I *can* imagine, and I will!

Wouldn't running the furnace for twice as long (at half max output) use twice as much electricity to run the blower fan? Even though you're using the same amount of gas and getting the same amount of heat? It's not much, but that's still efficiency lost.

This type of sales tactic was one of the reasons why I got out of residential HVAC and went to the commercial side. I like helping people and doing right by them.

You can explain it like water you have a valve turn on halfway it runs twice as long or a valve that's turned on all the way runs for a short period time both fill up the same amount of water just different times elapses

Tech temp on space heaters when the season's over blow them out and then stick them in trash bags when you store them this keeps them nice and clean and efficient for next season and doesn't smell like dust burning off when you first turn them on

And then of course, if it's winter time and your home is reasonably well insulated, that extra preheating time doesn't really matter. That heat will just disperse into the rest of the home anyway.

​@@OrigamiMariewait until you hear that some stoves vent directly outside

well, if it's a gas oven....

I see you've met my wife.

@@OrigamiMarie Spend about 8 seconds looking up the efficiency ratings for gas oven heating a room vs a gas furnace and heat pump vs resistive and get back to us.

No regrets. 🙂

And I will too.

Same lol

Yes, you could also watch the shorter one to see if it's better to send your friends and family like i did, but then everyone watched the longer one.

Watching Alec patiently explaining the bleeding obvious to people he really shouldn't be wasting his time with, is like watching Road Runner. You know he's going over the cliff, but you watch and laugh anyway.

Also it frustrates me to no end that in ARIZONA, I still see a constant barrage of buildings spec'd for resistive element or gas heat with no heat pump. This is literally the poster child climate for a heat pump. There is no reason anyone in Arizona, especially Phoenix and Tuscon, should not have a heat pump. It just baffles my mind. The price delta is not significant and honestly if I were in charge of my company I would only sell heat pumps if they are spec'd with secondary heat.

@@aristoyotacorner It's been my observation that most commercial HVAC guys keep up with the advances in technology while most of the clowns in residential choose not to. It's the difference between learning the trade and learning some of the tricks of the trade. I feel that residential HVAC is long overdue for a shakeup.

I'm no expert but I thought that non-VRF multihead systems run each head at the same relative capacity. If one room has high load the other area will cycle on and off (like a traditional system) to achieve the needed distribution. Is this not the case? Also, as somebody who has never actually worked with this stuff, I think hydronic systems are better for zoning than VRF. Run one loop at 120F and one at 50F. A zone will open valves to send the required temperature water into its coil and modulation is achieved by varying fan speed. It seems like there's much less that can go wrong compared to VRF, for instance a water leak in one area can be isolated for repair but a refrigerant leak would take out the entire building's heat.

@@eDoc2020 I believe you're right about non vrf multihead systems. I've only dealt with vrf multihead. Water source systems are definitely better for zone control. You lose a lot less energy for long piping runs. This just isn't feasible on a lot of small buildings or houses, as they take up a large footprint even for small capacity systems.

@TechnologyConnextras Pt. 3 incoming?!

Same lmao. It scratches that part of my brain

The vast majority of people have no idea how the things they rely on, on a daily basis, boggles the mind. How many people need a car to get to work, shop, etc? In the US, most people. How many people know how something simple, like how the brakes work? Yeah, a very small percentage of those same people who rely on that car to live. This makes me scratch my head. This thing is extremely important in your life, and yet you know nothing about it but "put gas in, turn key to start, dur dur dur."

@@jeromethiel4323 I also share the need to understand stuff. I think it might be common to people with ADD (I'm not 100% sure if I have ADD but I think I might, I've just finished testing and will get my results in a couple weeks).

He single handedly eliminated dishwashing pods for me. Heat pump is a bigger topic but we will get there.

All while ignoring the elephant in the room. The costs. The lack of electric generation capacity. There are 10s of millions of homes in the US that have either gas or oil heat in places that get very cold. The US uses 350 million gallons of gasoline a day. There are hundreds of new planned data centers in the US, yet to be built. We simply do not have the spare capacity for all this stuff. On top of that, there are forces trying to retire nuclear and coal generation. Even over a 20 year time frame, this is simply not feasible.

@@christo930 Does sound like a great reason to increase energy production from nuclear, and renewables, by a whole lot more, doesn't it

@@Ultimaximus I work on nuclear reactors, and the massive propaganda campaign against nuclear power is just mind blowing. So much wrong and fake info about nuclear power is taken as gospel.

