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Matt and Sean talk about heat pump comparisons, and a full long-form discussion with Paul Braren from TinkerTry.com
Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, Did I Get the Wrong Heat Pump: Geothermal vs Air Source https://youtu.be/CPwQTUaU-jI?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7uzySCXq8VXhodHB5B5OiQ
A couple of posts about our heat pump comparison on TinkerTry.com:
https://tinkertry.com/planning-for-heat-pump-comfort
https://tinkertry.com/geothermal-vs-air-source-heat-pumps-feat-undecided-and-tinkertry
Matt and Sean talk about heat pump comparisons, and a full long-form discussion with Paul Braren from TinkerTry.com
Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, Did I Get the Wrong Heat Pump: Geothermal vs Air Source https://youtu.be/CPwQTUaU-jI?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7uzySCXq8VXhodHB5B5OiQ
A couple of posts about our heat pump comparison on TinkerTry.com:
https://tinkertry.com/planning-for-heat-pump-comfort
https://tinkertry.com/geothermal-vs-air-source-heat-pumps-feat-undecided-and-tinkertry
Follow us on X: @stilltbdfm @byseanferrell @mattferrell or @undecidedmf
Undecided with Matt Ferrell: https://www.youtube.com/undecidedmf
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Creators and Guests
What is Still To Be Determined?
Join Matt Ferrell from the YouTube Channel, Undecided, and his brother Sean Ferrell as they discuss electric vehicles, renewable energy, smart technologies, and how they impact our lives. Still TBD continues the conversation from the Undecided YouTube channel.
Sean Ferrell: Today on Still to be Determined, we're going to talk about heat pumps. And if you're all having deja vu, you're not the only one. That's right. We're getting heat pump conversation again, but we're doing it a little bit differently. We are leaning directly into Matt's most recent. This is of course Undecided with Matt Ferrell where Matt took a look at heat pumps but he didn't do it by himself. This time he brought a friend. Paul Braren joined Matt to talk about heat pumps because they have two different types and they compared their year long or more than year long results with having run the heat pumps in their homes. And we have a special treat for everybody today. Normally what we do is we would visit our mailbag here on Still to be Determined and then we would jump into the mailbag on Undecided with Matt Ferrell. Today we're jumping right to Undecided with Matt Ferrell because we're also going to share the complete full conversation between Matt and Paul as they discussed everything about what they had seen in their homes and how the numbers compared from one home to another. So we hope you'll join us for that deep dive later in this video. But before we get into that, as usual, I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I write some sci fi. I write some horror. With me, as always, is my brother Matt. He is that Matt behind Undecided with Matt Ferrell. Matt, how are you today?
Matt Ferrell: Sean? I'm ready for winter to be over. Yeah, we, we. I'm done.
Sean Ferrell: We have been trying to avoid too much weather talk because you don't want to, you know, some viewers pointed out, hey, you talk about the weather every time. All right, fair enough. There's also the entire. You kind of like to have these be a little like bubble so that they're timeless. Hey, here's a conversation. It's from six months ago. Why are they talking about snow? We try not to do that too much.
Matt Ferrell: I got cabin fever. Sean. I got cabin fever.
Sean Ferrell: Tell me about it. Yeah, you got cabin fever, but you have a car. So when you want to go someplace, you can. You go from where you are where you're home and you're warm and go somewhere else where you're also warm. Ah, it's been a long winter.
Matt Ferrell: Yes, it has.
Sean Ferrell: Anyway, as I mentioned, we're going to jump into the mailbag from Matt's most recent. This is his look with Paul. Not what I expected. Did I get the wrong heat pump? It's a comparison of one type of heat pump to another. And Matt, do you want to give us, before we dive into the comments, a a very quick explanation of how are these two heat pumps different?
Matt Ferrell: Okay. Yeah. My house has a geothermal heat pump system which means I have a 400 foot deep well that has a tube that goes down and then back up again. And I basically get the heat for my house from the earth. And Paul has an air source heat pump which extracts the heat from the outside air to heat his home. And there's pros and cons to both of those, which is why I wanted to make this video to kind of demonstrate the pros and cons of those systems.
Sean Ferrell: We received a lot of emails or not emails. We received a lot of comments on your video which point to people's experiences with different types of models. A lot. There were so many comments and I did not pull. I did not pull them because they were all anecdotal. But it's very interesting from a, if you're considering heat pumps perspective to dive into the comments in Matt's most recent. Because there are so many experiences shared which are specific to I live here and had this experience and somebody else. Well, I live here and I had this experience. Not all of these line up one to one. And where you are in the country is going to have a big impact. As Matt has talked about previously in the channel and he just described here, he's getting his heat from a geothermal digging into the earth. Digging into the earth is not going to be an option for everybody. Right, Matt?
Matt Ferrell: Yeah, it's going to be tough for some people.
Sean Ferrell: So depending on where you are, Paul in his experience may say, oh, Matt had benefits that I don't have. Depending on where you are, you may not be able to access the benefits Matt does simply because your geography doesn't allow it. So all of this is to be taken as a starting point. I don't think Matt would say I have definitively answered the question. I don't think Paul would say he's answered the question. But both of them have experiences as well as all those commenters. So jump back into the comments on that video and take a look at various experiences. I think it's a really interesting perspective. There were also comments like this one from Zippy Mouse. Zippy writes in to say, here in South Carolina we run AC most of the year and my wife always hated our big ugly, noisy air source unit disturbing the peace in the yard. When the condenser failed a second time, I replaced it with a horizontal loop for the Mrs. And she couldn't be happier with the new quiet and space freed up in the garden. Scored major brownie points with that decision. I think this goes into the category of happy spouse, happy house. Like I'm glad that both of you are happy and interesting that here is one of those commenters who experienced both sides of it and pointed out, yeah, there's a certain noise factor that you don't have to deal with, right?
