Some Houses Are Really Hard to Electrify

In 2019 we made the very hard decision to sell one of the coolest homes I've been in and the coolest house we've ever owned, an 1835 former general store in Mantua Ohio. 

While a lot of this decision was financial, a big chunk of it was because the house was so hard to electrify. If it had had duct work, I could have simply installed a hybrid/dual fuel system (a furnace plus a heat pump) and moved on. Hybrids are the far simpler path, but this house does let us look at boiler heated homes and some of the options for those.

I'll give the background on the house, the 3 plans I considered, and how these lessons apply at a broader scale. 

Home Background

When my wife was young and her family was driving to the St Joseph's Ox Roast Festival in Mantua, they'd often pass this 1835 home and she'd say "someday I'd love to have a house like that but I'll never be able to afford it." We bought it when she was 25 and through hard work paid it off when she was 28 (until we hocked it in again...) It was literally a dream come true. 

The house was a HUD foreclosure which are normally the worst of the worst, but this house was in remarkably good shape. We went from not thinking about moving on Friday to having an auction offer accepted on Monday. It was a wild ride! We bought it in early 2010, my wife and I lost both our jobs in 2009 with the housing crash, so we couldn't get a loan because we didn't have 2 years of self employed tax returns. Her parents were kind enough to help us buy it.

This house was the general store for the town of Mantua until 1855 when the train line was put in 3 miles south and downtown moved. It's now on a quaint little aborted New England town square complete with a church, a historical society, and a town hall. We lived there for 9 years, our daughter was born there, and we expected to spend most of our lives there.

I became a House Whisperer while living there thanks to the mentorship of my old partner Ted Kidd. It became really clear to me that heat pumps were the best way to create a healthy and comfortable home.

I began to help clients electrify their homes, removing my first client gas meter in 2014. Naturally I started looking at my own home, and found it was one of the hardest homes I'd looked at to electrify.

Then my wife started listening to the ChooseFI podcast. FI stands for Financial Independence, basically you save up enough so you can semi-retire early and do whatever you want day to day. We've always been financially conservative, but we'd had a fairly tough road in our careers until then. We knew we were behind on retirement savings, so we decided to sell the house, buy a fixer upper, and put the balance in the market.

Portage County Ohio was not an expensive housing market in 2019, $100/square foot was pretty common outside of high end suburbs. It's now about double that. 

The house is 2200 square feet above ground plus about 750 square feet of finished basement. The house had been lifted to put a 12 course modern foundation underneath it, not the terrifying old cellar you'd expect.

We sold the house in November 2019 for $200K which will give perspective on the packages I considered. If this were a $1 million home, the decision matrix would have been different.

High Heating Load, No Ducts, and the Wrong Radiators

One of the biggest challenges was how much this house takes to heat. My former partner Ted Kidd and I are fastidious about doing accurate heating load calculations and truing them to actual energy use. I found that in Cleveland every 300 therms of natural gas use works out to roughly a ton of heating load. This house used 1500-1800 therms/year, so that's a 5-6 ton heat load or 60,000-72,000 btus. That matched our detailed load calc.

A heat load that high basically requires two heat pump systems to do since the most common sizes are 2 and 3 tons (24,000 and 36,000 btus.) The house has no duct work, so those systems would need to be installed as well, or run ductless units which is not my favorite.

If the load calculation were done by a traditional contractor, they would likely come up with 120,000-150,000 btus, over double what reality is and likely preventing a heat pump. I've consistently found that the US industry standard Manual J load calculation comes up with numbers that are around double what's actually needed, especially if you don't know how leaky the house is (tested with a blower door.)

Being a historic home and already having a reasonable blower door of 3800 cfm50, (under a 2:1 leakage to square footage ratio is well below average for a house this age), and not really wanting to dig into the siding & windows, there really wasn't much I could do to improve the heating load. 