@@turtletrimmings But the capital cost of that heat is already paid. The capital cost of building hundreds of new power plants is not. Only certain types of gas fired plants even have the ability to get a minor efficiency gain. The thermal efficiency of even the best gas power plants isn't that great. Going by memory, it's in the low 60s. This is for the best ones. How long will it be before the energy consumed by running the power plant (it has all kinds of ongoing energy costs not related to the thermal losses of the generator), the energy consumed building the power plant and the energy losses of the power plant and transmission losses are offset by the increased efficiency of heat pumps? There are likely still millions of houses where you cannot have a heat pump. My house is one of them. I have no duct work. I have steam baseboard heat with only a single pipe going to each baseboard.

I'll second that. A lot of times it's the varistor that burns up because it's trying to clamp the voltage peaks down. The ECM in our house has run in continuous fan @50% when there's no heat/cool calls for 16 years. It was installed in 2008. Original fan, original motor and original electronics pack. (Trane 19i communicating 2 stage heatpump)

I was thinking about that. At first I thought that running continuously might induce more wear but quickly realized that the start/stop cycle must be way more damaging over time

The furnace in my home was installed in 2009…and the ECM blower has been running continuously ever since…save for power outages and filter changes. It runs at 50% capacity in recirc mode and is nearly silent. Constant start stop is definitely harder than continuous use.

I just replaced the blower in our house from a hvac installed in 87. The electro air filter quit working and the dusk plugged up the motor.

Nothing better than love learning to learn

@@blitzwing1 I'm not trying to be snarkey when I ask this: help me understand why brits are against it because you don't have them I don't understand that logic. Get one and decide if you want it? Or, experience one? Are you all just used to being hot and sweaty? The last few heatwaves are examples of what's to come. The trade of a yet higher energy bill is not having heat stroke.

"general public educator". There's your problem right there. Those 3 words should never be combined in the same sentence ANYWHERE!!!!! Frankly I wouldn't trust most of the general public to sit on a toilet the right way round.

@@mattsw104 come to Britain in the height of summer. On *both* the hot stuffy days where ac might improve our homes we generally go outside or open a window. Offices, shops and businesses generally have air con as do many cars. But our homes really wouldn't benefit from the outlay. Unless from a heat pump air con combined unit. But even then it's going to be redundant for months at a time because we don't need heating nor cooling. Edit : by Britain, I mean everything West and North of London. The south east is its own anomaly. From my understanding of the US, you can buy an ac unit in a store and take it home, the cost is low and there's heaps of engineers who can fit one not excluding competent diyers. Here you would have to locate a specialist for everything and that's not going to be easy in most parts of the country.

​@mattsw104 I think they meant against heat pumps for heating as they're not familiar with heat pumps for cooling. If I said "flurbledurb" can save you money and help the environment your first response if you're not familiar with the term could be that it's a scam. Personally, UK here and air con is excellent. I stop functioning in the summer without it. 35C and humid overnight for weeks at a time is awful.

​@@mattsw104 Brittian doesn't have the temperature swings the US does. It's not as big of a deal there. The US is geographically blessed and climate cursed. The same set of circumstances which lead the US to be home to 75% of all the world's tornadoes also messes up our temperature swing. Let me put it this way. The lowest recorded temperature in Helsinki is pretty close to the lowest recorded temperature in Chicago. Meanwhile the highest ever recorded temperature in Chicago is about 10c higher than Helsinki. Oh, and did I mention Helsinki is 20 degrees further north than Chicago. Chicago just should not be by conventional world wisdom. Our summers are hotter than they should be for our latitude and our winters are colder than they should be for our latitude. The US's climate is cursed. We don't get nice summer days. We get sweltering summer days that cause heat stroke while also getting freezing winter temperatures, in the exact same city. That is not normal for the rest of the world. They get one or the other, not both. Another example. Look at Houston. About once a decade Houston gets a snow storm that wrecks the city. Now go grab a globe put your finger on Houston and spin it, nowhere else on Earth at it's latitude has seen snow in recorded history unless it's caused by altitude, Houston is at sea level and gets snow. Nor have they seen it's record highs.

Or "the candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long", and the energy in a candle is basically only determined by the amount of wax that it comprises.