Matt Ferrell: In a way, yes. I don't have the big honking condenser on the outside of my house that makes a lot of noise for the neighbors in the environment. But the compressor is inside my house in my mechanical room. So there is noise that's introduced inside the house that wasn't. Isn't there typically for somebody who has an air source unit, but that noise is very minimal. If you have in a basement or a mechanical room, it's going to be very minimized. So it's not that big of a deal. But it's nice not having the eyesore on the outside of your house, that space taken up, having the noise for the neighbors. It's just really nice having the peace of quiet around the house.
Sean Ferrell: There was this from Jeremy who came into the comments to say the lesson learned is to keep the ERV ductwork independent and not tied to an air handler. These are among the best insights of this video. So do you want to give a little bit more detail there as to what exactly they're pointing out it? I know that there was an insulation question. We'll get deeper into that in a moment. But what are the various options? Does some of this boil down to the manufacturer of the unit that you buy or are these all kind of modular where you can go say like I got this thing and I've had this person put it in and they had to added this thing on top and it was perfect.
Matt Ferrell: It's not necessarily manufacturer, it's more of a like mechanical engineer designing your system. Those decisions are made at that point. So for my system it was put in line with the HVAC system. So they were basically doubling up and using the same ducts that take air conditioned air and put it in the room. It's just putting the fresh inside air into that same ductwork sharing the system. And there's an efficiency there of you don't have to run separate ducts. It saves on costs, it simplifies the whole setup. But the problem is is that my RV doesn't have enough oomph behind its fan to kind of reach the most extreme rooms of the house to get that fresh air in there. So like without the air handler running consistently, you'll notice the CO2 levels like in the bedroom get higher than you'd expect. In the den they get higher than you'd expect. But then you turn on the air handler into a low setting which just constantly feeds just a slow bit of air through the vents. Suddenly everything equalizes and gets great. So that's kind of like the pro and con of that approach. It's not that it's bad, it's just not efficient on the fresh air side of things. It's efficient on the setting it up side of things, if that makes sense.
Sean Ferrell: It does. Finally, I wanted to share this comment from Tinkertry. If you notice a theme in the way that Tinkertry talks about themselves, it's because they are in fact Paul. So yes, Paul jumped into the comments to say, so happy to see this video go live and so grateful for the opportunity to put my home out there with Matts. I think it will be helpful to a lot of people. I'm looking forward to reading through the comments and hopefully having some time to respond to a few of them. He continued, I realize I'm likely to get roasted for how bad an idea it is to put ductwork in unconditioned space, something I cover in more depth in my article. Know that my overall intent is to help others learn from my imperfect experience, including just how important such considerations are when starting to shop for HVAC contractors. Hopefully videos like this will help move the needle of electrification a little further to the right. So thank you Paul for that comment. And with that, I now would like to introduce the full conversation between Matt and Paul as they compared their homes and the heat pump system each of them have experience with.
Matt Ferrell: So Paul, I want to first just thank you again for being willing to do this comparison between our systems. I mean, we did this with our solar panels and battery systems. What was that a year ago or something like that between your solar roof and my stuff? And I of course reached out to you again. I'm like, your house and my house aren't that different. It would be interesting to talk about air source versus geothermal. So I want to thank you again for being willing to do this.
Paul Braren: No problem at all, but also very worthwhile. This is great. I love to share how my experiences have gone all along the way.
Matt Ferrell: I shared the script with you before I put the whole thing together so you could kind of see what the data I found, what we kind of compared. So you know exactly what's in the video before it gets released. I wanted to ask you the big question for me is what was the thing that you found most surprising between our comparisons of our two systems? What's the one thing that jumped out at you?
Paul Braren: Let's see. The similarity in the experience was actually a surprise to me. When you talked about not setting back or changing your thermometers much, that's true here too. Now I do have zoning, so one room might be 3 degrees warmer on purpose than an adjoining room. But I leave it. If I set it back, it gets too fancy and it's got to catch up in the morning. And whether it's geothermal ground source or air source heat pump, you don't really want to mess with your temperature much. If you're only leaving the house for four or eight hours, that is nothing like a regular house or how my houses used to be.
Matt Ferrell: For anybody that's out there because like the conclusion of the video is basically like heat pumps rock. I don't care which kind you get, it's like it doesn't matter what it is. What's the one piece of advice that you would give somebody that's considering transitioning to a heat pump? Whether it's geothermal, air source, doesn't matter. What's the piece of advice that you would give?
Paul Braren: Not only do you need to trust your contractor, use your spidey senses that they're going to do good work and they've done this many times before, but also that they're going to make the right choice for you. Not for them. Not a four year old heat pump that they have in stock. No, you want the latest cold weather heat pump with the latest refrigerants. You will save money in the long haul for sure. So that's the biggest thing and it's a doozy because when it dips below and you do resistive heat, the efficiency is so low and you talk about that Matt 3 to 4 to 1 when it's summer, but winter your cop is more like 2 to 1. And then if auxiliary resistant heat strips go on, your bill will skyrocket pretty quickly cause it might be on for hours. So all of that is part of just trusting the contractor, making sure you vet them and the hardware they get. Do your own research on what they've chosen and what reasons they chose it.