The house also has a hot water boiler system (as opposed to steam) that uses low mass Slant Fin radiators. There's very little water or mass in this type of radiator, so you have to run hotter water in them than you do with large, heavy, and voluminous cast iron radiators. The radiators were built pretty nicely into the baseboards, so I didn't really want to change them to cast iron radiators. 

I tested how low I could turn the water down to on a 5F heating design day, it was between 170-180F. This means that I can't easily use an air to water heat pump because in general they max out at 150F and that comes with a significant efficiency penalty. They are most efficient in the 90-120F range which wasn't possible on this home.

This meant that changing the boiler out was not an easy option.

The house also didn't have AC, although you may be surprised that I could cool it with only two 5,000 btu window ACs. One upstairs and one downstairs. I had to plan ahead, if there was a 90 degree day coming I needed to close the house up 48 hours in advance and crank the temperature down which drove my wife nuts, she shivered every time I did it. 

The basement is finished and the drywall ceiling is only 7' high, I can touch it by reaching up and I'm only 5'8". So adding duct work and killing another foot of ceiling height is not ideal, but it's also the best way to heat and cool half of the first floor. There also isn't a great way to run a duct from the first floor to the second floor so I can either use one system or put the second system in the basement and run it upstairs.

To summarize the challenges, the house has a high heating load, the wrong radiators for low temperature operation, no duct work, and a finished basement with a fairly low ceiling. This is a hard one.

So what could I do to this house?

Never Half @ss Things: Three Plans

I mulled different ways to electrify this house and came up with three plans that reference one of my dad's favorite sayings, "Never half-ass something when you can do it right." I came up with half @ss, reasonable but effective, and whole @ass plans.

Half @ss: $40-70K

• Ductless heat pump in the 750 sf living room area
• Ductless heat pump in the basement
• Ducted mini split heat pump in the kitchen/office/laundry area
• Ducted mini split heat pump in the attic to serve the bedrooms separately
• Santa Fe XT155 ventilating dehumidifier with mini duct system to basement and first floor
• Maybe spray foam the top attic so the heat pump for the second floor would be in conditioned space

To be frank, this plan pretty much just ticks me off. Ductless mini splits only kinda do one of the 6 Functions of HVAC well: load matching. Load matching is when the HVAC matches exactly as much heating or cooling output as is required by the house at that moment, it's a requirement for true comfort. They aren't good at filtration, dehumidification, fresh air, mixing, or humidification. I hate how much compromise is involved here. The ventilating dehu is an attempt to take some of the edge off of this, as I could hook it to one of the two small ducted systems and provide better filtration, dehumidification, and fresh air. 

The attic has a decent air seal and R-60 cellulose in it, which is pretty good. But if you're going to put a ducted system in, it's by far the best to bring it into an enclosed space, which means sucking out all of that cellulose, the fiberglass batts under it, and installing closed cell spray foam on the roof deck. This is pretty easily a $20K project. 

But with a likely sale price of $200K, this also wasn't going so far into the house that I was setting back retirement that far. But spending this much money knowing I'd kick myself seemed dumb. So what's next?

Reasonable But Effective: $80-100K

• Carrier GreenSpeed heat pump in Common Sense HVAC configuration with new duct system in the second story attic to run the second floor and maybe part of the first floor below it
• Carrier GreenSpeed heat pump in Common Sense HVAC configuration with new duct system to run the basement and part or all of the first floor (I'd need a room by room Manual D report to decide)
• Encapsulate the second floor attic by removing all the insulation and spray foaming the roof deck

This plan at least delivers the 6 Functions of HVAC well (read the free HVAC 101 chapter of The Home Comfort Book or the upcoming Common Sense HVAC Guide for more on what those are), so I'm not compromising nearly as much.

I'm also giving the upstairs heat pump a nice place to live, and I'd pick up some storage space in that attic, not that this house needed any more.  

But now I've spent about half the value of the home electrifying. Yikes. I'd really like to retire someday and this is not helping. With higher housing values or a different financial position, I would strongly consider this plan.