Indeed. I was just muttering something similar. (see my main post for the long version)

This is a poor analogy because when filling a bottle or bucket we want it done fast. EDIT: Ah I get it, it's about total capacity or energy spent. In this way it's okayish. In case of heating it's just to uphold a certain temperature. The only exception being if the furnace turns off overnight and has to reach a certain temperature by a set point in time in the morning. Also that's where I disagree with Alec who calculated for the worst-case scenario a 100% working cycle.

@@VADemon Why do we want to fill the bucket up fast? At no time was that stated to be a goal. If it's going to leak X liters per hour, filling it up "fast" doesn't help at all. And remember, in practice we're not trying to keep the bucket "full" at all times, we're trying to keep it within a certain margin (so we can go a little over the target level, and it's OK to be a little under that level too). The ideal state would be refilling the bucket at exactly the rate it leaks, so it stays at the precise level all the time. Filling it faster just means we wait longer between refills. In fact, if there's a minimum time for the hose to be "on" (that is, we want to avoid short cycles), then having the hose give too much water means that even the minimum time requires a large change in the bucket's level. So we're going to be farther away from the ideal level more of the time. A lower rate of fill would let us stay closer to the correct level: slower is *better*, not worse.

@@trimeta did you get to see the EDIT remark? When you want to fill a water bottle, you don't open the tap to fill 1 droplet at a time. If you want to provide an analogy, don't leave room for interpretation and escapes. Other than that, I am of the same opinion on the subject.

No they are not.

They are not required. I'm also a tech. I'm in northeast Ohio and I have a heat pump that has no aux heat. It still goes into defrost as needed and it's not even noticeable. The indoor fan just slows way down.

A couple of people have already replied, but I want to echo them anyway. Heat strips are in fact no longer necessary for defrosting. The heat pump my mom and dad have is better thought of as an overgrown mini-split feeding a very large head. Just like a mini-split, when it defrosts it simply stops the indoor blower, reverses into cooling mode to get ice off the coils, then switches back to heating and turns the blower back on. And you can buy that system without heat strips! They're optional. It is my understanding that because it has an EEV, it can throttle flow and pressures to the point that the heat from the motor windings in the compressor is all that's needed to de-ice the outdoor coil. It doesn't actually need to collect any heat from the indoor coil in the process, so the effect to the user is a short pause in heat output. You even see that in the Ecobee data. If it were kicking on the heat strips, with 15kW you likely would have seen a slight _bump_ in indoor temp with each defrost rather than the dips you see. Now, I suppose it's possible that it's kicking on just a single 5kW strip, but I know for a fact you can install that system without heat strips - in fact, this was something the sales rep was aware of as he said his sister(?) had one installed and they didn't bother with them. I personally wouldn't do that in Illinois, but bottom line some of these advanced central systems really are just mini-splits feeding an air handler rather than a ductless head.

@@TechnologyConnections Nice! Been out of the industry for a while and therefore out of the loop. It's amazing how much things have changed (for the better) in such a short amount of time!

@@langj43 Things always just keep getting better it seems!

Similar to people trying to catch "methodological errors" in a scientific study they don't like the results of in the comments under a news article (more often than not things that if you look at the actual paper were of course controlled for one way or another but that fact was not appropriate to the level of abstraction of a 500 word newspaper article)...

@@HunterJEOr the more common error of insisting that a study needs to control for some variable that isn't involved in anything the study was reporting on. I don't have any particular examples, though I did once get in an argument with someone who thought bitcoin was somehow a "store of energy" (like, say, a battery, but with a lot more hand-waving).

@@noyb7920 this is definitely the more common version, people love to claim to see variables the scientists somehow missed... they're always indeed unrelated, as the study treated it lmao

plus maintenance is trivial

Compressors are meant to run 100% duty cycle, yeah? Running multiple days straight isn’t a problem?

@@StephenByersJ yes, infact the commercial ones I am working in developing are variable and prefer to run at all times.

@@StephenByersJ to my knowledge, the only thing between a compressor and 100% duty cycle is primarily lubrication, i.e. plastic compression piston (those just disintegrate immediately) vs an oil submersion compressor, which as long as you cool it appropriately, can basically run for ever.

I would rather replace a blower sooner because it ran constantly than replace a compressor because it didn't

Absolutely love my induction stove for all those reasons (I have a very small kitchen). The only thing better about gas burners is that I can use a wider variety of cookware - but sorry, that will never offset the rest of the advantages induction brings! It's definitely harder to demonstrate heat pumps, but some before and after data might help convince a few more.