Matt Ferrell: Do you have any advice on how to select a contractor? It's like for me it's like I always have a hard time with this one, Cause it's like you've mentioned spidey senses. Listening to those like little voice in the back of your head. It's like listen to that voice. If a little yellow flag is waving in the back of your mind. My opinion is just like listen to it. Because if you don't have a good vibe, but there's gotta be something more concrete that we could give people to go on.
Paul Braren: Yeah, I'll be honest. In 2022, poking around like Mitsubishi was the hotness, the one that people were trying to get while it was eight months back ordered in 2022, supply chain problems. If you're well I'll look for super highly rated installer of Mitsubishi meaning they do a ton of heat bumps and maybe we're open to other brands. I did that. It did not work out well. But I also had a very short timeframe. I only had a few hours to get in the house before we closed on it three months later. So whoever needed to come to the house needed to come in that four hour window. And that was a setup for a difficult process where I wish I had three, four, five different bids. I did not. So that's the other piece of advice. If you have some time to do it right, you're going to want multiple quotes because they're probably going to be completely different than one another prices and the equipment.
Matt Ferrell: That's actually a fantastic piece of advice because like most of the time people are changing these things out because they're under duress. So like your water heater has died and you have to replace it. Doesn't give you a chance to go shop around, find the best thing. It's like just I need a water heater, put a new one in. My HVAC system just died. The guy came, said it's not worth repairing. You got it. You got to make a very quick call. It's like most people wait to that point. So for this it's kind of like you need to kind of do your due diligence before you hit that point. Plan ahead I think would probably be a, a good call out. I was the same thing in my house build. It was like there were a couple of things I would have done differently but we had already kind of like cast the die and like it was too late. And even though there may have been a chance to do it, it would have been so costly to kind of change directions. It just like my hand was forced of like oh shoot.
Paul Braren: I was thinking as you're talking about that is you and I compared our numbers. The stats are pretty alarmingly different. Right. Pulling your energy out of the dirt, that's around 50 something degrees turns out pretty good idea. But if it's a last minute purchase or you're under a time constraint meaning something just died. Yeah, you're probably not finding a contractor who's going to dig a geothermal thing and it'll hurt for you. But I wish that was possible because yours is looking pretty appealing, right. As a source of energy rather than relying on the utility company or your own batteries and solar. Still, you've got even more independence with your energy. Right. I don't know, 10ft below your. Or you dug a deep straight down one. Right. These are all just watching people watching a video like this is a huge start because once they are under duress, at least they have some knowledge under their belt what these systems can do about how much they cost. That's where you're bold in this. We're actually going to talk about that and reveal what it costs to own it for a full year. Heating and cooling the entire year.
Matt Ferrell: On that point though, it's like I don't honestly don't think the gap between my water furnace system and your, your, your units are actually that wildly different, even though it looks like it on paper with the energy difference. Because I think the biggest difference is our houses themselves. I mean you're still in the process of updating the insulation and all that kind of stuff. I'm really curious to see when you're done, how close is that gap? Because I think it's going to be much closer than it is right now. What's your take on that?
Paul Braren: Good point. My house built in 1990 had two by four exterior walls. Eight years later, that wasn't code anymore. Two by six. Just start with that. You put gypsum board in the inside. You put some sort of a plywood instead of osb. I like plywood better on this house. And then we added 2 inches of foam and then, and then new siding that's thicker. So I added to the R value quite a bit. But nothing like, you know, Matt, you've got what, 10 inch, 12 inch seals around your windows. It's fantastic.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah.
Paul Braren: And it's factory built where there's no thermal coupling from the inside outside. Yours is engineered to do amazing things with heat transfer. So you make a good point trying to sift through how much of that is your incredibly efficient house with really good R value all around and no thermal bridging between inside and outside where possible. And really high quality windows with, like a lever that pulls the seal that is hard to pull out. But my house is probably more typical of what most people are facing. If they're doing a retrofit. That's kind of the good part. It's a retrofit versus new that's also helpful.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah, I think your experience is going to be what most people would experience. Like, as far as what the cost is to run it. Like, I was looking up the averages of your house, like, for what a heat pump should be. And like, you're square in the middle of, like, where you should be. That's why I was kind of thinking that my house is kind of like skewing the results a little bit because of the efficiency of the house itself. But what are the updates that you are planning next?
Paul Braren: Sure. My basement and this extended cold snap. February 2026. By far the coldest winter of the four winters my heat pumps and my wife and I have endured. The whole basement gets to 53-54 when it's sustained cold like that for a week. That means the entire 1856 square feet flooring underneath my feet is cold. Now, if I aim a camera at it or a thermal camera, okay, it's not 53 degrees, but some of the stone areas or tiles, yeah, they're low 60s, maybe upper 50s. That's a giant footprint of coldness. Then there's the ceiling. That's R40, most of it. But of course, reworking and having to do some work in the attic, putting in new catwalks and putting in new ductwork meant only about half of that R40 that we blew in when we moved in. The house is still 40. A lot of it settled or moved and disrupted. So those are two major areas. 1850 square feet below and above me could be better. That's the starting points. Rim joints around the basement that we sprayed with foam to seal it. That was typical in an area where air will just come right in. And then triple pane windows all around, including the basement windows, need to be replaced. Those projects for lower hanging fruit. These remaining ones, they need to be done when all renovations are done. And there's still one piece of renovation which involves electrical and maybe probably no ductwork. When that's done, then we'd blow the air 40 smoothly all over the whole attic again. So those could have a pretty good effect. 6, 8%. I don't know.
Matt Ferrell: The just the duct-run stuff you already did, like you were estimating, it might be around that 15% area of improvement. It's like I think you might be too conservative for what you might say. I bet you see more double digit gains from the additional stuff you're gonna do.
