This. I had 12 contractors come out for an estimate. I insisted to each that I would only consider estimates accompanied by a Manual J (aka show your work). I got 4 estimates with a manual J, and one of them the vendor said ‘despite that the math says you need a 4 ton outdoor unit, I’m giving you two,’ and refused to budge on that.
I went with a vendor who did the math and sized accordingly and my system works great - great comfort year round and very low energy usage.
If we’re trying to bring down cost the this is the issue with so many contractors coming out. The cost of sales is about 10-15% of the installation in the US. So thats $2-3k in California per heat pump
Try to get an install for $600 like in Japan when you have to pay $2k to find the customer.
Let’s have a lower cost sales process. Review 12 companies online, pick top 3, ask them to come out.
Yeah in case it wasn’t clear - I wasn’t asking a million vendors to price the job, I was asking them to do a manual J so they could price the job. It took 12 to get 4 to do the manual J. The other 8 came on-site and then refused to do the calcs even though I told them before coming out that it was a prerequisite for me to consider their quote.
I got a variety of explanations for why they weren’t going to do it, most of them along the lines of ‘I’ve been doing this forever - I know what I’m doing,’ but a few disappointingly ‘I don’t know what a manual J is.’ Again, this was AFTER my telling them over the phone that I wouldn’t consider a quote that wasn’t based on the calcs.
Yep, the cost is in the trip is a big factor but sounds like it was their choice to try to sell you. You did the right thing by asking them do the calcs before they came out. Millions of questions are time consuming and costly but better than someone rushing into and pausing mid project with in-decision.
We (I'm cofounder of Electric Air, HVAC contract) have had people pause on day one of install, and that ends up costing the company $10-20K due to delays. Mostly because there isn't something for the team to do for that day or two while we scramble to line up the next customer.
I've had a similarly frustrating experience trying to get contractors to redo my gutters.
They seem fine with the gutter part, but once I explain my rain collection system and my requirements around specific downspout sizing and simultaneous overflow, they just seem to have no interest in doing the bit of work required to make it all fit together.
Wild that you put it on the customer to reduce the sales cost.
I can see it being reasonable to explain during the initial contact that you want the standardized estimate, once that happens it's not really on the customer if the contractor goes out to chase the business even if they know they aren't going to do it.
You are right! I was unfair. The customer was clear they wanted ManJ calcs.
It's not the customer's problem to reduce cost. The high cost is the customer's problem through even if they are not to blame. And given I have a first hand experience in the cost stack of HVAC company, I would happy to share how a HVAC contractor thinks.
The notion that heat pumps don’t work at low temperatures hasn’t been true for years. I think you may be surprised to find that just about any heat pump you look at has good efficiency down to very low temperatures.
That’s true, but still doesn’t always make heat pumps the most cost effective choice to operate. For example, last winter I paid an average of $0.24/kWh for electricity vs $0.05/kWh for natural gas. Even if a heat pump had a perfect 4.0 COP all winter, gas would be ~15% cheaper. Electricity prices really need to come down before it will be viable for everyone.
This varies quite a bit based on location for instance here in Florida natural gas is $0.13/kWh while electricity is about $0.12/kWh, also where I live there is no piped NG so it would be propane delivered to a storage tank which is even more expensive.
Also the winters are mild here so basically everyone has either a heat pump or the further south you go it's just heat strips because heat is rarely used so not worth the cost.
So any kind of blanket statement about heat pumps vs gas heat would be folly, but due to improvements in cold weather heat pumps and solar power are allowing them to make much more sense in more places.
There are many advantages to decoupling fuel combustion from its energy use, burning NG at a power plant relatively efficiently with much better emission controls, then distributing on electric grid for use more than just heating, while allowing the home to heat from many different energy sources and allow for grid down backup as well.
Does your 0.05/kWh include the distribution costs? The thing to do once you go to heating with gas is to just switch completely to electricity and turn off gas. In my experience (admittedly not in the US, but several other countries) distribution cost often more than double the $/kWh for natural gas (especially if you only heat part of the year).
Not to mention, lots of places have time of use electricity pricing which makes it even worse. This is the problem with running my heatpump when its cold, some of the coldest times (right before dawn) coincide with peak time-of-use prices
I’ve tried. For it to be at all viable on my property, I’d need to cut down a bunch of trees. I’d rather keep the trees and pay someone else with solar panels.
