Mike Cappuccio talks about why homeowners should consider heat pumps for a greener way to heat and cool their homes.
I’m Mike Cappuccio, the founder of N.E.T.R., and today I am here to talk to you about a greener way to heat your home.
When we look at oil and gas, these are all sources of non-renewable energy. And at some point, probably within the next 50 years, we’re going to run out of natural gas and we’re going to run out of oil. So we got to be looking at alternative ways to heat our homes over the next 30 to 50 years.
Massachusetts has a goal in place by 2030 to reduce the carbon footprint, because when you’re burning natural gas and you’re burning oil, these are some of the things that are contributing to the climate change and what’s happening in the country today, and in the world. So I think we’ve really got to be looking at, “what are the alternative sources to heat our home?” Well, the heat pump.
The heat pump’s been around for years. I’ve been selling heat pumps and installing heat pumps for 32 years now. They do heat your home. They will work, and they will heat your home. You can remove the current heating system that you do have in your house now that is contributing to the problems that are happening around the world today. So let’s take a look at, how do we do that?
We would come into your home, assess, look at what’s going on in the home. You’d need to have the proper load calculations done on your home. I always suggest to people, let’s seal up the home, let’s look at the envelope, let’s look at the windows, let’s look at the insulation. Let’s look at what we can do to make the home tight, to reduce the amount of heat leakage that would go to the outside of the home.
With basic physics, you put an ice cube on the table and it will melt. Why is that? Warm air goes to cold. So if the warm air can leak from the inside of the home to the outside of the home, we don’t want that happening. So we look at all those factors, we look at what type of heat pump can heat your home.
With heat pump technology today, these manufacturers are striving and striving on cold climate air source heat pumps to heat your home when these ultra-low temperatures are coming; minus five, minus 10, minus 15. I’m seeing heat pumps now at minus 15 degrees that are giving you a hundred percent efficiency. So the advancement of the heat pump technology is unbelievable today.
The other thing that you’ve really got to look at too, and consider, is when I’m burning an oil furnace in my home and the gases that are just escaping, maybe into the basement, or escaping into the attic, that you could maybe have a leaky flue, or an unsealed combustion chamber where these natural gas fumes and oil fumes are going into my house… What is the quality of the air that’s in my home? I mean, we’re really not opening up windows in the winter time to let fresh air into the home, so the heat pump doesn’t have…we’re not burning any of these fuels. So we’re contributing really to the quality of the air in your home too.
So I really think that this technology is moving very, very fast right now into the world, and into homes in the United States right now. So if you’re considering a greener way to heat your home, you’ve got to be looking at these ideas.
