Why Mainers have a hard time with heat pumps

It may have been a warmer than normal winter in Maine, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t get extremely cold. In mid-January, temperatures in Farmingdale, a town outside Augusta where Kaylie McLaughlin lives, dropped to 6 degrees Fahrenheit. “The kind of cold that hurts,” she said.

But this winter, Mrs. McLaughlin’s bungalow is nice and warm, thanks to two heat pumps she installed to replace her oil furnace. “I just feel so comfortable,” said Ms. McLaughlin, a pharmaceutical sales representative. She also saves money and no longer pays $400 for an oil delivery every four weeks.

Unlike a space heater, a heat pump extracts heat from the outside air, even in freezing temperatures, and then runs it through a compressor, making it even hotter, before pumping it indoors. In summer it can work in reverse, taking heat from inside a building and pumping it outside, cooling interior spaces.

Heat pumps in 2023 sold out gas ovens a climate victory in the United States for the second year in a row. Electric heat pumps are the cheapest and most energy-efficient ways to heat and cool homes, and they don’t emit the carbon pollution that overheats the planet.

No state has adopted them faster than Maine.

This northeastern town with hardy species and snowbound winters is going electric quickly and installing electric heat pumps three times faster than the national average, according to Rewiring America, a nonprofit that promotes widespread adoption of electricity. Last September, Maine met its goal of installing 100,000 heat pumps in households two years ahead of scheduleand aims to install another 175,000 by 2027.

Rapid adoption in Maine is being driven by a combination of state rebates on top of federal incentives and a new cadre of vendors and installers, as well as growing frustrations over the high cost of heating oil.

The $12,000 price tag for Ms. McLaughlin’s heat pumps was cut in half by state rebates, and she paid the rest with low-interest financing. In the coldest months, her loan payments and electric bills were the same as her old oil bill, but she has already saved $100 a month during the shoulder season and received a $2,000 federal tax credit. Plus, the heat is reliable, she said, unlike her rickety old oil furnace, which forced her to spend much of the winter indoors. And even though she sets the pumps to 66 degrees, she says it feels better because the heat is distributed more evenly throughout her home.

It’s a big conversion for a state where more than half of households burned oil for heat in 2022, the highest rate in the country.

The change marks a cultural shift, helped along when then-Governor Paul LePage, a conservative Republican, installed heat pumps in both his official residence and his waterfront home a decade ago. Word of mouth spread among families, neighbors and even church communities where new heat pumps kept congregants warm. Even in frigid temperatures, they told each other, heat pumps worked even in Maine.

“Ten years ago they weren’t really popular,” says Josh Tucker of Valley Home Services, a family-owned heating business outside Bangor. “No one really knew what they were.” He first installed heat pumps in his sister’s new home in 2014, despite the objections of her contractor who, Mr. Tucker said, was “very against it.”

“He thought she would freeze to death if she didn’t have a furnace or a boiler,” he said. She did not do that and uses the same heat pumps today.

The new technology was especially quickly embraced in a northern Maine community after Mr. Tucker’s father installed heat pumps in a Methodist church there. The Tucker family still sells heating oil and propane, but less and less. The heat pump business, meanwhile, grew from installing two to three units per week to 3,000 last year, an almost twenty-fold increase.

“We’ve done TV ads and social media ads, but the biggest thing has always been word of mouth and that’s how it’s exploded,” Mr Tucker said.

According to Efficiency Maine, an independent agency that implements energy efficiency programs, replacing heating oil and propane with heat pumps saves a household above a thousand dollars a year.

They can also make a dent in the pollution that causes climate change. By means of a calculation, If every family home in the United States used heat pumps, annual greenhouse gas emissions would drop by 160 million metric tons, the same as taking 32 million cars off the road.

Heat pumps perform a kind of magic trick. They can produce three to four units of heat with one unit of energy input.

Because nothing is burned, the air quality in the area improves. Because heat pumps do not use oil or propane, there are no fuel leaks. Heat pumps run on electricity, and in Maine, much of that electricity comes from wind and other clean sources. In 2022, 64 percent of the electricity generated in Maine came from renewable energy.

In a twist, the state’s rapid adoption of electric heat pumps is tied to its historic reliance on oil and propane for heat. Maine is rural and sparsely populated, and gas companies concluded it wasn’t worth building distribution lines in many parts of the state, said Michael Stoddard, the executive director of Efficiency Maine. Instead of getting heating fuel from a utility company, Mainers typically have to pick up the phone to arrange a delivery when they’re running low.

This was one reason why Michelle Whitmore, 60, a former monogrammer at LL Bean, signed up for a pilot program that installed a free heat pump in her mobile home two years ago. Ms Whitmore is legally blind and relied on a neighbor to read her fuel gauge. She was also tired of having to shovel snow so the fuel deliverers could reach her oil tank.

“I thought it couldn’t be colder with the heat pump than my furnace,” she said. Now all she has to do is press a switch. The heating and cooling are also more consistent, she said, and although her electric bill has increased, she still saves $200 to $300 a year.

There is resistance from the oil and gas industry, which has provided support campaigns fighting electrification and questioning the effectiveness of heat pumps in the bitter cold. “Heat pumps have become involved in the culture war of electrification versus sticking to fossil fuels,” said Christopher Kessler, a state representative from South Portland who works as an energy auditor. Mr Kessler said some home heating companies that sell both oil and heat pumps still incorrectly claim that heat pumps cannot be used as a primary heating source.

Mr. Stoddard of Efficiency Maine said that while many Mainers use heat pumps in conjunction with oil and gas heating systems, the hybrid approach reduces the effectiveness of the heat pump. His agency recently changed its program so that only households that switched completely to heat pumps would receive state rebates. People can still use fossil fuel heating systems, but only as a backup or for hot water in the home, he said.

Smokey Bunn said he and his family paid up to $600 a month for oil, and used three tons of wood pellets for their heating stove every winter. “It works great,” he said of the family’s new heat pumps. “People who make them enthusiastic.”

The household’s biggest fans, he said, may be the family’s two dogs, Ivan and Nahla, who regularly curl up on the couch in front of the system. “It pushes hot air towards them,” he said. “They love it.”