They are also extremely badly insulated and costly to heat, having solid brick walls, large windows and high ceilings. We've already picked the low-hanging fruit like loft insulation and double glazed windows.
What's left to do is things like exterior cladding. I looked at getting external insulation applied to a victorian terraced house, and was quoted £30,000 - more than the UK's median salary.
The average annual energy bill is £1,923 so even if that insulation was so effective it dropped the energy bill to zero, it'd still be a pretty bad investment.
Even my grandma's summer cabin has double glazed windows and it's not liveable during winters in the least. =)
Over here triple-glazing is the minimum and has been for decades, I don't see why it wouldn't be useful everywhere else too. They keep the heat out during summers and the heat in during winter.
Unfortunately, having more panes of glass does not automatically mean you get more energy efficiency.
The triples with very good insulation and coatings (eg. heat rejection) can be better than old quadruples. My parents have quadruple windows from the 80's, and energy efficiency is much better in a modern triple single unit than with the two doubles they have.
That would be what, like 7% return on investment? We just had a period of ~0% interest rates and <2% mortgage rates.
It is not realistic to expect ROI of only a few years for upgrades to buildings or infrastructure. Lifespan of these things is like half a century or more.
Coming from eastern Europe, the age and condition of housing here was a bit shocking.
There used to be a grant in UK for insulating housing, and it was cut by conservative government. Our rate of insulating homes dropped form 2 million houses a year to basically zero. Without favourable credit, maybe zero interest credit, avaliable, of course individual homeowners will find it difficult to afford.
For the walls, it can become quite expensive to insulate it. But at least for the wooden floor, you have a cheap option: lay a new laminate flooring with proper underlay. It will cost typically less than £1000, you'll avoid damaging your wooden flooring, and also improve the thermal confort by removing the air leaks and insulating more.
I got AC installed a few years ago and regret not getting a heat pump. I didn't think about it until it was too late.
The main issue is your basic 14 SEER heat pump needs larger capacity to be able to be the sole heating source than it does for just AC, so in my case in the northeast US the heat pump can’t economically be run in Winter, just spring/fall & probably can’t keep up with the coldest winter days at all. But it does provide flexibility if gas prices spike in the future, and saves a very small amount of money per year (< $100)
If you’re the type to buy a high efficiency system going with a heat pump over central AC seems like it’s maybe more worth it from a return on investment standpoint
The solution usually is like in your case to include an auxiliary heat source such as electric or gas for those extreme cold days the heat pump can’t keep up.
I say that because both can spin up very aggressively.
What you’re seeing is not really because it’s brushless- it’s a “soft start” feature… most likely. It could also be that your unit is a variable speed.
Now — I may be completely misunderstanding what you’re asking. If so apologies. I went from an old unit to a newer variable speed, and the starting does seem very smooth, even when cranking up to full vs the jarring and faster spin up of the old unit.
Your typical AC unit has a single solenoid that physically makes or breaks the connection across your 240v line. That's the big clunk you hear when the compressor kicks on. This type of control is either all the way on or all the way off.
An inverter topology uses a bunch of electronics to convert your incoming 240v to a lower voltage or even frequency. This gives the electronics very fine control over how the motor works. You can start up slow, or run the motor at 50% or anything you want.
This doesn't really have anything to do with whether the motor itself is brushless. All brushless motors require advanced drive electronics. This usually ends up being pretty similar to an inverter topology, but not necessarily. A brushed motor doesn't care, you can just jam some electricity in and get motion out.
What you think of when you say "brushless motor" is categorically -not- the kind of motor in an AC unit. AC compressors use larger induction motors which may not have brushes, but they are not 'brushless motors'
A brushless motor specifically refers to a particular type of DC motor which uses phased, stationary coils to move a rotor with a ring of magnets. An AC induction motor may use either an iron core in the rotor, or a coil of wire that produces a magnetic field for the stator windings to push against.
Inverter refers to the drive circuitry for the compressor. The inverter basically concerts AC to DC, then it's inverted back into AC, however the AC output can be variable frequency. This allows for slower speeds of the compressor, at lower power consumption.
As far as I'm aware the compressor design can be exactly the same, the only difference is the drive for it.
My AC unit is only 1.5 tons but my furnace is 40k BTU and, unlike the 75k BTU furnace it replaced, is appropriately sized for the space. (Why someone previously installed such a massively oversized furnace I will never know.) If I remember correctly a 1.5 ton heat pump is roughly equivalent to 18k BTU, so it might be useful in the all too brief cool but not cold periods in spring and fall but in winter I'd still mainly be relying on the gas furnace.
It would also make people getting AC think about getting more expensive low-temp heat pump.
These people dgaf. Don't delude yourself that they do.
Also, what AC system doesn’t also heat efficiently? When I got our split system installed there wasn’t even an option to buy a non-reversible one.
> Inflation Reduction Act
Does not compute.
We switched to a heat pump last year and couldn’t be happier. It was quite expensive but Federal subsidies are now available with the Inflation Reduction Act in effect.
The real issue here is that the HVAC industry is quite conservative and still commonly recommends against heat pumps. This is the real political difficulty to overcome and the IRA’s buckets of money will do it. Europe needs the same.