Well except…
> Of course relative to NY, they do have a more reliable power grid
Okay, yeah. That would pretty much be my concern.
Having been without power for over two weeks in the past 12 months the propane tanks and propane stove / furnace / water heater have been a lifesaver.
Powering the control boards / fans with a generator (or even UPS in a pinch) is a lot simpler proposition than trying to generate enough power to heat my house, water, and food with resistive heating.
> Powering the control boards / fans with a generator (or even UPS in a pinch) is a lot simpler proposition than trying to generate enough power to heat my house, water, and food with resistive heating.
My furnace runs on 120V power pulling ~8A when running. That's ~1kW. Comparable sized resistive heating would use about 9kW.
1kW for a few hours a day is easy to provide through a cheap generator, a couple small solar panels and a single marine battery, or apparently a ~$220 wind turbine I can order on Amazon that can output up to 1200W. 9kW is a whole different ball game.
And that's just heating. My stove uses in the order of single-digit watts for seconds at a time. It can also just be lit with a match without power. My water heater does run a small exhaust fan while it's heating, but again... we're talking hundreds of watts instead of kilowatts.
Yes, all these options pretty much still need power, but the smaller power requirements are a hell of a lot easier to provide than the power needed for resistive electric heating. I could run my water heater off of a desktop UPS.
Sure. When we’re talking about the temperature band they work in. Once it hits 0C the efficiency is very low, and by -10C is almost doing nothing at all. At that point you have two things happening…
1. You are using electricity to warm your coils outside to keep frost and snow off them.
2. You are using drastically inefficient heat for your home.
200-300% in their band under ideal conditions, maybe. Seems like cherry picking.
And as for the question about colder climates: it's not a matter of whether an area can occasionally experience temperatures below eg. 17˚F. What matters is whether you'll ever experience daily highs that are cold enough to prevent heating the house.
Doesn’t make it wrong.
At -10C you are hardly pulling anything from the air, but you are spending electricity to keep your coils free of frost, as inefficiently as possible.
Do you not know how a heat pump works in cold weather?
You are talking about air source heat pumps. There are actually variants of that technology that work fine at -20 and below. -20 is actually quite far above absolute zero. The challenge is not that there isn't enough energy but finding and pumping liquids around that can absorb that "heat" and actually stay liquid. Efficiency indeed drops below zero. But it still works.
However, ground source heat pumps are not dependent on the air temperature at all and work anywhere you can get a decent temperature gradient from the ground. Which is pretty much anywhere except maybe on top of the arctic ice sheet in e.g. Antarctica.. Stick a few pipes in the ground and get them deep enough and you can have an nice cozy house pretty much anywhere that is not located on a few miles of ice. NY is perfect for that. No permafrost there and stable temperatures below ground throughout the year.
And again, they have been doing this for decades in places like Finland, Sweden, Norway, Greenland, etc. That's because this stuff works and is reliable and efficient enough. This is not some new kind of science fiction technology. Millions of households depend on this when it gets to minus 40C and below (about the same in C and F). And having lived in Sweden and Finland, I can tell you that they like their houses heated properly there and it really gets that cold up north. They don't use gas in houses there at all and never have. There are no gas distribution networks there. Oil based heating has been phased out in most places there a long time ago. But people forget that that stuff has to be trucked in and trucking anything in gets tricky when there's a few meters of snow on the roads. Heatpumps, resistive heating, district heating, and wood based stoves is pretty much all they use there. District heating is not common outside the more populated areas (i.e. most of the Arctic region) with the exception of the larger towns and villages.
The data wasn't terribly correlated to temperature, though he didn't have a mini-shed for the outside unit to protect it from snow, so it probably had to defrost more often during the less-cold, snowy days.
FWIW here in Oslo, we've been using a mini split as the main heat in our home, where it's often -15C for long stretches during winter, and can get down to -25C. It's in the main livingroom, and we do supplement the upstairs bedroom with resistive foil floor heating during the coldest periods. Other than that it's doing great, and comparing the electricity bills with friends and colleagues who don't have a heat pump it's definitely helping a lot.
Sure, but that’s worse than natural gas
Heat pumps are used all over Scandinavia and well into the arctic circle, including rural areas in the parts of Scandinavia (i.e. the polar circle) that see extreme temperatures far more regularly and for far longer periods than NY. Of course relative to NY, they do have a more reliable power grid and excellent building standards. Triple (not double) glazing is the norm there, for example.
And of course more rural places would also feature wood stoves as a backup. There is mostly no gas network there; especially not in rural areas. Before heat pumps became popular about thirty years ago they would have used that or oil based systems.