Alaska Heat Smart and partners to lower energy costs for nonprofits across Alaska!
On October 25, Alaska Heat Smart was announced as a ‘Prime Selectee’ for the Renew America’s Nonprofits grant, a funding opportunity from the Office of State and Community Energy Programs (SCEP) at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). We and eight other Prime Selectees from across the country will share $45 million in awards to help other nonprofits implement high-impact energy improvements in their buildings, creating cleaner and healthier community spaces, and generating energy savings that can be redirected to mission-critical work.
This $3.9M grant will allow Alaska Heat Smart and partners from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory – Alaska Campus (NREL), and Information Insights (II), to develop a statewide program to improve energy efficiency and reduce annual operating costs of up to twenty-five nonprofit Alaska buildings that serve lower to middle income and disadvantaged populations in the health and housing sectors.
Read our press release about this exciting opportunity!
For those of you who know Juneau resident and heat pump believer Shawn Eisele, you know his passion for experimentation, for learning, for digging in to better understand what works and what works best. Shawn applies this disciplined approach to ski tuning, to program marketing, and most recently, to heat pump functionality. Shawn has generously shared with Alaska Heat Smart his latest thoughts on heat pump heating and some ways in which heat pump owners can extract more heat from these amazing devices. This seems like pretty appropriate reading material given our current chilly October temps! Thank you, Shawn!
“My Heat Pump Isn’t Keeping Up” – But It Probably Can!
Courtesy of Shawn Eisele
If your heat pump is set at 75, but your house temperature is barely 65, we have good news – your heat pump can probably produce more heat – it just needs to be told to do so. A few simple adjustments can help.
Most commonly, the heat pump isn’t being maxed out. Rather, it thinks it’s producing enough heat, even though you may think otherwise. The heat pump’s thermostat is located on the air handler where all the hot air comes from. This thermostat measures adjacent hot air so if air circulation in the room is inadequate, the heat pump doesn’t understand that it should produce more heat. The heat pump coasts along on easy street, believing it’s 72 in the room (or whatever the remote is set to), but the adjacent room is ten degrees cooler.
Yes, you could just crank up the temperature setting on the remote. You might need to crank more than expected, say to 74 so a further away part of the house warms to 68. But to really make your heat pump work well and do so efficiently, you need to boost its air circulation. First, on the indoor unit(s) of your heat pump, set the fan to medium-high or high so the hot air produced moves into the rest of the house. Then, direct the louvers of the air handler to where you want the warm air to go. Is most of your living area off to the right? Then direct the hot air a bit to the right. Generally, direct the air just lower than horizontal. You want it to move directly out and away from the heat pump. Move obstructions out of the path of air flow. If there is a coat rack or table blocking the air, move it out of the way and let the air move easily from your heat pump to other parts of the house. And speaking of circulation, if you haven’t cleaned your filters recently, do so now! Unimpeded air flow will not only improve heat circulation, it will save you money.
The next major change you can make is to improve circulation in the room generally. A ceiling fan running in reverse can pull cooler air up from the floor and back to the heat pump’s air handler. Or, you can add a standing or desk fan to blow air from the cooler part of your home (say low on the floor, from a cold room or below a picture window) up towards the air handler. That cooler air not only tells the heat pump that more heat is needed, it also makes the heat pump more efficient, since it’s easier to heat cold air than hot air. If your air handler is near the ceiling, moving cooler air to it might make the biggest difference of all.
You can, by the way, install a separately-purchased heat pump thermostat in a different room, so the heat pump really knows it needs to keep producing heat. Still, increasing circulation and providing cooler return air is important to making even that set-up more efficient.
When outdoor temperatures drop, avoid setting your remote’s thermostat down at night. Instead, consider closing or mostly closing doors to bedrooms and spare rooms you don’t need overly warm. Reducing the square footage to heat at night, the time when it’s coldest and hardest to produce heat, will keep the heat pump’s warm air flowing to those spaces that you’ll want warm in the morning. That’s great because on cold days the heat pump won’t have capacity to warm them up as quickly in the morning. Later, open the bedroom doors when the sun is out and it’s easier for the heat pump to produce heat. CAUTION: If you have an oil boiler and hot water (hydronic) baseboards in your home, be sure to not cool certain rooms too much to prevent pipes from freezing. The same applies to plumbing in bathrooms.