Paul Braren: The way I look at it though, the way I'm. I'm becoming a net zero energy cost per year home is by fighting laws and policy changes, meaning that virtual power plant thing that I'm in now that gives me about three grand a summer to endure winters and come out even. I need to kind of assume that's going to go away. So I'd like to chip away at these things I can do. And that's the way I look at it. His budget allows and his return on investment might be, you know, the five year, 10 year timeframe a little more compelling than 20 years. Still, it's intended like yours to be a forever home, many times decades. If you're going to be moving soon, these projects tend to not make as much sense. Yeah, but that's another common area.
Matt Ferrell: We have the other thing about your duct work and how you've streamlined it so well now for like how much you reduce the length of the runs and stuff like that. It kind of comes back to when I hired my mechanical engineer. He was an independent mechanical engineer. So he was not associated to any HVAC installer company. He was not associated to the water furnace. He was just an independent guy. So he had no horse in the race as to what I chose to do. He just worked with me on what I wanted. He said to me, all the brands, they're all about equivalent. It doesn't matter which one you go with. They're all pretty on par with each other. He said it comes down to the installer. He said you could have the best unit that you could possibly spend money on and have a crappy installer put it in and it's going to be the worst experience ever. He said you could have a mediocre version put in by a great installer and it's going to give you 20 years of happy use. So he said it all comes down to somebody who knows what they're doing. Your duct run change to me illustrated that it's like somebody who's taking care to try to truly optimize the system for this specific house can really make or break the energy use that you're going to see. It's going to make or break the results you're going to get.
Paul Braren: No good point.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah, it's kind of frustrating to see that you have to do all of it yourself. And like the installers, not that they dropped the ball. It seems like some installers probably are not taking the care or the time that they need to. And there may be reasons for that. But what's your take on that?
Paul Braren: All right, in our confessions period here, not only are the ducts too long, but like ECOB thermostats, factory default is let's go to resistive heat. Anything below 40 Fahrenheit. Well, my heat pump's designed to run happily dial at minus 15. Not happily, not as efficiently. But it won't even turn off until minus 15 Fahrenheit. So turning it off at 40 makes no sense. You want the heat pump running all the way to even the deepest -5 degree Fahrenheit weather. But when the ductwork is long or twice as long or some spots even three times as long as it needed to be, yeah, that's a lot of attic. That's unconditioned space to travel through. So instead of a 5, 6 degree temperature drop, you might see 7, 8, 9, 10 degree temperature drop. So you're basically paying to heat your unconditioned attic. So it's another bit of advice. If you can do a conditioned or at least a basement like mine, where it's not as big a temperature difference between indoors and out, you're going to take up a lot of basement space with ducts. But in my case it was tricky. There was tile floors. You'd be making the holes for registers in the floor. It'd be difficult. The existing HVAC stuff was in the attic. And replacing that did make more sense. But boy, if you live in a part of the country where it's common to have conditioned space in an attic and they know what they're doing, they're not going to like ruin your roofing. Because some areas of the country condensation is a huge problem. You can't just willy nilly insulate an attic. Those are other considerations that, yeah, I could save money. But like you said, the ductwork coupled with being in unconditioned space. My attic varies from 105 down to about 25 Fahrenheit. That's a pretty big range, not ideal. The other thing is code is now R12 for Flexduct. Check your state.
In mine it should have been R12, but it's R8 and the inspector didn't flag it. So that didn't really help me as the homeowner. So all these little things to be aware of. You can do your own research. If your town says it's supposed to be R12 insulation on that flex duct they use for labor reasons. It's incredibly quick to pull the slinky out of a box and shove it in, but it doesn't mean they're going to pick the alt the right one, and it doesn't mean they're going to pick the right path. As we talked about, the length is a big deal because the airflow will just be half. Some of mine took like two almost right angle bends.
Matt Ferrell: I mentioned this in the video. Not to keep harping on installers, but I mentioned in the video how, like, I had an installer that completely overengineered my system. One of the first engineers that was working on this, but they came up with a system of I'm slab on grade. And they had designed this entire system where duct work was going to be embedded into the foundation, which is not unheard of. It is done. Not something you really want to do. And when he proposed this, my first thought was, what happens in 15 years if something goes wrong with one of those ducks and it's now ins cement? It's not going to be easy to fix. And then he sent me the renderings of what it was going to look like in the foundation. And he was using this old school methodology of every heat vent has to be underneath a window. It's kind of traditional. You put them underneath windows, around the outside of the walls. And it was this spaghetti monster of tubing that would have been in the foundation, not just one level deep. It was like it looked like if you did a cross section of the New York subway, it was like tubes on tubes on two, like three layers deep going all over the house. And I asked him, I'm like, why is that necessary? This house is so energy efficient. The manufacturer of the home said you could just get some mini splits and put a couple mini splits and it might be enough for you. And he had no good answer. And that's when I realized he doesn't know what he's doing. He doesn't know a thing about highly efficient homes. He doesn't know how to properly spec this out. Which is why I ended up shifting to that independent guy. You had somebody that just peaced out and like walked out of your house like, I can't do this.
And even the person that you did have didn't properly size the system because he seems to not have understood how efficient your house would be after your upgrades. I don't know what to say. I don't know what my question is for you other than just like, do you think the takeaway for you is also that it's just a lot of installers just know what they've been doing for the past 10, 15, 20 years and they're just not versed in what's coming or what's changing or how to adapt to it. Or do you think it's a, I don't know, willful ignorance or like just set in their ways and they're not willing to learn the new stuff?