@@bgracey7225 You can get almost all of the advantages without induction. Mine is resistive and can be used with any cookware. The downside is that the glass cook top gets hot and stays hot for a long time after you're finished.

Those old windows are a dream come true for the fuel and electricity companies. You need to keep large systems running almost constantly to keep the home warm or cool. Insulation is a more controversial item, adding it to an old structure will often bring lots of unintended consequences with moisture and mold. Most contractors do not understand the basics of moisture control and typically do things that will make conditions worse.

@@davidparker9676 Welcome to Sweden where not only double but now also triple insulated windows are the norm. The best windows today are not far from an insulated wall!

@@Xanthopteryx What are the low temps where yo live in winter? What are you using for heat?

​@@davidparker9676Sweden is a long country. In The north you can in some areas have -40C or lower (record low -52,6C). -30C is very common. In The middle -20 to 30C is common. Around the middle of the South, were the capital is, a normal winter can go down to -10 to -20, but also some times down to -30. But here is also often very humid. Going South normal is like -5 to -10 but can go to -20. Also very humid. Some still uses direct electric (radiators). In city areas district heating can be common. Also radiators, or floor heating. A lot of heatpumps, air or geothermal. Geothermal more common in north compared to South. In rural areas some use wood pellets or wood, and using wood in rural as a complement is not uncommon. 70 percent of Singel home houses have heat pumps and over 30 percent of Swedens total heating of all the building are done with heat pumps. Where i live, in a housing cooperative with seven houses each containing 6 flats we have a centralt geothermal heat pump. Comverted from district heating like ten years ago to heat pump. My parentes long ago converted from gas (they were shutting down the grid) to air heat pump connected torsdag water radiators inside. Almost no one uses ducted systems here. Either floor heating, water radiators or mini split air when using heat pumps. There are also exhaust air heat pumps. Then you uses active ventilation and take heat from air blowing out to heat air coming in and Walters for tap. There are models of heat pumps today that are guaranteed to work down to -35C.

@@Xanthopteryx I have a friend that lives in Stockholm but I never thought to ask him what they use for heating. -35C heat from a heat pump is impressive. I like the idea of using geothermal too, I have seen a few people on KZfaq make their own DIY geothermal that seemed to work pretty well.

I THINK he was some kind of engineer in the past. Somewhere, I believe I read he did stuff like work on elevators and other large-scale industrial devices. I'm sure he wasn't an HVAC tech, but he has a background in some kind of mechanical and electrical engineering; don't quote me on that, mind, but I'm fairly sure I remember that.

@@ZangamarthPretty sure he's mentioned before his background is in IT.

@@ZangamarthHis background is hotel management (edit: or at least that's what his last job was before he could afford to do creator thing full time, he talks about it in one his videos a few years back). Nothing wrong with that, just what it is. At this point, I'd trust him to do work with me more than I do most of the people I work with.

Too bad they are facing hordes of bean counters, sellers and - worst of all - customers bamboozled by all sorts of nonsense.

Data center engineers out here still live in the overpowered push lane - pull lane mindset. And they definitely don't grasp the edge case intricacies of "non-condensing". 😂

Bruh my God

I didn't see balancer in there but I'll let it slide since no one knows we exist haha

@@tylerbalazic4592 Touché good sir!

At least you get to feel superior since there are many people out there who simple cannot grasp simple concepts like this. Even when explained clearly as in this video.

@@retirementpirate3665 "who simple cannot grasp" Genius.

I grasp the consept of a heat pump. It takes heat from outside and pushes it into your house. The way it does this is with taking a liquid that turns into gas at -40C or something around those lines... And compressing it into a liquid. It takes energy for a liquid to turn into gas it doesn't just do it out of nowhere and it gets that energy from outside and you need to dispatch of energy when you turn something from a Gas to a Liquid. That's how it works. But if the ambiant temperature is too low like in My country were it regularely gets to -30C then it gets hard for the Liquid to turn into gas. Or to find enough energy to do so.

Alec has an inexhaustible supply of patience that he's tapped into from somewhere. In past centuries he'd be burned for this sort of sorcery.

@@johnrauner2515 also in Florida today

To explain HVAC, first you must explain the Universe.

Did someone say latent heat of vaporisation?

Don't overcomplicate it, itz just magic

He did mention that.

