So gas hash higher reliability and is cheap for the times you need heat the most, whereas heat pumps might not work and are not cheap at the times you need them the most?
I’ve had a gas furnace keep me and the water heated multiple times in a cold weather power outage.
> So gas hash higher reliability and is cheap for the times you need heat the most, whereas heat pumps might not work and are not cheap at the times you need them the most?
The major manufacturers have systems that will use the heat pump when the temperatures are not 'crazy', and kick in fossil at a certain point:
Depending on the cost of power and fossil fuels, you can program it to switch over once the COP becomes too low to justify running up kWh on your meter.
But whereas in the past heat pumps would have their COP drop around 40F/5C, modern systems can be fairly efficient at much lower temperature nowadays:
I’ve had a gas furnace keep me and the water heated multiple times in a cold weather power outage.