I have to tell you, battling the human-induced warming of the planet has been a long, strange trip here in Troy.
When we moved into our log house 30 years ago, our primary heat came through baseboards from an oil burner. No surprise there. For a long, long time, burning oil has been the primary heat source in Maine.
In the basement for backup, a small wood stove was plugged illegally into the chimney. We were not much bothered by this, beyond the fact we knew damn well our oil burner and cars were doing their parts to make an as-yet invisible but serious problem, i.e. global warming, worse. Practically everybody else in Maine was doing it that way too, after all.
The wood stove and a kerosene space heater kept us from freezing for nine days in January 1998, when, you might recall, the harbinger of last winter’s debacular storms crippled electricity delivery statewide. After that, I made sure there was a bigger stack of dry wood going into every winter.
In the 2000s and 2010s, I was keeping closer and closer track of temperatures, and liking the patterns less and less. It was no comfort to be assured by one of my students that global warming “has been disproven.”
By 2008, we were fretting over whether we could afford to take up the carbon emission slack at our house. At first, the answer seemed to be no. Solar panels were for rich people. So was geothermal, which looked like it, even if we were millionaires, would dry up our well in about half an hour.
A friend was learning to do the early home energy audits, so he came over, found ways we could tighten up the house and said we were in luck because a Bangor outfit had designed the first cold-weather heat pumps, supposedly generating heat down to minus 4 outside.
This system worked with ducts, before the rise (we will come back to this word) of wall-mounted mini-splits, and it was expensive. But different kinds of arithmetic assessing the rising price of oil and gallons burned versus the price of electricity revealed that if all worked somewhere near as described, we could save at least hundreds of dollars a year on heating costs, using the savings to pay off a loan in seven or eight years.
So we took out the loan and had the ducted heat pump system installed in 2009.
Ha ha! Things did not work as described. The Hallowell Acadia heat pump never really ran right. I had to keep calling the installer to come get it going, which meant we were still burning unplanned gallons of oil. For about two years, it wasn’t really funny.
It got even less funny when the installer stopped answering his telephone and disappeared. There were beginning to be news stories about the Acadia. Come to find out, a lot of people in New England had fallen victim to its flaws, including that it quit working and was usually irreparable.
I tracked down an air conditioning technician who had actually worked in the Hallowell plant, knew what the problem was and could fix it: Get a different unit. Which he did, discovering along the way that on the inside of the failed Acadia unit was stamped in big letters, “REFURBISHED.” So much for the upstanding local contractor, who had also tried to talk us into letting him remove the oil burner and tank.
This was in 2011. By the time it was operating again, we had about $25,000 into our heat pump system.
The new unit worked, but only down to an outside temperature of 25. After that, the oil burner kicked on. Since winters were getting warmer all the time, this was at least a halfway measure to curbing our carbon emissions. Plus, the price of oil was increasing faster than the price of electricity. So for the next 10 years or so, my arithmetic told me we saved money in the long run, despite the original fiasco.
So it went on like this, using the heat pump at 25 degrees or higher, then turning on the oil burner when the temperature was lower than 25. The oil burner was making the hot water, so it came on every day anyway. Not exactly “energy efficient,” but better than the cost of spewing carbon into the air.
The next round began in the summer of 2021, when we thought we could reduce our oil burning by a lot more, and had a hot water heat pump installed.
I’ll tell you the second half of the Great Heat Pump adventure next week.
Dana Wilde lives in Troy. You can contact him at dwilde.naturalist@gmail.com. His book “Summer to Fall: Notes and Numina from the Maine Woods” is available from North Country Press. Backyard Naturalist appears the second and fourth Thursdays each month.
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