Co-op Currents invites members to write in with their honest experiences buying and installing hot water heat pumps, cold climate heat pumps, electric vehicles, and other new electric tech. Submit stories to currents@wec.coop.
Amy Lepage: Hot Water Heat Pump – June 2025
I recently had a hot water heat pump installed in my house which is shared with a family of two, and a friend who is staying with me after she lost her house in the Montpelier flood and my kids when they are home from college. The hot water heat pump replaced a rooftop solar hot water system that was becoming more and more unreliable.
Currently, the community I live in receives hot water from a central wood pellet boiler system that pipes hot water underground to each of the six houses. It provides domestic hot water and heat in winter and cooler months when the pellet boiler is running. I had rooftop solar hot water panels for the 5-6 months a year when the wood pellet boiler was turned off.
For the past few years my solar hot water system has had some issues and wasn’t viable anymore. After researching what was involved in replacing the solar hot water system, I decided to shift to a hot water heat pump instead. I had just enough space to accommodate it.
Efficiency Vermont had a rebate/grant program that helped make this project doable for me and I now enjoy very reliable hot water whenever needed. The installer I worked with was very knowledgeable and once we had a plan in place, the work was completed in a day.
One difference, besides having reliable hot water, is that I sometimes notice when the condenser turns on. It’s in a basement area so it’s not annoying—it’s just different. Another perk in addition to the reliable hot water is that the condenser cools the space the hot water tank is located in. Come summer this will come in handy because I’ll be able to open the door to another space in the basement and use it as “air conditioning.”
I am happy with the new setup, and we have plenty of hot water for all of us.
Amy Lepage, East Montpelier
Ellen Seeger: Cold Climate Heat Pump – June 2025
I had a Mitsubishi cold-climate heat pump installed in August of 2021 by a reputable local HVAC retail and repair service. I live in a very well-insulated 17 year-old house with two floors, each of area about 670 square feet. I live mainly on the upper floor which has hot water heating baseboard along one wall, and the basement has radiant floor heating
The indoor part of the heat pump consists of only one head, located on the wall inside the largest room on the first floor. I purchased the heat pump mainly to provide cooling in the summer, as I have large south-facing plate glass windows that allow the house to really heat up on a sunny day. But I’ve come to use it to supplement the baseboard heating in the winter as well, as I’ve found it heats up the first floor faster than the baseboard heating does.
I found the instruction manual to be complicated and somewhat daunting, and have settled on finding an appropriate setting and leaving it there, turning it off at bedtime and on again in the morning. When using it as an air conditioner in the summer, I am careful to turn the fan mode on for about 20 minutes after turning off the cooling in order to dry out the inside of the unit. Otherwise, mold may build up inside it, requiring an annual cleaning. But if you don’t let the mold grow, my experience is that you just have to take out the dust filters and clean them off a few times a year. I haven’t had any problems with it over my 3.5 years of using it. Because my house is well insulated, it doesn’t have to work very hard, and my electric bills are reasonable.
My brother is knowledgeable of heat pump performance and what would best suit my house, so I did not use Efficiency Vermont for consultation. I did receive a discount on the wholesale price of the unit. Keep in mind that an electrician must run the wiring to the heat pump; for me that amounted to $670 beyond the cost of the heat pump installation.
After 3.5 years, I am still very happy with my decision to purchase my heat pump. I have not had to pay for repairs or maintenance in that time. While I have used it to augment the heat provided by a wood pellet boiler, which is relatively clean, the ability to both heat and cool over the whole year is a big plus for me.
Ellen Seeger, East Montpelier
Don Douglas: Hot Water Heat Pump – February 2025
We decided to replace our gas-fired water heater about three years ago. The old water heater was a replacement for the electric water heater that had failed just when WEC was paying an incentive to change from electric to propane to help members keep their bills as low as possible.
This time there’s an incentive to change from fossil fuels back to a heat pump electric water heater. The gas-fired water heater was still working but we wanted to try the new heat pump water heater for a couple of reasons. We heat our two hundred year old house with a wood furnace which is in the old root cellar just behind the wall for our kitchen and dining room. The cellar is very hot all winter while we are burning wood. We wanted to capture the excess heat and use it to heat our water. The idea of a heat pump is basically very simple, it’s just moving heat from one place to another. The old water heater used electric resistance to produce heat, like a toaster or a regular electric stove. The heat pump transfers the heat from the air in the cellar to the water in the tank. The other advantage for us was the location of the new water heater. We moved it from a far corner to the center of the wall in front of the wood furnace. That let us put in a laundry sink in that corner where there was a drain for the washing machine.
There other were other benefits I did not realize at first. The cellar was always a little damp and during the summer months we had to run a dehumidifier or mold would begin to grow. The heat pump water heater also takes humidity out of the air which we could channel down to the drain where we installed the laundry sink. And in the summer, besides removing humidity, the heat pump water heater also acts as an air conditioner and made the whole house a few degrees cooler.
However, it’s hard to be an advocate for energy efficiency when you suffer financially. First of all, every application is a little bit different, it really depends on the specific location in your house and what benefits you can realize. There is an incentive from Efficiency Vermont and WEC, but the heat pump water heater is still more expensive than a traditional propane water heater. In addition, the heat pump is a much more complicated device. After less than three years the motherboard failed. It was under warranty and a new one was shipped very quickly, but the warranty did not cover the labor. I believe that all of the brands available use the same vendors for the electronics and I was unhappy to learn that this is the sixth upgrade to the heat pump water heater that we purchased. It is a Bradford White and the model number starts with RE2H. Perhaps the seventh model will be more reliable. Nobody expects to purchase a new water heater every three years!
Don Douglas of Orange is the Treasurer of WEC’s Board of Directors