You can do this with your current systems as well even if they have shorter cycles, change the fan setting on your thermostats to be set to "on" instead of "auto".

Running the fan longer is not free and at least with my system does make a noticeable difference to my power bill.

​@JonSturm You must have exceptionally low power use compared to average for the fan to be making a big swing on the bill. Not that I personally would go for 24/7/365 as the previous commentor suggested with a dumb tstat set to "on" non stop. Edit: congrats on that low power use by the way. Not hating. Also to say a quick Google tells me you likely have an AC fan motor that uses much more power than my DC fan as well which could lead to the difference.

@@chublezI could definitely see how having the fan always running could be much more expensive if you have leaky duct work, which lots of homes do. If your ducts are leaky, running the fan will be sucking your heated/cooled air out of your living space and into your crawlspace or attic, which would significantly increase your heating/cooling needs

Exactly. Inverter systems are kinda like downhill highway miles because they can run at 25% capacity (or lower if you have a light commercial model)

@@shrededpudding5921 Even my fridge are inverter based and regulate the speed. It slowly ramps up and mostly it runs at a very low speed, and sometimes even slower so you can actually hear the speed! (like an old ignition ball engine).

Just started playing this video on the TV and my gf got up and left the room lol

@@deankruse8751my wife was like this channel again? 😂

I'm on-call (I.T. job) and everything will be on hold for this video 😉

2 of 4 people in this thread need new partners. ;P

​@deankruse8751 well, she maybe doesn't believe it but she got a good bf. You will keep her warm and rich😜

My dad was very HVAC savvy and he was a big proponent of non-stop fans back in the 1970s. We lived in a house with warm water baseboard heat that he designed in the 1960s, so couldn't take advantage of it - but that was the most comfortable house I have ever been in.

Commercial spaces are required to run continuously circulating systems for similar reasonings, from my understanding.

I just replaced my furnace and my old blower motor was using 400+ watts while my new furnace blower motor uses 45 watts. The whole thing is more efficient in every way.

​@goosenotmaverick1156 it's mostly just schools that have been required to have a certain amount of makeup air or portable HEPA fithers since COVID-19 reopening happened in fall of 2020.

I schedule my fan to run on low all day, and it definitely balances the rooms out.

I've had the same idea and looked it up, apparently it wouldn't work because in like an hour the basement would be hotter than the outside.

@@justt1ice Exactly. Geothermal isn't really getting heat from underground, but using the huge thermal inertia of a large volume of dirt. If you could build the great pyramid of Giza next to your house and use it for that it would work the same, but I guess just drilling some holes in the ground and stuffing pipes on them is easier!

@@karellen00 They actually do take the heat from the ground. The temperature, at least here in Sweden, increases with 2,5 degree C/100 meter down. And the temperature at 15 meter is the same as the average temperature above ground at that place. So if you have an average temperature at 6 degree C where you live, the temperature at 115 meter below the surface are around 8,5C. Of course, this could vary a bit depending of geology but it is a good estimate to calculate your need.

@@Xanthopteryx ​ Yes, but the heat from the ground is just the 2.5°C at 100 m depth, that alone wouldn't mean much. What you really use is the thermal inertia, you have so much amount of stuff that it would take longer than an year to get to temperature, so the ground stays at the average temperature. That's why you can both extract heat in winter and dump it in summer. To be fair this that I described is low enthalpy geothermal, there is high enthalpy geothermal too, that directly gets heat from the magma, but the places where it's available are only a few, and it's not the kind of thing you use to heat an house.

Inverter-drive compressors are awesome. I appreciate the efficiency, and I just think the sound of an inverter compressor gradually spooling up from off to max RPM is just cool. Pun intended!

Can you share what brand it is? I need one of those things and for a room that also has a gaming PC.

