Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post #2041: Think of it as evolution in action.

 

I think it’s time to face facts about this whole “internet” thing.

America, as it exists, was not set up to deal with it.  And now our Democracy is failing, and surely looks like it’s going to be replaced by an oligarchy.  With the most recent muscling of the Washington Post into silence being an excellent example.

To be clear, the internet revolution:

1: Has largely turned journalism into a charity.   What’s left of journalism.  In the case of the Post, it’s a private charity.  But in no sense does the Post make enough money to survive on its own.  Particularly, with the current incompetent management.

2:  Has made it almost unimaginably easier and cheaper to spread lies and rumors.

3:  Has spawned entire professional classes whose job it is create attractive disinformation.  So it’s not just random lies and rumors, it’s stuff carefully crafted to be “sticky”.  It’s material developed with considerable expertise, professionally designed to attract and mislead.

4:  Has allowed the crazy to cluster and self-reinforce.  With the help of Jewish space lasers, and Q, and weather control, and … the list seems almost endless, in hindsight.

5:  Reinforces a winner-take-all economy.  Ebay, Amazon, Facebook, and similar are essentially natural monopolies, like electricity.  Just unregulated  The result is an economic and societal landscape dominated by oligarchs, with a concentration of wealth that would have been unimaginable in (say) the post WWII era when America dominated the globe.

6:  Requires a huge Federal budget deficit to support the extreme concentration of income in few hands.  Because the rich have such a low marginal propensity to consume (that is, they spend only a sliver of their income), somebody has to borrow and spent a ton of money every year, or the large net savings of the rich would tank the economy.  (They put the money in the bank, somebody else has to take it out of the bank, or there’s not enough spending to support current income.)  Thus, we’re on an unavoidable path toward bankruptcy, as a country, because the large annual Federal deficit is needed to offset the annual net savings of our collective super-rich, to whom an increasing share of GDP flows.

Or maybe we just like spending money.

But having such a large share of the money, end up in so few hands, produces in the U.S. a political system driven by the desires of the oligarchs.  The fact that the Supreme Court blessed having the rich buy elections (via Citizen’s United) isn’t really the root cause.  It’s just another manifestation of the power of our domestic oligarchs.

Conclusion

People get it wrong, mostly, when they brand Trump a fascist.  Not that his well-documented admiration for Hitler doesn’t put him in that class.  And sure, attacking the news media, promoting a rabidly racist world-view, antisemitism, blaming all our problems on “the enemy within”, those are all straight out of the Mein Kampf playbook.

Hitlererian strategy, minus the Lebensraum.  That pretty much sums up what’s left of the Republican party, at the national level.

But he, like his idol Putin, is an oligarch.  One of a set of super-rich people who want to run the show.  The trappings of fascism are just there to attract the votes, mostly, I think.  Though the racism seems bred to the bone.

And, one way or the other, he has the cooperation of most all the other oligarchs.  Those that aren’t completely on board, he seems to be able to co-opt, or threaten into submission.  And so, because journalism is a charity these days, and the Post exists at the whim of its oligarch-patron, if that patron bends the knee in order not to have its lucrative government space contract threatened, then so does the now-all-but-irrelevant Washington Post.  Because, at root, oligarchs wouldn’t have become oligarchs if they hadn’t had the same central preoccupation — having as much wealth as they possibly can.  So, effectively, once they’ve divided up the pie, they’re all on the same side.

And so, America is in transition to becoming one of the best countries that highly-concentrated-wealth can buy.

I still wonder about how those West Virginia coal miners feel about all the help that Trump never gave them.  I’d bet they’re still going to vote for him.  And that’s about all you need to know, about what kind of a country we’re about to become.

In a world where Rule #4 applies — Yes, they can be that dumb — we simply lack the resiliency to adapt our Democracy to the internet.  Let alone AI.

Our ultra-rich — with the help of the Supreme Court — have now taken advantage of the inability (or maybe unwillingness) of our populace to sort fact from fiction.

Think of it as evolution in action.  We’ve created a world filled with spam, scams, and carefully-crafted lies.  Our population isn’t up to the task of sorting that out.  Even if it wanted to,

So we get the government we deserve.

(N.B., the title is from Oath of Fealty, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.  You might recall Niven from the Ringworld series, if you’re an aging sci-fi fan.)

Post #2040: Reposting a little perspective on growth in the Town of Vienna budget.