Paul Braren: Well, here in Connecticut, it's a whole lot of oil furnaces and natural gas furnaces in suburbs. Oil in the more rural areas. That's what they're experienced with. And you'll find a lot of them aren't designing systems from scratch. They're just replacing a boiler, replacing a furnace, not designing ductwork. So even though I talked to the manager of the company saying whoever you send, they need to understand what they're getting into. I need a clean slate design. Because right now there's only one supply, one duct at each door, relying on undercutting the door. I want some soundproofing when I close the door and I want a return and a supply in each room. Cause this is gonna be heating that coolant if the person you're talking to is afraid of even that. Right. Because you're heating the house with your heat pump and that's new to them. Yeah, there's no way you want to use them. They need to adequately size it for a huge temperature difference between indoors and out. But yeah, the one contractor literally announcing, he's walking away and just. It got quiet and he literally walked out the front door. And I'm standing there like, well, that just happened. The manager sent someone who didn't. At least he admitted he was in above his head, that he did not know how to a ductwork system from scratch. That means plenums, air handlers, returns, all of it. Some of them are just doing air conditioning in Connecticut where they're just doing supplemental gentle blowing and the cheapest, shortest duct rung they can run at the least amount of labor to each bedroom. That's it. That is nothing like heating, where you really need to properly do it on the whole perimeter of the house and not have pipes freeze in your basement. If someone designs it wrong and all
Matt Ferrell: that, I will say I actually tip my hat to that guy because it's better to have an installer do that and than to just push forward and just stumble into something. He doesn't know what he's doing. It's like I'd rather have an installer just upfront go. Can't.
Paul Braren: No. Yep. No, Good point. Yeah.
Matt Ferrell: One of the other questions I had for you was around the ERV stuff because, like, I brought up in the video how, like, I have a regret about tying it into my HVAC system because the air handler has to run at a low speed pretty much all the time to give enough force to the ERV air to get it, make sure it's circulating and wish I had done something like a Zender system or something. Something that was a dedicated unit. Have you had any. Do you have any regrets or concerns about your ERV system, the way it's set up, or would you have done something completely different as well?
Paul Braren: No, I definitely share your regret on that. It would with the budget, of course, so it's easy to say in hindsight, oh, it would have been good. Well, there were so many other things going on that we were having cost overruns. Easy to say now. But here's the thing. Turning on the air handler, it's only like 85 watts. Stage one, the first fan speed on a Bosch IDS 2.0 system that I have, or about 130 watts on the second stage or second blower speed, but I have two of them. The house is divided in half, so it's kind of like you run a data center. There's redundancy. If one half of my house went down, heat pump died. Ice falls into a fan blade. I sent you a picture of someone in Tennessee with that. One inch thick. And there are fan blades and they're compressed. Their outdoor unit. Anything can happen. If you're away from the house for a week, it'd be nice to have your pipe's not freezing your way. But anyhow, for all of that, the ERV having to turn it on every hour or so. When I'm in this office to get right now, my CO2 I'm looking up is 750. But in about an hour it'll be up to 950. And then the air handler's gotta turn on and then the ERV is bringing in fresh air to mix with that air. It would be good if that was a separate system. If you don't turn on the air handler and just try to shove fresh air into the system and hope it'll blow into the ducts. Doesn't really work. So, yeah, that's a regret. And then the other regret is summer. If you're very efficient. Heat pump system like sear20, like mine is, is designed for some hero numbers on how Efficient it is. It's probably not dehumidifying enough. You and I have talked about that a little bit. So if it's a rainy day also and you're turning on the RV and your RV is not amazing for its efficiency, you're now bringing in outside air in a system at kind of high speed.
So these super cold spells are super hot spells. It's not great to turn in your duct system if there's no heat at the same time, for example, in the winter. But all I need is CO2 in this room right now, not heat. You can see how it's tricky. So my home assistant, my $120 Raspberry PI is basically filling this gap. It's intelligently trying to figure out, okay, either a shower's made the bathroom really humid really quickly. So I can sense that, and I need to bring it down. Turning the RVs or CO2 levels building up, turn on the ERV. But it needs to do that smartly because if it's 5 degrees Fahrenheit out and it's taking 40 degrees to recover from humidity or CO2 from too many people, you got a problem. Cause now the temperature's dipping, it's gotta start calling for heat. But until it calls for heat, you're blowing 63 degree air on people in the room. Whereas a Zender would be blowing so gently from a central spot in the room, you'd really never think twice to just leave it running on at super low speed.
It's a big difference in behavior that you might not think about when you're shopping.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah, like, for me, it's like some of the minor issues I have with my system, I've just. Like you, I have a little home assistant server running where it's like I've just done my own automations and things like that to kind of fill the gaps of my system. But I'm not normal. You're not normal, we're not like normal Joe. Off the street. A normal person is not going to be setting up a home assistant server and going and doing automations. They're going to basically just use the system as it was installed. So for me, it's kind of frustrating that I've had to monkey with it like in the way I have. And I'd feel bad for somebody that wasn't in my mindset to do that kind of a fix. They would just probably live with this less than ideal setup and just be frustrated by it and not know how to fix it. It's a problem.
Paul Braren: This industry seems so ready for disruption. A turnkey solution where the thermostats and everything's just handled by like Octopus Energy in UK or something. Right?
Matt Ferrell: Yes.