VERY UNHAPPY COMPRESSORSOMEWHAT UNHAPPY COMPRESSORHAPPY COMPRESSOR
Attention needs to be given to the heat pump’s outdoor unit (compressor) as well. Make sure there’s an abundance of air flow around the compressor. Is snow covering half of it? Get rid of that. Is the copper refrigerant line uninsulated and giving off heat? Insulate it and save that heat for inside. Hopefully the compressor is far enough off the ground so it’s not touching the glacier of ice forming below it. (When a heat pump gathers heat from the air, the compressor becomes very cold and humidity freezes on it. A defrost cycle melts this frost and drains below, forming ice.) Good projects to schedule for next summer are to construct a roof over the compressor to shelter it from rain and snow. Ensure there is a clear path for water to drain below an elevated compressor. You can have a technician install a drain pan heater at the bottom of your unit, so water flows through instead of freezing there. Most installations today have this as a standard feature, or at least a highly recommended add-on.
By the way, it’s a little late to mention this, but hopefully you’ve installed a heat pump designed for colder climates. Daikin’s “Aurora” line and newer ‘Atmosphera’ line are rated down to -13°F and Fujitsu’s “H” models are rated down to -15°F. If you don’t yet have your heat pump installed, be certain that your quoted equipment is cold climate ready!
Ultimately, a heat pump struggles to gather heat when it’s really cold outside, and unfortunately that’s when you need the most heat. Having a back-up heat source to provide supplemental heat on cold days is important. This might mean retaining your old Toyo, furnace, or boiler for frigid days, or installing a wood stove or electric or IR baseboard heaters. Luckily, Juneau is rarely frigid, allowing us to get the most out of our heat pumps on these cold, but not frigid days. A heat pump may require a bit more thought and tinkering than our outdated oil-burning systems did. The savings seem worth it!
It’s easy to forget about your heat pump when temps climb into the 70s, but early summer is an important time to show your heat pump’s compressor a bit of love! We suspect that your heat exchanger fins are gunking up!
You may have noticed ‘willow snow’ floating around our air recently. Willow trees across southeast are shedding their seeds, sending the tiny reproductive packets on their way with the aid of what I like to call willow snow, that bit of cottony fluff that catches any bit of wind and takes the seeds to their prospective new homes. While this is an impressive and ingenious seed dispersal method, these seeds and associated fluff are great at gumming up our outdoor heat pump compressors. And, once the willows are through, fireweed seeds will fly close behind!
As your heat pump compressor pulls air across its heat exchanging fins, willow and fireweed fluff, along with grass, flies, and any other air-transported material, will accumulate on the fins. This material works to block both air transport and the heat exchanging process, decreasing the unit’s efficiency. In short, operating costs go up and performance, i.e. the ability to heat or cool, goes down.
My heat pump compressor is fairly well removed from trees and plants, yet the middle two photos above show its condition this morning. It’s not horrible, like the internet-grabbed image on the far left, but it could be better and it will just worsen as summer progresses. It’s time for a cleaning!
Some local heat pump contractors offer an annual maintenance service, a process well worth the small fee, considering what you have invested in your heat pump. Call around to see who is available to do this important maintenance work. A few times each summer I take care of the easiest part of the cleaning process myself. If you choose to clean the fins on your own, BE CAREFUL! The heat exchanger fins are extremely fragile and can bend easily. While bent fins can be straightened, a special ‘comb’ is needed and a contractor may be best suited to take care of this detail.
I use a vacuum cleaner with a long hose and a very soft brush attachment. If you look closely at the fins, you’ll see that they run vertically, top to bottom. If you work side to side, you will bend the fins. Very slowly, I run the brush from the bottom to the top, pressing very lightly to draw up as much material as I can. Working gently may mean that a few passes are needed. The results won’t be perfect, but the fins should be much cleaner than when you started. The left side of the compressor fin array is blocked by a screen of sorts, attached with a few screws. In the images above, this is the third image from left. I take this off and work the vacuum gently up or down these fins, putting the screen back in place when done.
And that’s it! There are other parts of the compressor that should be cleaned as well, but if you just want to get rid of the bulk of the mess, carefully using a vacuum and soft brush attachment can do the trick.