 

As our Town Council works up the nerve to OK the single largest expense in Town of Vienna history, I thought it might be a good time to repost this.

In a nutshell, adjusting for inflation, over the past 60 years:

  • Town population increased 43%
  • Number of town residences doubled.
  • Value of residential real estate increased five-fold.
  • Town of Vienna operating budget increased ten-fold.

Post #1820: Dribs and drabs of Town of Vienna historical data.

And, I guess it’s worth saying, pretty much everything we pay the Town to do for us would already be included in taxes paid to Fairfax County.  The sole exception is, I think, trash service.  The Town may do it nicer, or better, or something.  But if Vienna ceased to exist, Fairfax County would still maintain the roads, pipes, police and fire service, and so on, for the taxes that we all already pay to Fairfax.

From this perspective, to make the single largest capital investment in TOV history, to produce something that’s all-but-indistinguishable from a Fairfax County rec center, right down to the annual fee to use it … I guess that’s not unexpected.

Edit:   Now that I re-read that, I’m not sure it’s the largest in Town history.  I didn’t literally check, memory fades.  And when you get right down to it, you need to CPI-adjust everything. 

But memory fades, and costs are often pieced out across multiple fiscal years.  

But surely, of recent projects (police station, expanded community center, and now this), surely, once I start talking about the expected annual operating loss, then at that point, this building and all it entails surely dwarfs the other two, CPI or no CPI.

If the interest rate is 5%, the value of a perpetuity is 20x the annual payment.  If I take (what I see as the grossly optimistic) assumption of the Town’s consultant, of a mere $500K annual loss, a commitment to pay those losses in perpetuity is worth $10M now.  (And accordingly, if the real annual loss is more like $1M, that’s about like then town shelling out an extra $20M now.)

It’s a big decision.  Let’s leave it at that.

The decision to buy into the government-run gym market appears to me to be, right now, the single largest purchase the Town ever makes.  For a long time, anyways.  

So in theory, it needs that level of due diligence.

If nothing else, I’d like to see the Town Council put together a local panel of experts, meaning, representatives of nearby local governments that already run municipal pool/gyms (a.k.a. rec centers).  Then ask them discuss two topics:  Annual operating cost, and annual operating revenue, from running one (or more) of these pool/gym/rec-center things.

Heck, that could be interesting. 

Post #2039: Pro-pool propaganda is an objectionable use of tax dollars.

 

I should preface this by saying that, for a decade, I held job in the U.S. legislative branch that required me to use strictly neutral language in any official publications I wrote.

In that job, in order to indicate that an outcome was uncertain, I was forbidden from saying “X may result in Y“.  That statement, as written, is not neutral.  It seems to imply that X will result in Y.  Instead, I was, without exception, required to use “X may or may not result in Y“, as the only properly neutral way to convey the uncertainty of that relationship.  Without exception.

So maybe I’m a little sensitive to tax-financed propaganda.

But, in fact, the Town does this all the time.  They certainly did for the now-repealed MAC zoning.  And, if you go back and look at the archives, at some point, the Town newsletter morphed from being a source of information, to being the official house organ of Town government, reflecting its point of view.

Again, paid for by our taxes.

And so it goes.

The deep irony is that the Town routinely runs four or more months behind, on publishing minutes from its official meetings.  So if you actually want to know what’s been said, officially, so far, as a citizen, you’re shit-out-of-luck, unless you feel like spending an hour paying close attention to the video recordings of recent Town Council work sessions.

But the same Town government that can’t get minutes of its official meetings published in less than half a year can somehow manage to get a slickly-produced mass mailing, with every appearance of attempting to drum up support for a municipal pool, done in a perfectly timely fashion.

Anyway, if by magic, today’s mail brought me the following postcard. In addition to a beautiful artist’s conception of the facility on the front, it has this wording on the back, emphasis mine:

There’s no way for me to read this as anything other than advocacy.  “If you  like this, please let Town Council know.” (Separately:  Describing this as Town Council’s proposal is also, I think, objectively incorrect.  Use of citizen “wish list” was annoying in its gratuitous evocation of positive feelings.

Or, in my case, evocation of the Sears Roebuck catalog.

This in no way reflects on the merits or lack of merits of Town staff’s proposal for a municipal pool.  I’ve addressed the revenue projections from that in the just prior posts.  And, for sure, none of the advocates seems to stress that this will be a $1,000-a-year family membership pool/gym, similar to but with less comprehensive facilities than the many Fairfax County rec centers in this area.