@@LatitudeSky it's a Midea 14k BTU/h unit. Model MP12SVKBA3RCM. Edit: for reference, the room is about 125 sq. ft. in a basement with 2 medium windows, neither of which receive direct sunlight. The door is always (except enter and exit) closed. And there is a constant heat load of 300-500W from my server rack, plus the ~600W from my gaming PC when it's in use. The unit is way, way, way more than sufficient for the space. There was a smaller model available from the same brand when I bought it, but it was only 10% or so cheaper so I didn't think it made sense. In the future, I may consider moving this unit to the main (large, kitchen + living + dining, room) and putting a smaller one in here. The exact model number might vary between countries. They actually make this exact unit as a reversible heat pump, according to the manual, but it isn't available in Canada. (Maybe its cold-weather performance is garbage, idk.) It didn't matter to me, because the room it's in never needs additional heating. Fair warning, I do have my gripes with it, but they're mostly minor and I'd still buy it (or other Midea units) again. There may or probably is better available, but having one with a wifi connection that could be controlled locally (it's on wifi but can't reach the internet) was a top priority for me. Canadian Tire had two dual-hose brands available and the other didn't have any network connectivity so I went with this one. Edit: Midea makes a cool window mount unit that they call U-shaped, so the inside and outside portions are normal sized, but the window only needs to be open a couple of inches for the refrigerant piping. If I didn't live in a basement where all the windows open on hinges instead of tracks, I'd give that one a shot too for sure. (The hinged window is an issue for the hose unit too. I had to fabricate a custom shroud that covers the entire window because the provided materials were designed for sliding windows only.)

@@aspecreviews it is kind of a cool sound. Tbh, it's a bit annoying (during the ramp up only), but the Eco preset makes it ramp up so slowly that that noise goes away. If it were in a bedroom, I'd leave it on that preset or at least switch it to that at night.

been looking into an inverter AC just for the ability to soft start so i don't have to turn off other big loads on the inverter/generator whenever it kicks on to avoid overloading it.

Geothermal is completely different than heat pumps like the one in the video. A geothermal heater needs to go into the earth.

Dont compare the old devices to stuff produced today. The old devices are often better quality than current ones. The old one may be working fine for 30 years (Are they sized to run constantly?!) but current one sized exactly will die on 6-7 years due to wear running non stop. There is a reason why current devices are somewhat cheaper than the old ones. Mass production is a factor but cheap solutions are a factor too. My furnace and AC are 15years old and are loud.

​@@answeris4217 It pretty much is the same thing, except instead of venting the heat/cold into the air, you're venting it into the ground. It still is a heat pump, though. I think what might be confusing is the use of the word "Geothermal" instead of "ground-source" heat pump

@@answeris4217 Americans tend to use the term geothermal to mean 'ground source', not, drilling down to get heat from the molten core of the earth, if thats the confusion? If you are still thinking ground source, the tech is the same. its just the heat exchanger is in the ground rather than the air. the tech is basically the same, but a GSHP i more efficient because the tempeature of the ground is more constant, and tends to be closer to the temperature you actually want. plus no defrost cycles etc.

@@answeris4217 As a person that is Certified in the field I know what I am talking about. Geothermal heapump are heatpumps that use a liquid to air exchanger. in some a liquid to liquid exchanger. Also you completely miss the point anyway.

And he hasn't even scratched the surface. What if I told you that some of the mini-splits can power down to 5-10% of their peak power and achieve COPs of over 10 when temperatures are above 7℃. And of course using the same heat pump for both residential heating/cooling and domestic hot water all in one!

CED makers like this.

You can read them for amusement. Not for education.

After reading your comment, I had to revise my opinion about our building codes, specifically the part that states that fully north-facing units are not permissible. It's so much easier to move heat around within one apartment by, um, leaving the doors open, for example.

It's definitely not how I want it (and go figure the techs didn't do anything beyond "auto," but the last time I dug into the staging settings I couldn't make heads or tails of some of the metrics. Sounds like "enable reverse staging" was what I missed - thanks! I'll play around with it more when I get a chance.

you have to set it to manually manage staging or something. i haven't done it on a heatpump but only with a furnace. that contractor initially refused to connect w2 and just use the furnace board's timer and to add insult to injury jumpered w1 and w2 so it was locked on high heat thinking that is how to enable the board's timer. @@TechnologyConnextras

@@Jon-hx7peoh for fuck's sake. it's so insulting that you pay for new technology and the people who are selling it to you can't even be arsed to read the instruction manual.

that's the way it is. the people installing physically know how to install much better than you or i - but they know little about the equipment because they don't read manuals or attend training.@@evilspoons

Professor Twitter to the rescue. If I get cancer, that's where I'll go.

People are often far more prone to motivated reasoning than they realise, and then some corners of the Internet attract others who deliberately indulge in it for thrills.

This is a good point! My way oversized furnace does the same thing. I have to close the vents in the upstairs and active rooms, including the one with the thermostat. I've tried cycling the blower fan to move the air around in between heating cycles but it gets obliterated once that bad boy kicks on.

