It’s been economical for 30+ yrs for Germanys climate, they just have older housing that’s never been updated. Every heat pump has backup source of heat too. Which will be electric coils or gas usually, so you don’t even have to give up gas heat for the really frigid days.

I'd say in UK heat pumps are only just down to affordability domestically. If capital is cheap for you then perhaps they've been affordable much longer, but baseline costs are only recently noticeably low enough for me to consider it ... possibly when I look next time it'll be out of reach again given the weak pound and massive cost of living increase.

I'm hoping to get a heat pump next Summer.

Supply is a real problem at the moment. If you really plan on getting one I would order it well before you have the installation planned.

Thanks for the advice. I was hoping to have time over Christmas to start looking, I've done a little preliminary research. There are, as ever, complications (possible extension?).

It's tricky stuff, best to befriend a local installer so they can help you choose. In the end after doing all the numbers for our house the simplest solution for the next two years (as long as we still have netmetering) was to install ample solar and postpone the heatpump that way by the time we will buy the heatpump the solar installation will already be halfway towards being paid off, with the current electrical rates here the ROI on solar is incredible, and running a heatpump off the solar system in the winter isn't very effective, at a minimum you'll need a battery set up for that. But even in October we managed to be net positive with respect to the grid which helps to offset the cost of the gas.

But in 2025 it will be a completely different story which will likely require yet another investment. I'm kind of wondering how people that can't just do that kind of thing are going to cope, it is a worrying development. Of course it doesn't help that the measures to control the prices of energy here effectively benefit the large producers at the expense of the people that decided to go for heatpumps early on.

But as long as the countermeasures still split by gas and electricity usage it is to our advantage to get as close to the cap as possible on natural gas. Ridiculous, but the difference is too large to ignore.

Yeah there’s no denying that it definitely helps that electricity is a good bit cheaper in the US, making gas v. Heat pump heat pretty much on par in the northeast at least.

It hasn't been, though - not for any particular technical reason, mind you. Yes, they are 3x as efficient, but meanwhile we have heaved so many taxes and other costs on private electricity prices (to keep industry use cheap) while natural gas had stayed dirt cheap that the upfront capex really made no sense.

If they weren't so impractical, everyone should have been buying gas turbines to make their electricity - that's the level of market failure we are talking about.

Heatpumps gained in popularity here in Sweden around 20 years ago. My parents have one that's starting to get old enough to need replacing.

https://skvp.se/statistik/varmepumpsforsaljning

If the government can subsidize solar installations, can't they just as well subsidize furnace replacements? It's interesting which parts of this problem people are eager to tackle, and which parts they completely let their own side down on.

The incentives and the rhetoric are poorly aligned.