Northstar Heating & Cooling Services

When heating, it will always be more efficient to capture heat in the air, rather than
buying and burning fuels from the marketplace. In the end, it's about how much money
it will cost to heat your home. With heat pumps, you are not buying a fuel but the
electricity to capture and move heat, which is freely available in the air. Given there are
only three small electric motors in use with a heat pump, we can see how claims of
200% to 300% efficiencies can be achieved. That is, for every dollar of electricity you
put in, you get $2-$3 of heat.

The strategy with heat pumps is to use it as the main furnace, with the expensive
exisiting oil and gas furnaces used only as the backup on the few days a year when the
air is too cold to provide all the heat required. The above table outlines the annual
operating costs of a heat pump integrated into your existing oil furnace. Operating costs
for adding on a heat pump to a natural gas furnace are very similar or less, due to the
fact that natural gas is currently a cheaper fuel.