Depending of your particular furnace, you may be able to change the firing rate. Find a good tech in you area.

This is what I experience as well, my furnace will never run for more than 15 minutes at a time and it gets super hot, and then when the fan cuts out, it gets cold quickly, and the cycle continues. Id prefer a cooler furnace with longer fan run times to even it out.

Can your thermostat turn on just the fan? That will help balance the heat out.

@@mangamaster03Some smart thermostats do this as a means of eeking out every bit of energy from the furnace, by manually commanding the fan to run after the call for heat has finished and only shutting it down after they see the temperature stop rising.

My dream setup is something like what you described. How beautiful it could be if builders and A/C companies moved forward instead of just getting the easiest thing.

A heat pump already is a dehumidifier, so you don't really need the second one. A basic external exhaust fan will cover the third requirement...or just occasionally opening a window

@known1443 A heat pump can dehumidify, and some of the better dehumidifiers are heatpumps, however. The maximum dehumidification of a heat pump is the saturation point of the indoor radiator. This means that to reduce the humidity below the 100% humidity level indoors you must reduce the temperature of the indoor radiator substantially below the desired indoor set temperature and pump that heat against the indoor outdoor delta-t. If you have a heatpump in the air handler of a ducted hvac system, you often have to do this anyway, but with minisplits, you can have substantially larger indoor coils, with larger surface areas that don't need to go that far below the desired temperature, increasing efficiency. However, this does limit the capacity for air dehumidification somewhat. Further, to use a heat pump with coils inside and outside the building envelope as a dehumidifier you must cool the air to be dehumidified, and this is not always desirable. There is a workaround where you cool to dehumidify, and then heat the space to regain temperature, but doing so against the delta-t of the building envelope is less efficient. Finally, a heat pump is sized to work for the heat load of the building, not nessisarily for the enthalpy for humidity reduction in the worst case, and it can be that this does not match up. All of this means that it is more efficient, and gives better results to use separate mini-split cassettes in each room for heating/cooling, connected to either individual outdoor units or a shared multi-split outdoor unit and then use a separate dehumidifier on the fresh air system, treating them with a separation of concerns. This does increase the cost of the whole system somewhat over having a single centralised indoor coil in the air handling system, but generally gives better results, especially since you can use smaller ducting to each room for supply and return, as you now only have to supply fresh air, and the return balance, rather than air for the heat load of the building. It also reduces noise leakage between rooms and reduces noise from the hvac system when done well. So basically, you can do it with a single oversized heatpump and a fan return. You really do get a nicer space if you didn't though.

@@known1443 The advantage of an air exchanger system over a basic fan or open window is capturing energy during the air exchange. You can pre-heat or pre-cool incoming air using the outgoing air, reducing the overall energy required to maintain the desired house temperature.

@@missamo80 not to mention you get filtered indoor air, which is significant with the particles produced by internal combustion engines. Also you can get more air exchanges with the same power consumption. Finally there are ervs which also equalise the humidity of the outdoor and indoor air, reducing the requirements for humidity control.

Get a variable speed system and never worry about it....

You can use the propane for other things too like clothes drying, hot water, and cooking.

I only heat the house in the cold months. Although I do wash in warm water. Electricity is 4X the price of gas 6:00 per kWh for me.

We keep our house at 69-70degF during the winter and 78-79 during summer. End of Jan and early Feb was very cold, but our nat gas bill was $144 (hot water is also gas). The house is a 2019 construction and has 2,800 sq ft. I don't know why so many people pay so much, to be honest. Maybe they have 80 deg F in winter and 70 deg in summer? I have a utility bill tracker where I record all our monthly bills (water/sewage, electricity, gas, internet and phone). Our COMBINED electricity+gas yearly bill was $2,195, split almost evenly between the two.

@@lukeearthcrawler896 insulation. Thats the reason, a new 2019 house will be well insulated.

@@lukeearthcrawler896 Good insulation in your house, I expect.

@@lukeearthcrawler896 I don't have the luxury of having nat. gas. (Even though a line runs right through the township. Unbelievable, right? (- You'd think they'd force them to provide access, having provided the 100'+ right-of-way) Here in the Northeast, it's typically fuel oil, if you don't have nat gas.