In fact, if you read that postcard, it sure reads as if a temporary (not stated:  10-year-long) increase in the meals tax will pay for everything.  But that’s misleading.  Somehow the Town staff did not mention their consultant’s proposed schedule of fees, which, no surprise, looks pretty much like the fees that Fairfax County charges to use its similar (but larger) facilities.

Anyway, if you’re going to set yourself up running a taxpayer-financed business — which is what we’re talking about here — you need to approach it as a business decision.  Not as something for which Town staff advocacy is normalized.

Conclusion.

Again, this is neither here nor there, with regard to the wisdom of the decision.

I’m just pointing out that when I worked for a government entity, if I’d manage to do what Town staff just did — use tax dollars to produce a public-directed bit of advocacy — I’d have been fired, no questions asked.

But in the TOV, this is just business as usual.  We’re so used to it that I’d bet nobody in the Town power structure even gave this use of tax dollars, to sway Town Council opinion, a second thought.

Post #2038: Wading into the Town of Vienna pool, adding on a baby pool

 

The Town of Vienna is considering building a municipal pool/weight room, at an initial cost of around $32M, including the purchase price of the land it sits on.  The projected ongoing annual cost to the taxpayer appears to be in the neighborhood of $500K.  Ish.  But that’s net of a projected annual revenue of about $1.7M.

This new facility would provide people in the area an opportunity to purchase a roughly $1,000/year family membership, or pay (say) $10/head/visit.

And yet, everyone in this locality already has that opportunity.  Except for the location, the smaller size, and the more limited facilities, this proposal from the Town of Vienna appears to be not much different from the existing Fairfax County Rec centers in this area.

But, near as I can tell, the Town’s analysis ignores the existing government-run gyms in the area.  Above, left, is the view of the market area that was delivered to Town Council this past September.  Above right, I’ve added in the three nearest Fairfax County rec centers.

I will again state that these County rec centers are very nice facilities.  The Oakmont rec center is, by far, the nicest gym that my wife and I have ever used.  Our local Fairfax County rec centers offer a broader range of activities than the Town can offer in this location, up to (e.g.) golf courses.

Other than location, the only unique aspect that I saw for the Town’s proposal is that it leans toward having a “fun” indoor pool (= child oriented), as opposed to the more serious (= exercise-centric) indoor pools found at the County rec centers.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but anyone in Vienna who wanted to pay $1K/year for a family membership to a government-run gym and indoor pool has long had the opportunity to do so.  That fee gives your family access to a set of rec centers that is top-notch, and offers a broader array of facilities than than the Town can offer.

This would suggest that any projection of revenues, from the Town’s pool, ought to be done conservatively.

Seems like a good place to start, then, with a realistic project of likely Town of Vienna revenues, is with those Fairfax County rec centers.

I thought I should do a straight-up projection of likely revenue, based on what Fairfax County has experienced with its similar, but better, rec centers.

In effect, these are the revenues to be expected if the Town is able to sell its government-run pool/gym to its own citizens (only!), to the same extent that Fairfax County is able to sell its rec center services, to its citizens.

Here’s how the two compare.

All I’ve done is taken the observed Fairfax County rec center revenues per Fairfax County resident, and boosted them for the higher average incomes in Vienna.

Alternative simple estimate: revenue per square foot.  An alternative way to get at a similar estimate is simply to take rec center revenues per square foot, for the county, and multiply by the proposed square footage of the Vienna municipal pool facility.   Like so:

Again, the result is nowhere near the Town’s projected revenues.  Edit:  In hindsight, I screwed that up, the revenue number should be more like $22M, and the resulting revenue per square foot more like $750K.  Still a long way from the projected $1.7M for the 30,000 square foot proposed Vienna pool/gym.

Finally, there is limited public information available for Herdon, a nearby Virginia Town with a larger, but less affluent population.  Herndon maintains a pool/gym, indoor tennis courts, a golf course, and other amenities.

In total, Herndon’s Parks and Recreation revenues — from a roughly 60% larger citizen population, and a far broader array of offered services — was $1.8M, per their most recent Comprehensive Financial report (2023 report, Exhibit A2).  I get the vague impression that most of that revenue came from the golf course, but I was unable to pin it down any further.  (Edit 10/26/2024:  Upon reading Herndon’s budget, that must be wrong.  They maintain distinct funds for their Golf Course and their cemetary.  So figures pertaining to golf course costs and revenue should not appear on (what I hope was) an analysis of Herndon’s general government fund.)

