I talked to my electrician, who I’ve used for many years. But he’s clearly influenced by the conservative media’s take on all this climate stuff. He was pooh-poohing heat pumps: “Natural gas is great. If you get a heat pump, the grid’s going to collapse!”
Going from a gas furnace to a ducted heat pump was a little painful because we had to redo some of our ducts. Heat pumps need a higher volume of air circulation to work because the temperature differential isn’t as strong.
But by far themostpainful piece of the retrofit was theblown-in insulation. We had to Swiss-cheese our walls and move every single piece of furniture in our whole house because the contractor needed4 feet of working space around all the walls.
We had a nuisance outage — the power went out for a couple of hours. I was traveling that week, so he texted me: “Hey, I just got this ping, and our block is blacked out. I didn’t even notice! We still have power here. This is great.”
