I recently learned from an NPR piece that only about 13% of US households have a heat pump.
This floored me. One because in my mid Atlantic area nearly every house has a heat pump. When house shopping many years ago we never saw a listing that didn't have one.
The other is that if you have central air then it seems like you should have a heat pump. You're basically just running the heat pump backwards to provide heat instead of air conditioning, but apparently the vast majority of central air installs are only set up to do cooling? This makes no sense to me. Even if you area gets too cold to be efficiently warmed by a heat pump in the winter you can still use it for several months out of the year and switch to gas only when you need to. It's not like gas is especially cheap.
This floored me. One because in my mid Atlantic area nearly every house has a heat pump. When house shopping many years ago we never saw a listing that didn't have one.
The other is that if you have central air then it seems like you should have a heat pump. You're basically just running the heat pump backwards to provide heat instead of air conditioning, but apparently the vast majority of central air installs are only set up to do cooling? This makes no sense to me. Even if you area gets too cold to be efficiently warmed by a heat pump in the winter you can still use it for several months out of the year and switch to gas only when you need to. It's not like gas is especially cheap.