My house is egregiously huge and it's my fault because I designed it. My heating season extends from the beginning of October to the end of March.
For the previous 15 years, I heated with wood. Feeding the open maw of the admittedly extremely efficient stove gave me some degree of satisfaction and exercise and, like most wood-heated householders, I declared that "There's no heat like wood heat." This despite the fact that I was introducing into the atmosphere tens of thousands of pounds of carbon. Every year.
Recently, the price of firewood increased substantially and I was tiring of the endless moving of firewood from one place to another. I decided last January to install a "mini-split" - an electrical air-source heat pump. Interestingly, this purchase coincided with a record cold spell, with temps approaching minus 20 C. That's close to zero for you last remnants of the Fahrenheit scale users.
The heat pump worked amazingly well, perfectly, in fact, keeping the entire house cozy with no intervention from me other than selecting the temperature via the wireless remote. I no longer had to shovel a path to the woodpile and I've not had a heat fire since.
Unlike most furnaces that cycle on and off, this system gradually throttles itself, so its operation is near-silent and undetectable in operation.
Several areas of the house, unusable in summer due to solar heating (the sun room!) are now usable year 'round. Not only does this thing heat the house, it cools it, too. With the new reality of high 30's C in summer, this is delightful.
My wife takes care of the household accounting and, after a few months of operation she reported the cost of the electricity used to heat and cool the house with this new system. It was cheaper than firewood.
Of course, there's nothing like a wood stove. Mine is in the kitchen, where I and both see and feel it, and it's lovely. But now, I can have a fire when I want one, not when I have to.
And I'm saving both money AND the planet.
