ROCHESTER, N.Y. — With climate and energy goals increasingly leaning on electricity, some are taking that switch to heart in their home.
“We’re in a circa 1910 built home,” said Jeff Flaherty, founder of Wise Home Energy.
This house seems like a normal build, but upon a closer look, things might look a little different.
“The home has been fully insulated and it is fully electric,” said Flaherty.
It’s a different way to heat and cool your home.
“Heat pumps work by moving heat from one area to the other,” he explained. “They’re going to move it from outside to inside in the wintertime and then vice versa in the summertime.”
Wise Home Energy has worked on about 10 fully electric houses in Rochester.
“People do it for the reasons of not having a combustion appliance in their home,” said Flaherty. “Some people want to do it solely for environmental reasons.”
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, a quarter of all U.S. households were fully electric in 2020, mostly in Florida and Hawaii, but colder areas are seeing more interest, too.
That means there are some more things to take into consideration.
“The myth is that heat pumps don’t work in cold,” Flaherty said. “So they have to be rated for cold climate and then we want the air leakage and the insulation to be tightened down and at the highest possible level for insulation.”
Devices gage how tight a home is. The more leaks, the more that electric bill would go up in the winter.
Fully electrifying a house can cost thousands and if you don’t do it right, it could be considered a waste of money.
“It’s a souped-up engine in a car with three flat tires,” explained Flaherty.
Plus backups need to be kept in mind during potential blackouts.
“There are standby generators,” he added. “We can have solar on rooftops that provide their electricity. And really the shift is going to be toward, hopefully, a cheaper battery that will be able to supplement electricity in the rare times that there are outages.”
Flaherty says once it’s all said and done, electric heating costs could be comparable to, if not better than, gas, especially if there are more standard 25 to 30 degree winter days.
“What we can’t control is what is the per kilowatt hour cost or the per therm hour cost and where that will go in the future. That’s sort of the unknown,” said Flaherty.