Heat pumps can save the world - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston
Last week, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a $2 billion program over the next eight years to support the installation in private residences of heat pumps.
The program provides $10,000 per household rebates to up to 820,000 homeowners installing eligible electric cold climate air source heat pumps.
I have a long history with heat pumps. Way back in the 1970s, Blyth Festival co-founder James Roy designed renovations to Blyth Memorial Hall. The old furnace that used to heat the building in winter was removed and replaced with heat pumps at the rear of the building - this was 50 years ago. The heat pumps took heat from the air to warm the building and acted as air-conditioners in summer to cool the crowds the Festival attracted.
I had just become the Festival’s first general manager and my assistant was Anne Mann, whose husband was Cliff Mann who had a job, at that point, with the Listowel company that installed the heat pumps.
I remember talking to Cliff one day when he came in to visit his wife. He explained to me how the heat pumps worked. I remember remarking to Cliff that if heat pumps could take heat from the air to heat buildings, they should be able to take even more from the earth.
Some years later I was talking to Cliff, who by then had his own plumbing and heating company in Lucknow, and he told me that indeed geothermal furnaces had been developed. In fact, his company became a main installer of the geothermal furnaces.
Then, 15 years ago, we had saved enough money, and the federal and provincial governments had come up with enough grants, that we were able to hire Cliff’s Plumbing and Heating to install geothermal heating in our house, including hundreds of feet of plastic piping below ground to collect the heat.
Our oil bill immediately disappeared. Our electricity bill increased, but only a fraction of the cost of the fuel bill. We figure we’ve long since saved more than we spent on the system.
The Prime Minister’s new program is much cheaper than geothermal. Installers will put a heat-exchanger on the outside of the building (as Memorial Hall did more than 50 years ago).
How home heating has changed! We have lived for more than 50 years in a house that, I’m guessing, was built about 1900. I live in the McGowan settlement, which meant all the houses were substantially built.
The house we live in was heated by wood until the previous owners installed an oil furnace. Up on the hill sits the grandest of the McGowan settlement homes, but, until recently, it was heated by an outdoor wood-furnace that piped the hot air into the house.
Missing from this list for urban residents was coal. When we first moved to Blyth there was a coal warehouse near the railway station visited by local trucks that hauled coal to local homes and businesses that were heated with it.
It’s remarkable how things have changed in 200 years. We first burned wood because there were so many trees around before we cleared the land. It was basically free fuel. Both at the house I grew up in and here on our farm, we had woodsheds that stored a winter’s worth of wood for heating the house and cooking the meals. We had the woodshed and summer kitchen torn off and John Rutledge designed a light-filled room that’s still our favourite room in the house. (Ironically the house I grew up in is now owned by Old Order Mennonites who heat with wood.)
And now our government is encouraging 820,000 homeowners to install heat pumps so they won’t use fuel oil or natural gas. (I wonder what the Premier of Alberta thinks when the Prime Minister also promised to help build a pipeline to the west coast to help get oil and gas to other places in the world?)
The big thing about all those heat pumps is that they will reduce Canada’s emissions by over 25 megatonnes - the equivalent of taking nearly eight and a half million cars off our roads for one year. As far as the individual homeowners go, they will save an average of $1,400 a year for households currently heating with oil or electrical baseboard heating.
I have lived with geothermal heat for 15 years now and can swear by the comfort and savings. Soon, we’re going to have to sell this house and move to town. We just had the geo-thermal furnace serviced by the serviceman who assures us the furnace is still good for years.
Thinking back, I can’t believe the changes that we’ve seen in home heating. But climate change is altering the future. My grandchildren must either change, or have to live with the changes their environment brings. Here’s hoping the Prime Minister’s heat pump program will change that.