Whole Ass: $250-400K

• Reasonable But Effective plus:
• Remove wood siding and add continuous exterior insulation and a suitable new siding layer like Hardie Board to suit this historic home. I'd look to approach Passive House performance.
• Replace windows with very high performance ones, again probably looking at Passive House type tilt/turn European windows. 
• Attack any air sealing opportunities with gusto. I'd target 1000 cfm50 or so blower door, about a 75% reduction.

I've learned there are two ways to do anything: right and again. This is doing it right. My dad would be happy.

But my dad also went bankrupt trying to restore another historic home. I don't really want to follow that path, although if I was older and had plenty set aside for retirement I would consider this.

Another reason I'd consider it is if housing values could support it. If this house was 10 miles away in Hudson, a high end suburb where I went to high school that has double or more housing values, that could be on the table. But it wasn't. So we had a decision to make.

Reasonable But Effective Solutions

What I was searching for on this house, and on my client projects, is a "reasonable but effective" solution. The typical "low hanging fruit" aka half @ass solution seldom achieves desired results on complex projects like this one. This is not a new thought process for me, in fact I said that Low Hanging Fruit Is Poisoned all the way back in 2015.

"Reasonable But Effective" solutions cost more than low hanging fruit options most of the time, but they carry 80%+ odds of success and don't ask impossible things of contractors. Two ducted systems plus fixing the top attic was the path for this home, but the cost was more than we could justify at that time. 

I've recommended selling their home to a few clients, it's far from my favorite thing to do, but sometimes it's the logical option, so I always consider it. 

You can also go whole @ass and nearly guarantee good results, but it's often not worth the time, money, and effort. My friend Quint David reminded me today that when it's cheaper to buy solar panels and generate the energy than it is to do the performance project, strongly consider adding the solar panels. Or just switching to renewable electricity suply so the money is being used to put up solar panels or wind turbines somewhere. There's a place for full bore projects, but they're pretty rare in my experience. 

I'll write a proper article about Reasonable But Effective solutions in the future, it's a guiding principle to my work, and I firmly believe it should be to all pros. It's as simple as offering an array of solutions with rough costs and rough odds of success, then letting clients choose. It also shares responsibility so that if results aren't what's expected, it wasn't actually unexpected, and there's a plan for what to do next if desired.

Also, if this house had had a duct system, I would have installed a hybrid/dual fuel system which is a furnace plus a heat pump. This typically reduces gas usage 50-100% (less in older homes in cold climates, more in newer homes in warmer climates). That's often what a reasonable and effective job looks like in my work. 

The New England Challenge & Some Hope

A brief aside before I wrap this article up. The Yellow House as we called it is very similar to many New England homes which are very heavy on boiler systems, much more so than anywhere else in the US. 

There's more hope now on this front, if you have large radiators you could replace the boiler with an air to water heat pump to cover about half the heating load in many homes. Then you could use ducted/ductless systems to cover the cooling load and the rest of the heating load. There are definitely more options today, but boiler heated homes remain some of the most challenging home electrification scenarios. 

I'm hearing prices in the $35-45K range for changing a boiler to an air to water heat pump in New England, which is expensive enough to put other options on the table. It's a surprisingly difficult and detail oriented process, it requires far more thought than a boiler replacement. Ductless mini splits typically run around $5-9K each. Most homes will need 4-8 of them, and you also get AC. This is why mini splits with the boiler left as backup are so common. I dislike how many of the 6 Functions of HVAC you lose with ductless systems, but they are very pragmatic. 

I expect in time this will get more reasonable, but I doubt they'll ever get to the price of replacing a boiler because there's more labor involved (at a minimum there's an outdoor unit and running water/coolant lines to it, plus new radiators may be needed) and the equipment costs more. These systems are pretty common in Europe and the UK, check out Heat Geek's homeowner Facebook group in particular to learn more. 

I should repeat, if the house has duct work, you can always do a hybrid (furnace plus heat pump.) If you are looking at homes and would like to electrify, look for one with a duct system. 

