OT Electric or Gas furnance.

I used to hate heat pumps, and I'm still not much of a fan of air tranfer types. They have problems with heat transfer in extremely hot weather, or extremely cold weather. I get both here.

But the sub-soil ones, those work great year round. I've got friends that have them, and I'm very impressed with them. In fact, you could probably talk me out of the gas backup with a sub-soil installation just because they never seem to need to kick it on.

Resistance wire electric is god awful expensive. It's dandy for little space heater installations, but you don't want to see how your meter spins if you've got a whole house heated with it.

Radiant in floor heating feels nice. I've had it, and the warm floor is delightful. But it tends to be pricy, and it's slow to warm up the house. Baseboard hot water is far faster at heating the house up, and neither give you blast of warm air to go "ahh" in. And of course leave you looking for a/c in the summer.

I haven't many complaints about the heat pump, but I want the best efficiency available going forward.
BTW, I'm in southeast Pennsylvania so I suspect that our weather conditions are similar.

I might even consider hot water but installing the system could be costly retrofit.

I am surprised to hear someone say that they removed a wood pellet stove/furnace. I put in a pellet stove and love it.

Other than cost is there another reason for getting rid of the pellets?

From Designing HVAC systems for the past 35yrs, Natural Gas is the cheapest heat if considering store bought fuel.

Wood heat beats that if you don't count your labor. This type of heat is unlike any other type as it's the most satisfiying of all heating types. Next is a "true" heat pump. I say true as some try to pass off any AC system with back-up electric stip heaters as a heat hump and it's not. A true HP uses the refrigeration cycle for both heating and cooling by using a refrigerant reversing valve. HP are very efficent to 45* then they drop off rapidly. At about 30* then a back-up source needs to be used, ie electric strip heaters or?. However there are ground soruce HP's that bury a coil in the ground or use well water to suck heat out of. They work well and efficent. HP register temps are about 125* slightly cooler than gas at 140*. I will get complaints from people who came from a natural gas units to HP units saying the registers blow cool air.

Never use electric resistance strip heaters for back-up heat. A pure waste of money.

From here you can get a piggy back unit with natural gas for heat and refrigeration for AC. They work very well and the most cost effective.

On the refrigeration side, only choose a AC unit with a scroll compressor. These compressors are almost non-destructable and last a very long time when comparred to other compressor types. Run from any type of radial compressor no matter what it's on.

Next comes the piggy back LP/AC units. Although not as cheap to orperate as natural gas they come in third in cost.

Electric heating of any kind is just plain expensive. A HP is not electric heating/cooling. Electric is resistance heating just like a electric dryer is.

Now when you compare apples with apples you will not use any other figures than BTU's. Alot of salemen talk all kinds of numbers but there's only two you need to be concerend about. On heating, Cost per therm or 100000btu
On cooling, cost per ton of refeigeration, 12000btu
Add these two numbers together and you get your approx. orperating cost difference between units. There's more too than this but it seperates the sales BS.

You will also see SEER numbers. The higher the number the better.

If they try to use any other numbers you just met a used car saleman!

The last cost study I did is reflected below but keep in mind this was for a specific job and may not reflect your actual oprerating cost numbers but listed as "ball park" figure and only reflected the heating demand:
Natural gas $.34/hr
HP $.44/hr
LP $.85/hr
Electric resistance $2.35/hr

The above numbers was for Phoenix, AZ the most idea weather for a HP. Ground soruce HP's in colder climates will have simular numbers but unit cost becomes a factor thats not included in the above numbers.

T_Bone

With regards to the rising gas prices, what your A/C guy forgot to mention is why gas prices are going up. Demand for gas is going up because almost all new electric generating plants are gas turbines. It's a lot more efficient to deliver gas to your home and burn it there than to deliver it to a generating plant, burn it to generate power and send the power over transmission lines to your home. That's why it will ALWAYS be cheaper to heat with natural gas than with a heat pump.

Now if you use propane rather than natural gas, the cost difference between a heat pump and a furnace is not nearly as great. But it's still going to be cheaper to use propane in most parts of the country.

I had a house in coastal North Carolina that I heated with a heat pump. Actually, that's not quite true: I heated the house with a kerosene heater, because the heat pump did not deliver comfortable heat. If the auxiliary heat is off, the air coming out of the ducts is only a few degrees warmer than room air, so it feels like there's a cold draft going through the room. When the aux heat kicks on, it feels more comfortable but it really makes the meter spin.

Seriously, if you have natural gas coming into your home, install one of the new high efficiency gas furnaces and you'll have no regrets.

A pellet stove w/inverter would be a dandy back up, but I understand they require frequent cleaning. As a teenager I cut wood for a wood furncace, 1 cord a week, then split and carry and load. Now I am not too anxious to repeat that part of youth.

Several years ago wood furnace went bad. Had elect. furnace as standby. Former owner had it set up like this. The air handler was also used for central air. Got to figuring. The elect.furnace drew 22 kw when on. Figured up cost of cove heaters. These mount on the wall just below the ceiling. They would operate on less kw then the elect.furnace. Installed the cove heters and as someone said,you also need a good humidifier. Was in the process of looking for a good wood stove for the basement when we decided to sell out and move south. Looked into heat pumps but they were too costly.

steve