I mean, in many countries, often either the government or a company closely allied to the government has been granted a legal monopoly on selling electrical energy, so buying electricity from other people is illegal.
ASHRAE—an HVAC organization—has data on the coldest and hottest days for areas so that you can design things for the coldest or hottest 1% of the year (4 hottest/coldest days):
I think that if you have an older, leaky/ier, less-insulated house you may need to 'brute force' heating your (probably older) domicile. But if you have a <4 ACH@50 air tightness, and reasonable insulation levels, a good portion of the US population could make do with a heat pump.
Mitsubishi publishes data were they have 100% heating capacity at -15C, which some models being 100% at -20C and -23C:
It is warmer than -16C/3F at Chicago (O'Hare) for 99% of the time (i.e., except for 4 days a year), and warmer than -18.7C/-2F for 99.6% of the time (2 days).
ASHRAE are the folks that publish the heating/cooling standards that are used in building codes for estimate heating/cooling equipment capacities (Manual J) and selecting the right equipment (Manual S).
Here's a PDF with a lot of locations in the US and CA (and other countries further down), and if you look under the "Heating DB" column, you'll find very few US locations that have -30F under the 99% (or even 99.6%) sub-columns:
So unless you're in AK, MN, or ND, long runs of temperatures colder than -20F/-30C don't happen too often. Of course if you have a leaky house with little insulation, you're throwing money out the window/door, so the first consideration for a good ROI is better air sealing and insulation.
I think the comment was saying below 30F and below 10F. Much warmer than you're saying.
Also..
> It is warmer than -16C/3F at Chicago (O'Hare) for 99% of the time (i.e., except for 4 days a year), and warmer than -18.7C/-2F for 99.6% of the time (2 days).
If my heat doesn't work for those days, I'm kind of boned. Four days per year without a working heat pump? That's a mess.
At face value, then in the worst case that's just 4 days per year of using resistive heat to keep a home warm.
Which is, of course, very expensive to use -- but it's only expensive for those 4 days. Resistive heat can be avoided for the other 361.2425 days in a year.
In the US (as of August of 2025), the average price of residential electricity per delivered kWh is $0.1762 [1].
If using resistive heat averages 4kW during each of those 4 days (it's probably either more than that, or less than that, but ballparks are ballparks), then that's about $16.92 for each of those days. Or: $67.66, per year.
> At face value, then in the worst case that's just 4 days per year of using resistive heat to keep a home warm.
The design philosophy for using 1% is that you may end up having to run your heating (or cooling) 24/7 to keep up with temperature delta between outside and desired inside, but it will keep up with the demand.
The rest of the time (99%) the mechanicals only run intermittently. Also note that the 1% would not necessarily occur every year: it is just the historical average. The charts also have the 0.4% extremes if you want to be extra conservative, but most building codes specify 1% because that is what experience has shown is a good trade-off.
Part of the process (in the US) is to use what is called the Manual J to determine/estimate/calculate how much energy is needed to maintain a particular temperature (typically ≥70F/21C in winter, ≤75F/24C in summer):
> The Cooling Design Day is effectively the "worst case" day for your air conditioning loads. The "worst case" hour of this day determines equipment capacity, fan sizes, and subsequently duct sizes. This largely impacts first cost. The Design Hour also impacts peak KW demand which often has a huge impact on the utility bill.
So gas hash higher reliability and is cheap for the times you need heat the most, whereas heat pumps might not work and are not cheap at the times you need them the most?
I’ve had a gas furnace keep me and the water heated multiple times in a cold weather power outage.
> So gas hash higher reliability and is cheap for the times you need heat the most, whereas heat pumps might not work and are not cheap at the times you need them the most?
The major manufacturers have systems that will use the heat pump when the temperatures are not 'crazy', and kick in fossil at a certain point:
Depending on the cost of power and fossil fuels, you can program it to switch over once the COP becomes too low to justify running up kWh on your meter.
But whereas in the past heat pumps would have their COP drop around 40F/5C, modern systems can be fairly efficient at much lower temperature nowadays:
That's one of the older style units. Starting in 2007 when Mitsubishi introduced their "Hyper-Heating Inverter" heat pumps, and continuing with Fujitsu and Daikin following with similar technology in the 2010-12 timeframe, and others a few years later, heat pumps got way better in the cold.
