We had a heat pump installed last year. It’s advertised as a cold-climate heat pump and it’s “good enough” for us, but it’ll never again be toasty on a cold night, just relatively warm. When under heavy load, it also has some kind of loud vibration issue, I think in the lines that run from inside out to the condenser. The system is an Ecoer, which is a Chinese company that pretends to be a U.S. company. And it has a really suspicious 4G cellular IoT modem that, of course, feeds all the data to their cloud, with no end-user access.
I will say, it keeps the temperature very stable, which is nice. And it saves money, paying for itself within 10 years. But there’s actually quite a bit that can go wrong during installation and it’s not easy to get them to fix everything, maybe because U.S. installers aren’t used to all of the nuances of heat pumps yet. Our aux heat strips still aren’t working properly, after multiple service visits.
If I could do it over again, I would still get a heat pump. But I would go with a Mitsubishi system and a more experienced installer. The extra cost is worth it.
It’s the largest residential model that Ecoer makes. The home is a 3-bedroom, large but nothing crazy. The installers said they erred on the side of too big, rather than too small, and that’s corroborated by my back-of-the-napkin math and Google searches indicating that “too big” is standard practice in the HVAC industry. So in theory, it shouldn’t be a lack of power. I think it’s poorly optimized. From what I’ve been reading, the pressure in the lines is very important. I have no idea if they are pressurized properly. The unit apparently has sophisticated monitoring of the line pressure, but the IoT gateway has no end-user access which is a huge red flag for me that I wasn’t aware of before it was installed.
I will say, it keeps the temperature very stable, which is nice. And it saves money, paying for itself within 10 years. But there’s actually quite a bit that can go wrong during installation and it’s not easy to get them to fix everything, maybe because U.S. installers aren’t used to all of the nuances of heat pumps yet. Our aux heat strips still aren’t working properly, after multiple service visits.
If I could do it over again, I would still get a heat pump. But I would go with a Mitsubishi system and a more experienced installer. The extra cost is worth it.