Paul Braren: One phone number to call to just install the heat pump the right way and the temperature control the right way where the homeowner has someone to call. And I got as close as I could to that. I'm using off the shelf Ecobee thermostats but and I'm glad I didn't pick Nest at this point. Ecobee, they don't talk to each other. They're five independent thermostats. They have no sense of oh I'm in the same house and I'm on, I'm controlling one heat pump. So you have a zone damper controller that adds complexity. So we reached our goals. Humidity control year round humidification, winter dehumidification, summer and the shoulder months and comfort in each room and individual temperature control. But the cost was complexity which it's good. You have multiple vendors, you're not tied to one but you definitely have different numbers to call if something goes wrong. And it's really just the way it is in our country right now. We've got a ways to go and the controls for all of this.
Matt Ferrell: I want, I do want to talk about like the utility side in a second but something just popped in my head which was we've both, we are currently still living through it but there's been a massive cold snap in a huge portion of the country. We had the big storm that came through and it was funny because as we were putting this video together it was, that was happening. I've never experienced temperatures like this in this region. Here in Massachusetts I don't think I've ever experienced temperatures that were like negative 15 -18 without. That was not the, that was not the feels like temperature. That was just the actual air temperature was negative 18. I don't think I've ever experienced that. 25 years I've lived here and you
Paul Braren: came from Rochester, right? Growing up.
Matt Ferrell: I grew up in Rochester where it got cold but we had more, it was more snowy than it was cold. And it's now been two weeks of abnormally low temperatures in this area. So it's been interesting to see how my geothermal system is handling. It's handling a champ. But it's funny to look at the loop temperature. It normally is like 46 degrees Fahrenheit, maybe it's 50 degrees Fahrenheit and right now it's like at 37 it is really cold. Because.
Paul Braren: Wow.
Matt Ferrell: But the air temperature in the house, like the house feels no different. So it's working within specs. It's all fine. But it's been fascinating to see how cold the loop temperature has actually gotten on my system. And it basically has an antifreeze in it. So even if it gets below freezing, it's not going to freeze. But it's still interesting to see how cold it got. How has your system handled the past few weeks?
Paul Braren: It's kept up. We're both wearing short sleeves. That's kind of.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah, it should be a stun or something.
Paul Braren: So we don't care about the weather too much. But yes, I did struggle where there was a wiring issue where when my resistor heat went on, my heat pumps were turning off. That's not good. You need them both going because it could barely keep up with one or the other. If you have one to the other off and it's hitting -5 Fahrenheit for many hours. And then the next day was only going up to like 8, day after day. I've lived in this area for 30 years. Never seen that either. This is a sustained cold snap for about a week. Yeah, it. It struggled a bit. It's working harder. The unit's outside. I never seen them defrost. Have to defrost quite as often. So that's another thing where you have an advantage of a heat pump indoors, minor outdoors. They need to turn off and defrost well when they didn't wire correctly and the air conditioning is turning on for 10 minutes. In the winter, it's not unreasonable for my wife to wonder, why is the duck blowing 37 degree air for three minutes? Well, because the auxiliary heat is supposed to turn on at that moment and have her not notice. Well, that wasn't fun to notice that when it was 8 degrees and I'm out there looking into it with touching bare metal when it's 8 degrees and windy. It was rough, honestly. But now that I have it all figured out and working, oh, man, it feels good. I understand it all. I totally get it. Everything's tuned right. It's quite comfortable. And now my electric bills. Next winter they are going to be less than the last two. I now know I fixed some stuff that just should have been fixed all along, but nothing like a cold snap like that. The ultimate torture test. The best one in 30 years to shake out the kinks in my system. I'm always an optimist. That was good. I'm home and fixing it. It's fine.
Matt Ferrell: But then again you're closing that gap to my system. Like this is another one of those like bricks in the wall that you're building of just narrowing that gap which I think is super cool. Okay, so for the costs, I did bring up in the video how like there's the spark gap problem, which is a real thing. Definitely a lot of people are like, I'm not going to do a heat pump because natural gas is so cheap. Why would I switch? That's a huge issue. What's your experience in Connecticut with the utility and what you've got? Because I believe you have special. A special rate for your heat pump system. Is that right?
Paul Braren: Massachusetts version of Eversource did roll that out to you.
Matt Ferrell: I'm in the process of enrolling. I haven't gotten the final like, okay,
Paul Braren: so next winter will be different for you. But yeah, we don't have that yet in Connecticut. I sure am hoping we get that it's still ever source where I am. That would make a big difference for me when I made the kind of pitch to my wife in 2022, hey, we're going to spend over 100,000 living here in the next 12, 15 years in this house. We're going to renovate. Should we put that money into solar batteries, roof and all that or just keep, you know, paying the electric company? I said we can probably come on net zero if we're enrolled in virtual power plant. That was always part of the plan. I knew winter, the sun, we've one sixth of solar energy in the winter that we do in the summer. You've seen that with your system, we're just too far north. You would need a massive amount of batteries to endure three or four days of bad cloudy winter weather in a row. So I knew you're going to be grid tied and I knew we could sell back and get paid handsomely for summer selling back of electricity. So again that worked out and it's about three grand a year for. Because in the winter is when we deplete our negative energy bill and now we go positive. We owe the money and it can be over a thousand. Speaking of that, when I moved in, remember I said the 4040 degree set point is where the factory default ecobee was. That was a $1,200 mistake. When we got our January bill, the year we first moved into the house, 1,200 pounds. That was not fun to talk to my wife about that one to find out the heat pumps going on at 40 degrees, not 4 degrees, 5 degrees like it should or something. That was brutal. It's confessions here. Those rough edges. Your contractor should know all that. Not you have to explain a major mistake like that.
Yeah, I don't want, I don't want people to be scared off, that they should be encouraged that if you get a contractor that's installed a few, you're probably going to be pretty darn happy in wearing short sleeves in the winter, not worrying about it because it works pretty darn well to not leave the temperature alone year round.