AHS is proud to announce that the Juneau 100 Women Who Care has chosen Alaska Heat Smart during its second philanthropic offering of 2023! The many caring women involved have raised more than $30,000for Alaska Heat Smart and the foundation of a new, quick and nimble, Heating Emergency Lower-Income Program, or HELP.
Since its first Juneau ‘giving event’ in early 2020, the Juneau 100 Women Who Care organization has raised nearly $400,000 for local nonprofit causes. The group has grown from roughly 100 women to nearly 350 members so each quarter’s offering to the chosen nonprofit can be quite substantial. Previous recipients of the generosity of Juneau’s 100 Women Who Care include the United Human Services of Alaska, Juneau Animal Rescue, The Glory Hall, and Renewable Juneau’s Carbon Offset Fund.
Alaska Heat Smart board members and two friendly dogs join leaders from Juneau’s 100 Women Who Care to celebrate!
Current heating assistance programs offered by AHS are federally-funded and subject to income verification, home surveys, environmental reviews, historic preservation office constraints, and more. In short, while the end result of these programs is warm, dry, efficient, and economical homes, months can pass from the time of a homeowner’s application to the completion of work.
If a family’s heating system is failing or fails, especially during winter months, there is little time to act. Both the family’s health and that of the home are potentially at risk. Our HELP program will move the family in need to the top of the AHS project lists. Staff will work with the family to verify that gross household income is below 80% median area income. Pre-established arrangements with local contractors will allow for quick deployment of services. AHS and contractor staff will assess the home’s needs, form a work plan, order equipment if needed, and proceed with heating system improvements. If necessary, interim measures will be taken to provide temporary heat while parts are acquired and work performed.
Please help us spread the word to Juneau families who may be able to benefit from this new assistance program. Winter has just ended, but we all know that the next cold and snowy season is not all that far off. Awareness of this new and valuable program will help to ensure its success.
More information will be available soon! For questions, contact AK Heat Smart at 907-500-5050.
Months in the works, the Thermalize Juneau ‘how-to’ guidebook, “Thermalize Your Rural Community: How to Bring Clean Energy & Energy Efficiency to Your Community’s Doorstep” is now live. This tremendous body of work, made possible by the superhuman efforts of Alaska’s Information Insights, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and Alaska Heat Smart, is THE blueprint to instruct any community on building a community-based energy efficiency campaign.
The Thermalize Juneau StoryMap guidebook has been designed to be interactive, engaging, informative, and fun! It is built to provide assistance to community leaders in small, rural locations to promote beneficial electrification through wide-scale adoption of energy-efficient technologies for homes and businesses. The guidebook details all stages of a thermalize campaign for rural cold-climate communities, from early planning to program evaluation. The tools, forms, and lessons that came out of the Thermalize Juneau 2021 campaign are linked for easy download throughout the StoryMap. A full list of resources, which includes outreach materials, heat pump specs, requests for proposals, surveys, reports, and more can be found in the Resourcessection.
This guide offers many best practices and recommendations from our own experience in setting up a campaign of this kind in a rural, isolated community. There is no single way to start on the path to beneficial electrification or to organize and implement a thermalize campaign. Our guidebook seeks to connect residents, leaders, organizers, and energy enthusiasts with Thermalize Juneau’s campaign resources and experiences so that they may design an approach that aligns with their opportunities and nee
Get started today with Thermalize Your Rural Community. We’d love to hear from you! Send is your thoughts, questions, takeaways, impressions. You’ll find other Thermalize Juneau resources on our Thermalize page.
The Juneau Empire covers Alaska Heat Smart’s most popular money-saving home heating programs!
In short, there really has never been a better time to add a heat pump to your home. Alaska Heat Smart can connect you to low-interest traditional financing, provide a financial incentive of up to $3,000 towards your heat pump purchase, or offer up to $15,000 in funds to improve your home’s heating, air sealing, and safety. Alaska Heat Smart can guide you along your pathway to clean and affordable renewable energy heating with a free home heat pump assessment.
This clear and concise article from the Washington Post (you should be able to view three articles for free without a subscription) lays out a logical process for planning a home heating switch to a heat pump.