In any case, this again suggests that the Town’s estimate of revenues, for the proposed municipal pool, is optimistic.  Presumably, all it would take is a phone call, from Town of Vienna to Town of Herndon, to get the actual annual revenues from Herndon’s municipal pool.  (Edit:  If such a figure exists, e.g., if Herndon has a way of tracking specifically revenue for use of the pool/gym facility)

Will our Town Council do that much due diligence before proceeding further?

Maybe they already have, but there’s no easy way to know.  At the current rate, it looks like the Town Council might get around to publishing the minutes from its most recent work sessions sometime this coming spring.  (Thus, staying within the letter of the law, while keeping the citizens in the dark to the greatest extent possible.)  Once the Town gets around to that, Edit: if they haven’t already voted to fund the pool, once they’ve voted to fund the pool, as this looks increasingly like a done deal to me, then maybe I’ll read those to try to find that out whether they bothered to ask Herndon about its revenues, from its municipal pool.  My guess is we’ll never see that, from the Town, unless the answer is favorable to the “yes” decision to build our own government-run pool and weight room.

Post #2037: Wading into the Town of Vienna pool.

 

 

I had a friend ask about the new pool.  Against my better judgment, I decided to try to get the facts straight, about a proposed Town of Vienna municipal pool and weight room.

I didn’t get very far.  But if you read nothing else, pause to consider the two maps below.

Edit 10/24/2024:  What a sheep I am sometimes.  I fell right into this one.  Just copyin’ the slides.

The price tag above  excludes the purchase price for the property (the land), and the cost of demolition of the then-existing structures. The issue at hand is the amount the Town now needs to borrow, but if you’re reckoning the total cost, you need to add in the cost of the land and prep, call it another $6M.

Full disclosure:  My family belongs to one of the private membership pools in Vienna.  We also use the Fairfax County rec centers, which come with pools.  Neither of one influences my thinking, but both give me some perspective, I think.

 

Continue reading Post #2037: Wading into the Town of Vienna pool.

Post #2036: Replacing my heat pumps III: The tax angles.

 

Winter approaches. 

But no pressure, as I slowly work through the tax angles on this HVAC equipment replacement decision.  And bring somebody in for another quote for new equipment. And maybe, eventually, get everything working again.

If nothing else, this whole episode shows me that it’s good to have multiple heating systems in your home.

Even with one heat pump dead, we have some heat.

And that is way better than no heat. Continue reading Post #2036: Replacing my heat pumps III: The tax angles.

Post 2035: Oh for ducts’ sake!

 

This is a further installment in my two-dead-heat-pumps, gonna cost me $50K and up to fix it, saga.

Today’s punchline.  My 1959-vintage first-floor HVAC ducts are, objectively, way too small to work with a modern heat pump.  The main duct is roughly one-third the size (cross-sectional area) it needs to be.

We could put the best ground-source heat pump in the world at one end of those ducts, and the kitchen at the other end of the air duct would still freeze in the wintertime.

If feasible, we’re going to replace (one of) our dead ground-source heat pump(s) with a couple of ductless mini-split air-source heat pumps.  Just bypass the grossly undersized ducts entirely.

Sounds like a fundamentally stupid thing to do.  But not so, in this case.  I think.

Never make fun of the size of a mans ducts.

I finally got the bright idea to measure the size of my first floor ducts.  The ones that barely function. Admittedly, guessing about it was more fun.  And even if I knew the dimensions, figuring out the “right” size is an engineering black art.

But I had a hunch that a quick ballpark answer would be good enough.  The main duct measured out at 0.75 square feet in cross-sectional area.  The first floor of the house is about 1500 square feet.  Per two on-line rules of thumb, the original 1959 ducts are about one-third as big as they need to be.

That squares with the rest of it.  Not just their abysmal air delivery, but just by eye, the cross-sectional area of the main duct is about a third that of the plenum to which it is attached.

I can easily believe that the folks who originally installed my ground source heat pump installed a super-duper ground-source heat pump, then blithely hooked it up to grossly undersized duct work. It’s of-a-piece with the rest of the shoddy retrofit they did before selling the house.

But the ducts themselves appear to be much, much older.  They’re behind plaster walls, for one thing, and I’ll swear that plaster has never been disturbed.  They are in an unusual configuration, with both ground-level ducts, and ceiling-level ducts that must be fed by long risers.  The guy who built this house seemed to build pretty good houses.  How’d the original builder manage to put in such goofy undersized ducts in the first place?