Matt Ferrell: I mean, that's, that's actually a good question that we could, you could ask an installer is how many heat pump systems have you installed?
Paul Braren: Yeah.
Matt Ferrell: Get a sense of like, oh, I've, I've done a few. It's like, oh, maybe you find a different installer. But somebody's like, oh, I've installed, like, I can't, I've lost count. Around 20 or 30 or 40 or something like that. It's like, okay, this is a guy that probably knows what he's doing.
Paul Braren: And then a follow up would be, let's say someone sends you a quote and you have a hydronic system, you have baseboard heating and you have air conditioning for your ductwork. Well, I have a friend who gave me a quote to look over. And what do you know, it didn't include reworking his ductwork. I asked him, I said, so your house is built like 12 years ago. Yeah, the air, the ductwork was built just for air conditioning. He goes, yeah. I go, so there's no. It's going to be really loud in the winter to try to pump air through your existing ducts again. I guess the question you ask your installer there is tell me about what needs to be changed about my duct work to actually handle heating, not just the air conditioning it was designed for. And that's super common here in Connecticut. Just a few small ducts for a 20 degree difference between indoors and outdoors. Maybe 25 degrees. Way different than an 80 degree Fahrenheit difference between indoors and outdoors. Needs to blow more air. So, yeah, it's another question to ask your contractor. Are they prepared to look at your ductwork and tell you exactly how much it'll cost? And a lot of that's labor. It's not the metal bending parts making part. It's a lot of labor.
Matt Ferrell: So is there anything else that we haven't touched on that you'd want to touch on? Like, are there any, like, words of advice or anything that you'd want to give?
Paul Braren: Wintertime dryness, so health reasons it'd be pretty good to keep your house between 40 and 60% year round. More like 35 to 50% for comfort. And that's difficult and energy intensive. So I know we kind of left that out of the video for simplicity, but I'm actually blowing steam into my ducts and they need to blow steam in my ducts only when a motor's running. So you need to have a check there to say do not blow steam into the cold attic in the middle of winter if the fan on the air handler dies for whatever reason. So it's a pressure transducer to say don't flood the ceiling and ruin it when someone's at home if something fails. This part is crazy, but they're old fashioned steam. Basically a boiler that throws steam into your air handler while it's running and keeps you comfortable in the winter. Not something I really thought of until I realized that's a heck of a lot better than filling a humidifier console thing I was doing every day at my previous house. Yeah. So these are things to think about. If your contractor can handle winter and then summer to make darn sure the HVAC system adequately dehumidifies and have answers for that, then you probably have a good contractor that understands you want them comfortable all year round, including shoulder months. April and October, when no HVAC is running well, you still need to control CO2 and you still need to control humidity. When it rains three days in a row, ask them that question. See how they respond.
Matt Ferrell: That's interesting because at my house, I found something interesting that the house seems to be holding onto its moisture level way better than my old house. My old house, middle of winter, it might be like 30% humidity. My hands would get so dry. Awful here, not doing anything. It's been hovering around 40% most of the time. And I haven't done anything, but it's still kind of dry. So I still have a humidifier that I have in my room that I have to fill every day to remember to fill. So the bedroom gets a little more humidity overnight just for comfort. But it's. It's been surprising to me. I didn't expect that, that this house would hold on the moisture. I think it's because it's so airtight and the moisture that we are giving off, I think that might be what's keeping it at that about 40% level. Just because of how airtight it is.
Paul Braren: Yeah, no, that's. That's a very important point. Mine's gonna be more typical for what most people will deal with. Oh, yeah, you're probably gonna plug up your chimney. By the way, chimneys are awful, awful common here. There's a whole lot of heat escaping there. You might want to consider convincing your significant other to plug up that giant hole in your house. Because my flue was so rusted out, it had like a half inch gap blowing heat out, you know, and these are the worst.
Matt Ferrell: Don't get me started on them. Because they are the worst. You. You create a fire in your house to get nice and warm and toasty. All you have now succeeded in doing is creating a system that will now pump heat out of your house so fast it'll make the rest of your house cold. Even though you're toasty warm in the living room with the fire, you've now made every other room in your house colder because you're just. It creates a suction that pulls all the heat out of your house.
Paul Braren: Yep.
Matt Ferrell: Don't do it. Please don't do it.
Paul Braren: Or as a compromise, we put a fireplace insert that looks like fire and it covers the giant hole. So you still have the aesthetic and you can turn it on. I didn't bother putting. Putting its resisted heat elements. Those you don't have to hook up. It's just an LED light that looks pretty when it looks like a log. So that's a compromise. Right. Where these are important little barriers. And then of course, washer dryer. Right. If you can do a dryer that doesn't blow that condition air you paid for out of the house in the middle of winter. Another thing you brought up in your videos. Those are not easy decisions. And we haven't gone that way in our house on all of them. And I suspect people listening to this or in the same battle, you're gonna be bucking other people. But if it comes down to money and math and an idea of how much money you're talking about per year, that might make the conversations a little easier. And I haven't really seen anyone. Matt Reisner kind of did something about makeup error. Right. Turning on range hoods and turning on a dryer. But how much it equates to what it cost you to keep that dryer on versus a heat pump dryer. Yeah, that's harder math to do. And it's a difficult thing. Yeah. Don't be scary, though. It's all good. I mean, the local builder that put
Matt Ferrell: my house together from Unity Homes. So Unity Homes designed and constructed the house, and then a local installer put it together and finished it out the local installer, when I was telling them, I don't want an event for the dryer because I'm gonna have a heat pump, they kind of gave me a look of like, wait, what, what, what? No vents. And they were like, why? I'm like, I don't want that. All the house air going out that vent. It's like, that's why I'm getting a heat pump dryer. And they were kind of like, oh, it kind of makes sense. Like, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. There's the same thing for the. For the vent hood. It was like there was a big debate about whether we actually vent the outside for our vent hood or if it's just kind of a filter hood kind of a thing. And then we rely on the ERV to help evacuate air out of the kitchen to. To make it more energy efficient. And that's the direction we went. Just again, to save as much of the heat that we're keeping in the house, we want to keep it in the house as best as possible. So fewer vents to the outside.
