Gas is cheap and it is fairly efficient (debatable) but the rest of your comment is silly. My wife and I and a child of 5 live in a 1000sqft house (two floors total 2k sqft) and heat and cool with a heat pump. Electric on demand water. Nothing crazy about the building as far as insulation and air sealing. 2012 build-to-code. Our electricity bills are NEVER over $200 a month and usually under $150 a month. We haven’t had a power outage in two years and the last one was scheduled for about 1 hour.
If you want to argue for gas make better points. Electricity is cheap and reliable. I don’t disagree that gas is cheap also and that we shouldn’t entirely abandon gas and I’m a realist in thinking we can’t eliminate it entirely and suddenly.
What are the gas and electricity rates in your area? In Sask, we’re paying about $0.16/kWh for electricity and about $6.40/GJ. There’s about 278 kWh in a GJ, so the electricity cost works out to about $44/GJ, or about 7 times the cost of gas. A good coefficient of performance for a heat pump seems to be about 3, and modern gas furnaces are easily above 90% efficiency so the actual cost difference for gas to electric heat is about 1:3.
Now, newer houses are better insulated, so your heating load on a 2012 build is going to be a lot lower than a 1977 build. You also didn’t mention your heat source. Ground source pumps are pretty good efficiency year round, but cost a lot for the initial install, while air-source pumps have a large seasonal variation in their efficiency, which is particularly troublesome in central/northern Canadian climates.
Gas is cheap and it is fairly efficient (debatable) but the rest of your comment is silly. My wife and I and a child of 5 live in a 1000sqft house (two floors total 2k sqft) and heat and cool with a heat pump. Electric on demand water. Nothing crazy about the building as far as insulation and air sealing. 2012 build-to-code. Our electricity bills are NEVER over $200 a month and usually under $150 a month. We haven’t had a power outage in two years and the last one was scheduled for about 1 hour.
If you want to argue for gas make better points. Electricity is cheap and reliable. I don’t disagree that gas is cheap also and that we shouldn’t entirely abandon gas and I’m a realist in thinking we can’t eliminate it entirely and suddenly.
What are the gas and electricity rates in your area? In Sask, we’re paying about $0.16/kWh for electricity and about $6.40/GJ. There’s about 278 kWh in a GJ, so the electricity cost works out to about $44/GJ, or about 7 times the cost of gas. A good coefficient of performance for a heat pump seems to be about 3, and modern gas furnaces are easily above 90% efficiency so the actual cost difference for gas to electric heat is about 1:3.
Now, newer houses are better insulated, so your heating load on a 2012 build is going to be a lot lower than a 1977 build. You also didn’t mention your heat source. Ground source pumps are pretty good efficiency year round, but cost a lot for the initial install, while air-source pumps have a large seasonal variation in their efficiency, which is particularly troublesome in central/northern Canadian climates.