Assess your home’s present heating system condition and plan ahead for replacement
Explore your home’s state of efficiency, looking at insulation, air sealing, as well as electrical capacity
Look into potential system costs, paying attention to numerous available incentives, credits, traditional financing options
Find a contractor and how to choose one
While this list may be easy for some to explore and achieve, many of us just aren’t all that comfortable looking at our home’s in these ways. Luckily, Alaska Heat Smart offers free advisory services to help you answer these questions and gain a better understanding of the interplay of your home and its heating systems. Every home is unique and there is no true one size fits all solution. While we at Heat Smart have learned that nearly every home can benefit from the addition of a heat pump, the specifics are important and ‘getting it right’ cannot be understated. Apply for a free home heat pump assessment to start your path to savings and carbon-free heating! And, check out our assistance programs that can help slash the cost of your switch to a heat pump!
But wait, there’s more!
Alaska Heat Smart has ‘made the news’ recently in three related stories about heat pumps and their ability to function in cold climates. You’ll be happy to know that yes, heat pumps really do move an abundance of heat when temps drop! Yesterday it was 12 degrees on my deck and my home was a toasty 70 degrees. And, I spent $3.40 yesterday to heat 1450 square feet over two stories.
An Alaska-centric heat pump update, covering the surge in interest spanning the state, from Fairbanks, to Anchorage, Juneau, and Sitka!
When she (Genevieve Gagne-Hawes, a resident of Alaska’s capital) received a bill of almost $900 last March for heating her home during the winter months, she decided to find an alternative. Gagne-Hawes decided to install an air source heat pump. “I expected it to be fine but it’s been spectacular,” says Gagne-Hawes. She says the heat pump is saving her roughly $100 a month.
Alaska Heat Smart is finding many IRA articles out there in internet land. When we stumble upon a good one, we’ll share it with you. This summary of the IRA’s diverse credits and rebates in the New York Times is easily digested and is clear and concise. There should be no paywall for this article. If you come upon one in using the link below, copy and paste the headline into a new browser window.
Many American consumers are now eligible to save thousands of dollars when they buy an electric car, heat pump, solar panels or energy-efficient appliances.
Also, be sure to visit Alaska Heat Smart’s FAQ page on the Inflation Reduction Act where we regularly update the most pressing questions and answers that have come our way over the past month or two.
If you live on Juneau’s Starr Hill, or anywhere between Gastineau Avenue and upper 7th Street, home to some of Juneau’s oldest neighborhoods, and you call the quaint, colorful, steep hillsides near the base of Gold Ridge your home, you may be subject to a serious case of heat pump FOMO. According to the all-knowing internet, FOMO is an emotional response to the belief that other people are living better, more satisfying lives, or that important opportunities are being missed. FOMO often leads to feelings of unease, dissatisfaction, depression and stress.
Here at Alaska Heat Smart, it is our hope that ‘Starr Hill FOMO’ will lead any that find themselves afflicted to add a heat pump to their home’s heating mix. FOMO relief may just be that easy to remedy! A recent ‘Starr Hill heat pump prowl’ revealed a surprising number of heat pumps in Juneau’s 100+ year old neighborhood. If you’re willing to do the heat pump prowl, and brave Starr Hill’s legendary staircases, some pushing 200 steps, you’ll find many of these energy-saving, bill-slashing, emissions-eliminating heat pumps. They’re tucked under stairways, wedged below decks, mounted in back alleys and on the dark and mossy uphill sides of homes. A quick way to locate the more challenging and discreet units is to look for the lineset, the white channel-covered refrigerant connection between the outdoor compressor and the indoor air handler. This white link across the home, or up a wall, can easily be mistaken for a common rain gutter downspout.
In all, Alaska Heat Smart’s Sunday heat pump prowl discovered 31 different Starr Hill heat pumps. Some were really tucked away, convincing us that there are others to be found. We’ll keep looking as we sort of like the stairs and the associated exercise that comes with the required up and down of the prowl.
Heat pump FOMO is probably not limited to residents of Starr Hill who are yet to acquire a heat pump. It really could strike anyone. If you find you need help and would like some professional assistance in understanding just how a heat pump could improve your home heating, reach out to AK Heat Smart and apply for a free home heat pump assessment. You’ll come away educated, empowered, and maybe just a little less ridden with the unease, dissatisfaction, depression and stress that the internet suggests are associated with FOMO’s dark side.
