Heat Pump???

News from Kentucky......

My mother keeps scolding me for actually mentioning that it is COLD here in Kentucky.  Yes, the average temp has been in the 20's and below for 4 days and yes every time the Polar Vortex decides to descend from Canada into Michigan all the weather you would have gotten comes here.......

The problem is - Kentucky is really not set up for this kind of weather.
Did you know there are a lot of hills here???  Ice + Hills = Never a good driving scenario.
They do not have snow plows - here in Bowling Green we haven't gotten much snow, but some of the state has been hammered.
Almost everything here runs on Electricity.   THAT totally sucks, they are having issues like you would in the summer - asking us to actually turn our thermostats down to 60 degrees-  YES THEY REALLY DID THAT.

Which leads us to the real problem of the day....
Did you know that more houses have HEAT PUMPS and not actual Furnaces?????

  Now, I have gotten a major lesson in how those suckers work this week.  (Especially since we got our December electric bill at the same time as the Polar Vortex came to visit.)

Here in Kentucky the standard temperature right now should be between 35-50 degrees.
At that temp, the Heap Pump does okay.  It might have to turn on the extra heating strips a couple times to help pump up the house.  But did you know that they never really send HOT air into the house?  At most it is exactly the temperature or sort of that you need to keep the house around 67-70 (or whatever you love to keep it at.)

Heat pumps work better in the summer.  I read a page where the Heating/Cooling guy said that if you made the Heap pump big enough for a northern winter, it would be SOOOO big that your house would be an igloo in the summer.. (I'm adding emphasis here....)
So, they add these weird heat strips in the house (under my house) in the ducts to help keep the house a normal temp so the pipes don't freeze.

So, we hear the outside pump, right outside our bedroom that runs almost constantly - to keep it from getting frost all up and down the inside of it.  Then the heat strips come on to actually heat the air for the house.
For anyone who has ever burnt their feet on a register in the winter waiting for the Furnace to heat up a house, you understand how VERY sad it is to not feel anything come out of the registers here.
(I noticed the same lack of cold force in the summer too.)

I am betting that our Electric bill for January (comes late Feb) will be 3 to 4x's what we paid in November.  I'm disturbed by the amount we are paying for December and we weren't here for 2 weeks.

So, here is the cautionary tale - Heat pumps can be much cheaper to run in warmer climates, but woe- is- me to the people in Michigan or North East who have one.  Hope they all have fire places - which we also do not have.....  But that is a whole other post...

Stay Toasty my friends, Stay Toasty.....