water than before with the same amount of energy. The 2.78 kWh that I now pay daily would previously be equivalent to 47,428 BTU of gas.
Fortunately for me, you, and all of human civilization, those 47,428 BTUs in gas form cost me about $ 0.90 a day. This saves my tenant and I money and reduces our emissions at the same time. And my basement has stayed more or less constant at 56 degrees Celsius.
The main difficulty was the initial cost of capital. Each water heater costs twice what a gas heater would have cost. And the discounts didn’t help, because gas is considered “clean”. The next version of MassSave’s discounts is expected to correct this. Let’s hope it does, because we have many popular gas water heaters to replace in Massachusetts.
Doug Quattrochi is the managing director of MassLandlords Inc.
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