The Decision & Results

Between how hard and expensive this home would be to electrify and our goal to actually get on track for retirement, we made the hard decision to sell the home. We fixed all the stuff we'd been dragging our feet on and put it on the market with our friend Heather Lutz-Neal (highly recommended if you are buying or selling a property, she found our fixer upper then a buyer for it too.)

This was our personal decision on this one home. I'm not saying it will or should be your decision.

It's worked out really well, largely through dumb luck. We sold the house for $200K, bought a fixer upper for $72K and put $30K into it, and put the other $100K into the market. As it turned out the timing was great as I pushed much of the money into the market during the major dip caused by the beginning of the COVID pandemic. Dumb luck. We have since sold the fixer upper (AKA the River House) and nearly doubled our money on it. Again, dumb luck as the housing market got hot. 

After seeing how well the River House did on AirBnb, we bought an 1150 square foot double wide in southern West Virginia with the New River Gorge National Park literally in the backyard. We originally planned to use it in the summer, but liked the area so well that we sold the River House in Ohio and officially moved to West Virginia. WV is one of the cheapest places in the western world to retire, and we were planning to do so, we just moved that date up 20 years or so. 

We've now created a number of themed all electric AirBnbs: the Game House which is board game themed, the Wizard House where you can stay in a small version of a famous wizarding school, Mothmanor which is themed after the West Virginia monster Mothman and is also a whole house escape room, and the Lucky Penny camper. We're gearing up to create a bunch of cool glamping units too which help satisfy my wife's extremely strong artistic drive. If you'd like to see what a kick butt all electric house feels like, come stay in one sometime! 

I'll write about the HVAC and performance projects on the other houses in time as well. I greatly enjoy having all of these laboratories where the only person I have to convince is my ever tolerant wife Rachel. I do chuckle though as I've long given fellow pros a hard time for only writing about their own homes when the real learning comes from selling and executing these jobs for clients. If you'd like to see some of my client case studies check this page out. I do remote consulting if desired, check out the contact us page on this site. 

I'm confident that the technical challenges of creating high temperature water with heat pumps will be solved so that the electrification of the Yellow House can be a drop in replacement of the boiler. It's already possible with carbon dioxide refrigerant (although you would need 4 of them because they're small, and you couldn't do cooling.) Or you can use two different refrigerants to do the lift which is called a "cascade" system. A few of these exist but they are very low volume at the moment. It was obvious that those solutions were 5-15 years out as we made the decision to sell in 2019. 

Many of these hard to electrify homes will get far easier to electrify in the next 5-10 years. 

Meanwhile my wife, our daughter, and myself all miss the "Yellow House" as we called it. Our newborn son will never miss it though. =)

It went to a really lovely Connecticut couple who had recently retired and were following their grandkids to the area. They said they'd done the same downsize routine at our age as well. It was a really warm transaction and we stay in touch. I know that he and his wife will continue to steward the home for future generations just as we did for 9 years, including our daughter being born there. After all the Yellow House was 30 years old when Abraham Lincoln delivered the Emancipation Proclamation, what else will it see in the next 100-200 years of its existence?

That said, selling it opened up a bunch of new possibilities for us, and did indeed get us on track for retirement, so it turned out to be a very good choice in the end! Hopefully this discussion of various options helped you as well. 

Looking for Help?

If you are reading this and trying to figure out how to electrify your home, I highly recommend reading my book The Home Comfort Book, much of which is available for free download on this site, and also taking the free #electrifyeverything course. Then you may want to buy an hour (which is usually 1.5-2 hours) here. Good luck!

PS I emailed Eric Werling, head of the Department of Energy's Building America program on 9/8/19 to ask for an air to water heat pump with 60K output at 180F water temp when it's 5F outdoors. He said that's a very challenging specification and nothing he knew at the time came close.  Lack of a high temp boiler replacement is the only significant technical hole in home electrification. Like I said, I expect it to be solved in the next 5-10 years, but it's 5 years after the decision to sell the Yellow House. =)