Paul Braren: You know, it ties into our previous topic of a gentle steam. Humidifier is what you have there when you're drying your clothes. Yeah. It's anything else. You have a very efficient house, and that's supplementing your winter low humidity problem.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah, I never considered that just living in the house would provide probably just enough moisture to keep it comfortable in the winter. I did not see that coming.
Paul Braren: Your house runs on two hair dryers of energy in the winter when it's really cold. That's incredible. Right? Houses were not built that way in the 90s. Probably 99.9% of the ones in Connecticut are not built that way. So this. That's just the reality. So you building new. An excellent approach if you can do it.
Matt Ferrell: But most people aren't going to have. They're going to have a house like yours. Most people. That's why I wanted to share your story as part of this, because it's good to see what people are experiencing and what you've been experiencing. People learning from what you've done. I think it's going to be very valuable to see. So, again, thank you again for participating in my part two video comparing our houses together. We'll have to come up with a part three.
Paul Braren: There's all sorts of stuff and yeah, thank you. The home automation is another angle, too. A lot of people are interested. It's weird that we have $100 raspberry PIs running the comfort of our homes. Right That's a good story, too. It's pretty easy. It makes it pretty easy to back up if it dies. That's. That's kind of you.
Matt Ferrell: Again, thank you so much for taking the time and participating.
Paul Braren: No problem. I always enjoy hanging out with you and I love sharing whatever I learned with other people to help them avoid some of the pain I went through.
Sean Ferrell: So we hope you've enjoyed that long conversation between Matt and Paul. And before we close the episode, wanted to share a couple more comments that I thought were interesting takeaways, like this one from Abel, who writes, the takeaway is improve your house with better windows. At least double glazing, but triple is even better. And insulate the heck out of your house, which not only keeps heat in or out in the summer, but also blocks sound from the outside. With the better windows, your fuel and power costs will go down if the house is properly insulated. That's the one piece of information out of this entire conversation that is the universal, wouldn't you say, a hundred percent.
Matt Ferrell: Like before you consider doing anything with heat pumps or anything. Look at insulation. It's the che. I won't say cheap. It's the most effective thing you can do for your house, full stop. That's it.
Sean Ferrell: And aren't there some simple little tricks that you experienced when you were having your home built? Do I remember correctly that the simplicity of seeing where if you light a match and then blow it out where the smoke goes can be a way to find those locations where you didn't realize where the draft was coming from or where the air was moving toward little gaps in the insulation. So you might be able to track down some stuff like, oh, that door in the kitchen that leads to the outside entrance to the garage, maybe bleeding air that you don't even realize. Little things like that.
Matt Ferrell: Exactly. Yep, a hundred percent.
Sean Ferrell: Finally, the best, worst comment and a little story behind it. Bianca jumps into the comments to say, matt, this is the fourth occasion you've shown geothermal heat pumps to the class. To which John responded, it's to make up for how little it gets mentioned on other channels. Smiley face. And then that was followed up by Jerky who jumped in to say, and I will watch every single one, especially now that Dandelion and Fed credits are out of the game. He goes on to complain about the change in basically public funding to help people put in this kind of system into their home. And as I captured this image, I couldn't help but think, well, there's something about this that doesn't Strike me right. This seems like a strange comment to make. This is the fourth occasion you've shown geothermal heat pumps to the class with no other comment. It wasn't a positive, it wasn't a negative. It was just a blank statement. So I clicked on the username. This is a porn bot. It was an AI porn bot. So the AI has gotten sophisticated enough that it's able to go in and leave a comment that doesn't say something completely out of left field. It doesn't say something that's, like, out of context. Like, why is this commenter saying this? Like you, we're all accustomed to the generic comments that say things like, I found this video very helpful, and it really helped me solve my problem. Like, no, that's. That's. That's spam. But this time it actually is able to look at the content of your channel and come up with a comment that has context. And I found that.
Matt Ferrell: This is terrifying. This is why AI is going to destroy everything.
Sean Ferrell: That's right.
Matt Ferrell: The end of days we're in, Sean.
Sean Ferrell: So the reason this is the best worst comment is not because of the conversation it generated, but because of the source. Thank you, Bianca. Thank you so much for jumping into the comments. And all of you listening to this, all of you who are not porn bots, please jump into the comments yourselves. Leave a note. Let us know what you thought about this conversation. Let us know what you thought about the long conversation between Matt and Paul. Was there anything in there that you found surprising? Anything you wish Matt had shared in his original video? Let us know. We'd love to hear from you. As always, liking subscribing and sharing with your friends, those are all very easy ways for you to support the podcast. And if you'd like to support us more directly, you can do it right here on YouTube by clicking the join button. Or you can go to StilltBD FM, click the join button there. Both of those ways allow you to throw coins at our heads. We appreciate the welts.
And then we get down to the heavy, heavy business, trying to figure out where the AI porn bots are coming from. Thank you so much, everybody, for taking the time to watch or listen. We'll talk to you next time.