Concerned about climate change, more Chicagoans are buying all-electric home heating systems
When Derek Eder started looking for an all-electric heating system for his 100-year-old home in Oak Park, some local furnace installers refused to work with him, saying the technology wasn’t up to the challenge of a Midwestern winter.
Other installers told him they’d do the job, but only if he invested in a natural gas backup system for very cold days.
But Eder, who was trying to go all-electric at home to fight climate change, pressed on, eventually finding a local company that was happy to replace his gas furnace with two high-efficiency electric heat pumps and an all-electric backup system.
“It’s been doing great,” said Eder, 41, the owner of a Chicago technology consulting company.
And yes, he said, he was including the recent subzero cold snap: “We had plenty of heating.”
Already popular in the South and parts of the Southwest, heat pumps are now making headway in Chicago and other subzero cities, thanks to better cold-weather technology developed in Europe and Asia, as well as concerns about climate change and financial incentives from utilities and the federal government.
The heating and cooling industry doesn’t release state or regional sales data, but Mitsubishi Electric Trane HVAC U.S., a major heat-pump supplier, told the Tribune that heat pump sales in the Chicago area market have increased by double digits year over year for the past 10 years.
At Heatmasters, a 74-year-old HVAC company in the Jefferson Park neighborhood, residential services manager Leonard Sacchitello reported that heat pump sales are “way up.”
That’s in keeping with anecdotal evidence of rapidly growing installations in Northern states.
“In Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Minnesota, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, we’re seeing heat pump demand kind of skyrocket,” said Josh Quinnell, a senior research scientist at the Center for Energy and Environment, a Minnesota clean energy nonprofit.
Quinnell said that makes sense because people are looking for ways to save energy and lower their carbon footprints and heat pumps are “a really viable strategy.”
Residential energy use accounts for about 20% of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, according to a 2020 research article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“From my perspective (heat pumps) are just as transformational as electric vehicles and solar energy on your roof: the big, big steps that consumers can make,” said Quinnell.
Staying warm
Heat pumps don’t burn fuel; they move energy from one place to another.
That makes them highly efficient, and a bit counterintuitive.
By condensing and evaporating a fluid called a refrigerant, a heat pump transfers energy from outside into your home, where the energy provides heat. And on hot days, the heat pump works in reverse, using energy from warm air inside your house to provide cooling and to move heat outside.
If the second part of that equation sounds familiar, it’s because air conditioners are a kind of heat pump.
Earlier heat pump models didn’t catch on in the northern United States. But then, about 10 years ago, more advanced cold-weather models arrived here from Europe and Asia, where energy costs are higher.
Skepticism remains, and studies of the cold-weather heat pumps tend to be small, focusing on up to 50 households. But by now there are dozens of these smaller studies from northern climates in the United States, Canada and Europe, according to Quinnell, and they’ve all shown more or less the same thing.
“Yes, heat pumps work,” he said of the findings. “In fact, when they’re specifically designed for cold temperatures, they work at these very cold temperatures.”
That’s the message coming out of Maine, where furnaces often run on oil, an expensive fuel. In July, the state announced it had already achieved its goal of installing 100,000 new heat pumps by 2025.
That’s in a state with only 600,000 homes, according to Andy Meyer, a residential program manager at Efficiency Maine, the quasi-governmental agency that runs Maine’s energy efficiency programs.
“People are extremely happy” with the technology, he said, citing customer satisfaction surveys. Of 9,669 people surveyed since August 2019, he said, 88% gave their heat pump experience a rating of 9 or 10.
His home heat pumps stood up to a minus-34-degree windchill last year, he said — and they kept the house at 69 degrees.
In Chicago, it’s common for HVAC contractors to recommend backup heating systems for heat pumps, which are sold as wall units called minisplits or as central units that look like furnaces and often go in the basement. Both types of heat pumps are paired with outdoor units that resemble condensers for central air conditioning systems.
Backup heating options for the very coldest days include gas and lower-efficiency electricity.