I now think that these first-floor air ducts were originally designed and sized for use with a gas-fired hot air furnace.  The air coming out of one of those is very hot, and so quite energy-dense, compared to the lower-temperature air you would typically get with a heat pump.  Not only would you have to move less air to heat an area (thus requiring smaller ducts to move it),  you probably got a considerable “chimney” effect in the vertical risers that serve the many ceiling-level vents.  (Vents that, in the current system, seem to do absolutely nothing.)

In the end, it doesn’t matter.  A few simple checks all tell me that they are, in fact, just way too small for use with a modern HVAC system.   

Twenty years ago, they cut a major corner in the original ground-source installation.  For 20 years, system performance must have been sub-par as a result.  For sure, for 20 years, the kitchen has been freezing cold every winter.

It’s time to fix that as best I can.

Rule number 4:  Yes, they really can be that stupid.

 

A buddy of mine once gave me a little laminated list of rules for life.  Rule number 4 was as stated above.

At root, my biggest problem so far with this two-dead-heat-pumps fiasco is forgetting Rule #4.  Because, when I bothered to check, sure enough, the folks who retrofit this charming home with a super-expensive ground-source heat pump system then proceeded to hook one of those heat pumps up to grossly undersized ductwork. Which made the entire point of installing an efficient heat pump almost completely irrelevant.

And so it has remained for two decades.

And now, completely contrary to the conventional wisdom, it makes sense to  replace a worn-out ground source heat pump with an air-source heat pump.  If for no other reason than to bypass the undersized ducts.

Addendum:  Or duck the ducts.

I finally got it.  The story ends … and you can’t replace the duct, because a properly-sized main duct would stick down too far in the basement.  So not only didn’t they replace the ductwork, they couldn’t replace the ductwork without losing standing headroom right down the middle of the finished basement.

This situation is no-one’s fault.  It is what it is.  Deal with it.

Post #2033: A rare double-attaboy today.

 

I wrote the following two comments (to other comments) on Jennifer Rubin’s opinion piece in today’s Washington Post.

In a first, two people thanked me for my comments.

Maybe I should buy a lottery ticket today.

So here’s something that’s topical, and near-zero marginal effort.  And so far, hasn’t managed to tick anybody off too much.

On the urban/rural Democrat/Republican divide.

Just think of the entire Republican platform as promising to return to the past. They want to pretend to live in a world where: Global warming doesn’t exist. American manufacturing dominates the (Post WWII) world. Women know their place. Non-whites, non-English-speakers are a small and quaint fraction of the population. Coal is king.

I’m sure you can fill in others.

And this jibes well with the core audience, which is rural America. Just look at the red-state blue-state map. Even within blue states, the rural areas are red.

And, at a guess, that’s because rural America has been going backwards, economically, for about the last half-century. In large part from the gutting of light industry in the U.S.

I don’t think anything could have stopped that. But if I were in their shoes, I think I’d listen to anybody who promised to turn back time. No matter how illogical and frankly racist that promise was.

So Trump exploits that. Remember how he was (e.g.) going to bring back American Coal, when talking to West Virginia miners? Even though every trend said that was nonsense.

Well, truth or fiction just doesn’t much matter if you’re poor, getting poorer, and see no way for your children to make a living where they grew up.

Not making excuses for it. I have yet to see any positive policy proposals from the Republican side for doing anything about … well, anything. Just trying to grasp the mindset.

In response to somebody who pointed to the massive increase in asylum-seekers allowed into the country …

Then, if America is still governed by the rule of law, change the law. But what we’ve seen this past year is that, at Trump’s order, the Republican party would have nothing to do with revising immigration law. Because this is too juicy an issue for Trump to use in his campaigning.

In 2022, about a quarter-million people requested asylum, of which Cuba was the most common country of origin. So, roughly speaking, with a population of about 330M, roughly 1 person in 1000 in the U.S. was a new 2022 asylum-seeker. That’s a lot, by historical standards, but hardly a crisis.

That ramped up so much in 2023 that Biden temporarily shut down asylum at the southern border, by executive action, this year. He can’t do that permanently. Not unless he’s a dictator.

But that, along with cooperation from Mexico, greatly reduced the number of people trying to immigrate at the southern border.

And what was the centerpiece of the immigration bill that Trump shot down? It was to expand the immigration courts, and so clear the asylum case backlog and get almost all of those people out of the country, as actual grants of asylum in any given year number in the low tens of thousands.