Mitsubishi's maintain 200%+ efficiency down to -4℉ (-20℃) and 150% down to -22℉ (-30℃) [1]. Only a few towns in the continental US get below that, and even those aren't going to get cold enough long enough to make it worth it an an all electric home to switch to your emergency electrical resistance heating.
Their capacity doesn't start dropping until you get down to 23℉ (-5℃), dropping to 76% at -13℉ (-25℃).
I've got one about 8 years old, and it does just fine down to 0°F (it hasn't gotten colder than that here). It doesn't even have any kind of auxiliary heat.
It's fine. The only difference when it's super-cold is that the air coming out of it isn't as warm, so the heating cycle stays on for a longer proportion of the time. But it keeps it 70°F inside no problem at all.
Though it’s worth noting that that first 2 ton rated unit is putting out 0.5 tons (6k BTU/hr) at that temp and rating.
That’s not going to be particularly helpful for a structure that needed 24k BTU/hr during warmer temps, meaning the owner of the unit is likely mixing in a lot of 1.0 BTUs to meet the heat loss at -13°F.
> Though it’s worth noting that that first 2 ton rated unit is putting out 0.5 tons (6k BTU/hr) at that temp and rating.
I just did a quick search for "all" units and sorted the result list/table by COP@5F. If one was actually shopping/designing a solution then a more nuanced search criteria would be used.
Further, you'd probably want to do a (US ACCA) Manual J calculation to first determine how much energy is needed (j = joules)
Nice timing. I’m right in the middle of doing this for music and video media for my kid (using an elaborate concoction of python, nocodb, home assistant, Jellyfin, a NAS, an RPi, and a chromecast) and the thing I had yet to figure out was the physicality of the RFID-sticker-containing cards themselves
I still strongly believe that all day to day computing happening via AR is nigh inevitable. We have become so accustomed to computing happening via small rectangles, fixed in place, happening with computers that have no clue about the real world we occupy, or of what’s happening now, that the idea of computing sharing our world with us seems six leaps removed and itself unmoored in reality. I think someday within our lifetimes we’ll look back at the way we compute today as a primeval relic and wonder how we ever thought of it as computing at all.
A good example of one of my favorite diagnostic axioms, Hickam’s dictum:
Hickam's dictum is a medical principle that a patient's symptoms could be caused by several diseases. It is a counterargument to misapplying Occam's razor in the medical profession. A common version of Hickam's dictum states: "A man can have as many diseases as he damn well pleases."
I’m all for minimalist travel but I feel like I picked up a number of cues that the author is buying and disposing of (somehow) items seasonally or even on an as-no-longer-needed basis. Hopefully that means donating the item and maybe even buying used to begin with but it’s not mentioned here. I don’t want to make assumptions but in the worst case this could be a very wasteful kind of minimalism.
Funny thing is the list is not at all far from “latest Apple and arc’teryx” which I’d consider the consumerist side he’s complaining about but - some of those items are objectively really high quality and durable
I found this a bit odd, especially when the author mentioned they lose their apple watch a lot so buy an older one. It feels peculiar to buy such an objectively expensive high end item when you know you constantly lose it, and barely use any of it's features. To me that is continual overconsumption.
I can't pretend I don't have my own contradictions going on, so I'm not having a go at the author. But I did find it a little funny when reading it.
'One baggers', at least those who post online about it, are very consumerist in general despite the practice being about minimalism.
You'll find people posting about upgrading their bag from the $300 Aer Travel Pack, to the $400 Goruck GR2 because of style preference. I've seen someone talking about repurchasing items they already own in a particular color to match their packs color scheme.
I think the motivation for many has nothing to do with being anti-consumerist and more about just freedom to travel without paying-for/carrying-around checked-in luggage and all the other benefits of travelling light, which is fine.
Yeah, I've come to realise that this is much more of a hobby for people than a genuine lifestyle.
I think YouTube has caused a big increase in this. One bag, EDC, Ultralight - the videos are all completely the same. "Here's a bunch of things I just bought, and here's a bunch of things I've used for a month and am throwing away". With YouTube they can get paid to do it though, and get to add a new dimension to their hobby which lets them connect with others.
As you say, all of this is fine. I certainly can't cast judgement either, I for sure have my own issues with over-consumption.