We were even told our heat pump would be an "9 months of the year" system and we'd need to rely on the furnace when it gets really cold. Frankly, except for a couple days the year before when we had a cold snap down to like -10 F, the heat pump has worked great and the furnace only needs to run for the hot water

I always thought "heat pump" made more sense... At least in my brain. We are pumping heat from the outdoors to the indoors, indoors to the outdoors, inside this refrigerator to the outside of the refrigerator, from the air outside the water heater into the water inside the tank, etc....

Ac 2.0

@@ClaytonDorrissome part of general public would understand "reverse air conditioners" easier and would be less prone to fearmongering rather than with shorter and more elegant "heat pump". It's simply because everyone knows what AC is and it doesn't need explaining, even a single teeny tiny sentence.

How about "bi-directional heat movers" ? :-)

@@user-mx6hu9yv6l Interesting opinion, given my summer electric bill is $480/month to run a heat pump and my winter electirc bill is $90/month to run a not-heatpump aka, forced gas furnace with a $90 gas bill.....

As a Sweden i would say that, yes, things have come along in six years, but not that much. They were really really really good at six years ago too. 20 years ago you could get a heat pump that worked down to -20C. A side note: The first heat pump in Sweden for domestic home was installed in 1948. That is 76 years ago...

The gas fired water heaters here require forced extraction to outside the house.

It's not even that new! I have worked on many apartment buildings with water source heat pumps. They generally have an in unit heat pump, which rejects or absorbs heat from the water loop, then a chiller and a boiler keeps the loop around a design temp.

I see what you did there

Sadly as far as I know, no-one does house sized "variable flow with heat recovery" systems, which is why it was mentioned only in the context of apartment blocks. The smallest system I've found so far has an outside unit that's about 1 cubic meter (around 3x3x3 feet) which wouldn't be acceptable to most home owners, and would be seriously over sized for anything but the largest homes. *8')

It sure seems that way and also an overlap with people who confuse watts and volts and amps a bunch.

As an electrician, electricity is hard to explain to people at all. Sometimes. Actually most times lol

@@goosenotmaverick1156It's sometimes hard to explain electricity even to electricians. I have heard so much bullshit over the years from professionals with years or decades of experience.

@@0106johnny i swear up and down to people that we just move magic with (mostly) copper 😂 I once you get deep in the weeds on it, I start to get lost, no lie. So I don't doubt that one bit

Proof: there are many perpetual motion vids (It's impossible)

@@goosenotmaverick1156 So I should preface with: I'm certified in neither, but I've got a physics degree and a willingness to take things apart, and have taught myself / learned from friends who are certified over the years. And at least in my experience, despite electricity being the more interesting and more likely to kill you if you fuck up, HVAC (Or, I should say, Thermodynamics) is harder to explain to people than electricity unless you're getting really into the weeds of induced voltages and shit no one wants to deal with. Something about the idea that heat is energy is heat just confuses the shit out of people. What do you mean my outdoor air conditioner is hot? That makes no sense, my AC is supposed to be cold!... Well, you see it's transferring the heat energy from your house outdoo... WITCHCRAFT!

You had an air flow problem or metering device/ref charge issue. Over-sizing causes short cycles not icing of the indoor coil.

Believe me the residential units are not designed with industrial grade bearings …..

A pumped hydro-electric storage facility I have been to has a spare-bearing in stock; the expected life of the first bearing is 50 years; that runs-out in 2028. They spin the thing virtually all the time to stabilize the grid, even when it is not pumping nor generating - i think they called that 'making bars' for some reason. [power-factor?, bar-charts?] To spin it 'dry' [of water] they fill the chamber with compressed-air to drive water out the bottom of the 'bell'. The total weight of the spinning unit is 150 Tons. Bearings LAST!

You are making an incorrect connection here. The dynamics of bearings in a power plant have very little to do with the roller bearings employed in your furnace. The primary failure mode for these small light duty bearings is a failure of the shielding which allows lubricant to leave or debris to enter. They almost never fail through the stop start stop skidding dynamics of the rolling elements.

I always have this thought as well. Seems the uppity northerners need to go back to school.

It's so weird that American installers rip you off by charging so much more for a heat pump. Where I live nobody would ever buy an A/C only for their home.

How'd you jam all those monitors in your panel?

@@thezfunkThey just fit within the panel. Its an old panel with only 14 circuits in use. I have a thermal camera that I used to be sure it wasn't creating an overheating danger.