There’s also the option of going with a cold-weather heat pump without backup heat. The worst-case scenario, Quinnell said, is that on the very coldest days, temperatures may be several degrees colder than you’d like — say, 64 degrees, rather than 68.
The caveat, he said, is that this assumes you have good insulation and sealing. If your home is very leaky, temperatures will be lower.
In the Chicago area, several homeowners told the Tribune that they had stayed warm with heat pumps this winter.
Joe Lynn, a news photographer who went with a heat pump for his family’s Edgewater condo, said he prefers the smooth consistency of the heat to the variability of furnaces, with their on-and-off cycles.
“The temperature has been rock solid,” he said. “It’s been really nice.”
Vel Natarajan, 56, an acupuncturist, said he has been happy with the heat in his family’s 2,000-square-foot home in Grayslake.
He found an installer who was willing to use a wood-burning fireplace insert for cold day backup, but during the recent subzero cold snap, Natarajan, who has a background in engineering, tried an experiment.
On a night when the windchill dropped to minus 15, he ran the heat pump without the backup system.
“The house was set at 65 degrees, and we woke to a 63-degree temperature in the house,” he said.
“It was pretty fun to do, I’ve got to tell you,” he said of the experiment, which was based on his own calculations. “It was a fun little adventure for our family.”
Early adopters
Eder was already interested in protecting the environment when a friend recommended the book “Electrify” by the engineer and inventor Saul Griffith.
The book helped popularize the idea that electrification — or replacing fossil fuels with electricity — is the low-hanging fruit of the transition to clean energy.
By running cars, appliances, heating systems and power plants on electricity, we can use existing technology to slash our greenhouse gas emissions and put ourselves well on the way to reaching our climate goals, Griffith argues.
Eder was taken by the book, and by a speech by the friend who recommended it.
He went on to help build a website, Decarb My State, that shows what people can do to go electric and reduce their carbon emissions, and that got him thinking.
He started to wonder: What if he actually did what he was advocating? What if he went electric at home?
Eder, who lives in a two-story brick home with his wife and their two children, got a solar roof in 2022, then moved on to electric heat, appliances, and hot water. He has documented his journey at Electrifying Our Oak Park Home.
Eder’s main heat pump cost him $16,250 before a $1,400 ComEd rebate and the minisplit was $7,000 before a $1,350 Com Ed rebate. There was also a $2,000 federal tax credit, bringing the combined cost down to $18,500.
There were additional costs, including $2,975 for insulation, attic sealing and a related test, offset by a $225 rebate from Nicor Gas, and $1,440 for drywall repairs and painting.
“Insulation is still probably the most economical thing that we did,” Eder said. That reduced the total energy needed to heat the house by 20%.
Heat pumps cost very roughly $10,000 to $20,000, not much more than the $8,000 to $16,000 it costs to replace both your furnace and air conditioning, according to Matt Nickels, vice president of Energy Matters, an energy efficiency and HVAC company in Oak Park.
One of the biggest challenges for Eder was simply finding a company that would install an all-electric heat pump.
“It was, frankly, really discouraging,” he said.
When he did his research, about a year ago, a lot of HVAC companies told him they didn’t install heat pumps, or that heat pumps wouldn’t work in his home, he said. Some suggested a hybrid system, with a heat pump and gas backup heat, in one stack, but that didn’t make sense for Eder, who wanted to make use of the free electricity generated by his solar roof.
His advice is to look for installers who are willing to run the numbers on your home: how old the building is, how big it is, how many windows it has, what it’s made of. The installers who did that for Eder did what’s called a Manual J load calculation.
“It was the (installers) who were really up to date and used those tools — especially the Manual J — who were like, ‘OK, this will work, this is viable, here’s our plan,’” Eder said.
He found two installers and chose Energy Matters to do the job.
This is his first winter with his heat pump, which was installed in April, so he’s not sure how long it will take for the system to pay for itself. He plans to add to his blog when he has more data.
Asked if he wants to serve as an example for friends and neighbors who are considering going electric, Eder smiled.
“Yeah,” he said. “Because I didn’t have one.”