I do wonder if the sort of person who can lose a watch "frequently" is also the sort of person who would immensely benefit from only owning 20 things and having absolutely zero choices to make about clothes.
Even if the author is literally throwing away seasonal items, the environmental trade-off is that they probably purchase far fewer items than the average person.
This. The disincentive to buy anything is constantly present when you live out of a bag. It's an odd way to defeat the rampant consumerism of modern society, but it works.
Sure. But for the fridge, TV, washing machine and car - which together contain orders of magnitude more embodied carbon and rare minerals than his pocket-sized gadgets - he's condemned by his lifestyle to sharing them with others.
When it comes to ultralight hiking gear, don't think durability is a major issue if it just sees occasional use in urban environments and you take good care of it.
I've travelled w/ a Montbell Versalite and Arcteryx Cerium LT for the past few years and both are like new, each probably getting around 200-300 wears in primarily city use while traveling to over 40 cities. Just picked up a Montbell Travel Umbrella (3 ounces!) a couple months back as I'll be in Mexico City for awhile and it rains like half the year.
I was wearing some Uniqlo puff jacket the ul community recommended on a trip to Italy. I brushed up against a pillar at some ruins and it snagged on the rough material and exploded into a cloud of down that the heavy wind blew all over a crowd of tourists.
Now I wear sturdy cotton, linen, leather, denim, and the extra weight is just a couple more calories burned.
I have hundreds, possibly over a thousand hours on mine and it is significantly more delicate and expensive than the Uniqlo one, which I had owned previously.
To me packability and efficiency reign supreme, and I just reflexively know I’m wearing a delicate item and react accordingly to my environment when I wear it.
It’s similar to the sunglass paradox. For many years, I owned fairly cheap pairs and lost them often. Then suddenly I spent $300 on a pair of Oliver Peoples… had them for 10 years, finally gave them to an ex-gf who loved them more than I did.
You can in fact change semi-reckless behavior when the quality of the item dictates it. Perhaps the extra anxiety isn’t worth it, but this is an article about one bag travel - which I do - so it fits.
If you are flying with any regularity, you are completely exhausting your carbon budget. The remaining carbon budget is the CO2 if emitted will lead to 2C warming. IPCC estimates it to be 1150 GtCO2 in 2020 [1]. Which is ~140 tCO2/person over however many years we use to spend this. So if we want to limit warming to 2C by 2050, that leaves a budget of 4.7tCO2/person/year.
A transatlantic round-trip alone can be 2.3tCO2 [2].
The elephant in the room. Even one flight per year per person is basically too much. Flying, above all else, is how middle-class folks (like those in this thread) explode their carbon footprints. For obvious reasons very few of them want to hear this.
In the limited amount of experience I’ve had with researching these things, embodied carbon can be a much higher number than you might think, even with something as simple as a cotton t-shirt. Odds are that shirt had already sailed around the world once or twice by the time you buy it, and it might make its way to another continent once you’re done with it as well.
> Odds are that shirt had already sailed around the world once or twice by the time you buy it,
That's like... 40 grams of CO2 for those 2 trips for a t-shirt. Aka, a 2 min uber ride.
Shipping containers are incredibly efficient.
Modern large container ships consume about 200-300 tonnes of fuel per day, and could carry 742 millions t-shirts [1]. It takes 16 days to do something like Shanghai - LA, so that ends up being like 20 grams per shirt per trip.
I did make it sound like transport was contributing to the lion’s share of the embodied carbon and I shouldn’t have - it’s more in the production process. Would have been well served by an ‘in addition’ in between those statements.
Having bounced around several snoop-ware GUI-heavy vendor-lock-in personal finance products, I've this year been using and loving a similar product called Tiller, which absolutely convinced me that a spreadsheet is The Way for this.
I built an MVP of this [1] with images (not video) and in more of an Instagram style (not tiktok) back in ‘22, with the tagline ‘What if social media were literally fake?’
I am bullish on this, albeit with major concerns in many domains. It was fun and addictive as hell with images. With video it will be wild.
Yeah my rule when considering taking on a freelance project is ‘do I want to become an expert in this, and do I thus want my phone to ring for this for the next 2 years?’
I went with a vendor who did the math and sized accordingly and my system works great - great comfort year round and very low energy usage.
reply