Magic Heat Pumps

vacuum,
The cost is partially due to the economy of scale. How many have been installed in your neighborhood vs gas or electric based HVAC systems? Some of your costs in production do not change when producing more units, so those costs are shared by more consumers as production increases resulting in a lower price for the consumer. What makes me irate, is the refusal of the home building industry to change. Try to buy a new home in a subdivision that is designed to take advantage of passive solar, utilizes a heat pump, or even has a tankless water heater as standard or even optional equipment. They are the ones that could really drive the economy of scale to bring prices down for us all. Imagine being the builder of a subdivision and selling homes that may be more expensive, but have the selling point of a fraction of the utility costs of the subdivision down the road.

Heat pumps are relatively simple units why is the cost so exhorbitantly high? Yes lifecycle costs are low but one wouldn't think the technology is that complex to require high upfront costs.

Um...Mark...you live in arizona...either face that fact and pay cooling bills becuse you want to pretend your body is in a different climate, or scrap the A/C, use ceiling fans and and some solar opening skylights to pull the heat out, and quit being so hung up on climate control! Yes, hvac installers do need to come out of the dark ages, but you talking about them wasting precious resources is insane when I think about the size of the footprint your 5000 sq ft house is taking up on this earth and the amount of resources it takes to work and make a house of that size!

With 5000 sq ft of house in the AZ desert, I've searched in vain for a qualified and experienced HVAC or MECH Contractor to put together a GeoThermal system for us. The local "btu jockies" seem to suffer from sheer ignorance or inertia. The fact that something new or different might be better, cheaper for the long run, and have less impact on the earth seems to make no difference. These guys have been in the fortunate position of being able to throw together mediocre systems and shove them in tract and custom homes here for years without anyone demanding anything better of them! The result is that we have many "luxury" homes here that have substantial square footage and HVAC that meets the bare minimum required by law, and nothing more. Doesn't seem to matter if the house cost 2 Million or 10 Million. The HVAC you get is almost always the same old antiquated technology poorly installed. Their idea of a heat load calculation is "ya got 5500 sq feet of house - yer gonna need about 12 Tons of Cooling." And then they install the system that is most profitable for them and probably the most brutal for the homeowner to operate over the next 20 years or so. To be sentenced to $800/mo electric bills because of sheer incompetence and cheapness on the part of the various builders is INSANE! The waste of precious resources that result from this kind of thinking borders on the criminal in my opinion. The one place in the US where we could EASILY run our entire home on PhotoVoltaics and the subsidies here from the government and utilities are far lower per KW/of installed capacity than they are in NYC!

But to not be able to find a decent company to install a GeoThermal system is mind-boggling. I've been told by HVAC contractors "... they won't work here!" (I guess the laws of physics get suspended here in the desert maybe?) or "... they can't dig the holes deep enough!" (Funny - most homes here have t

Do youn have knowledge of those systems been cost effective in
tropical temperatures of 80-90 degrees year round like in the
caribbean