Instead of just exploiting the issue, it would be a breath of fresh air if Republicans would, like, you know, try to govern. Which starts with addressing a legal issue, by changing the law.

Post 2032: Replacing my heat pumps, part II: How efficient are my ground-source and mini-split heat pump options?

 

The key question for this post is about as simple as it gets: If I have two choices for heat pumps, which one will use less electricity?

In my case, one option is the replacement ground-source heat pump that has been recommended, at a base installed price of about $25K per heat pump.  The other option is to replace my dead ground-source heat pump with a modern air-source mini-split heat pump, at somewhere around half that cost (call it 60% after adjusting for likely difference in equipment life, in my particular case).

This is a stupidly hard question to answer well.  As I explain at length below.

But, after doing all the homework that I care to do, for my house and my climate (with mild winters and an efficient gas-fired secondary heating system), the answer is that either style of heat pump (air-source or ground-source) will use roughly the same amount of electricity.  Or near as I can tell, based on published data.

That’s not due to the underlying physics of the situation.  If it were only about the physics, ground-source would win hands-down.  Instead, that appears mainly due to faster technological improvement in air-source units over the past decade or so, compared to ground-source units.  This seems to have fully offset the “natural” advantage of ground-source.  In effect, my real-world choice is between air-source using the current generation of technology, and ground source using older technology.  (The model of ground-source heat pump I have been offered was first introduced in 2016.)  Or, at least, using a less-efficient design for the heat pump itself, disregarding which heat sink (air, ground) is used.  That’s what makes it a tie ballgame, as of now.

This leads me to conclude that replacing one of my dead heat pumps with (e.g.) a name-brand air-source mini-split system:

  • Is substantially cheaper, even accounting for likely shorter equipment life.
  • Incurs no significant loss of efficiency compared to my ground-source option.
  • As a bonus, bypasses my house’s barely-functional 1959-era ductwork.

Ground source systems still have some clear advantages.  All the equipment is indoors, and so likely lasts longer.  They work well even extremes of cold or hot weather.

But the fact is, there just ain’t that many of them, particularly in a relatively mild climate like Virginia.  Of the roughly 4 million annual residential heat pump installations per year (in 2022), maybe 50,000 (call it 2.5%) were ground-source units.  That has big implications for how rapidly the units reflect improved technology, and how much choice you have for who installs and services your unit.

Unless some unforeseen problem arises, I will replace one three-ton dead ground-source heat pump with a pair of 1.5-ton mini-split air-source heat pumps.

And I will not feel the least bit guilty about doing so.

I was going to give full and excruciating details but the overall accuracy of the conclusion does not warrant that.  Below, I sketch out enough to summarize how I arrived at the numbers above.

SEER, EER, HSPF, COP, and all that jazz.

The efficiency of a heat pump varies, based on the how big a temperature difference it is trying to pump against, and how close you are to the maximum capacity of the system.  The bigger the temperature difference, and the closer to maxed out, the less efficiently the heat pump runs.

This means that, despite what you read from many internet sources, you cannot simply convert one heat-pump efficiency measure to another with a simple conversion-of-units number.  Yes, you must do that first, because some of these measures mix BTU/Hs and watts, and others don’t.  But in addition, you also have to make some sort of adjustment for how stringent the test is.

It’s very much like EPA mileage.  The MPG the EPA gets depends on how the car is driven.  Typically, EPA city mileage is much worse than EPA highway mileage.  If you compare the city MPG of one car to the highway MPG of another, you’re making a mistake.  So it is, in spades, with SEER, EER, COP, and HSPF.

Now we get to the hard part:  Things are hazy.

If you Google SEER, say, you’ll see the same zero-details definition everywhere:  It’s the ratio of the cooling power produced (in BTU/H), to the electrical power supplied (in watts).  But as to, how, exactly, that’s measured, it’s hard to find any information at all.  E.g., is the energy used to run the water pumps included, what indoor and outdoor temperatures were used for the test, how were ducts, water pumps, etc. factored in, and so on.

  • The details of the tests are proprietary and reside behind an expensive paywall.
  • For the same measure, ground-source and air-source heat pumps use different methods.
  • Certain aspects of overall energy use — duct system back pressure, water pump electricity use, and resistance electrical heating for backup heat — are either ill-specified, or not stated as to impact.

Among the things that I’ve seen hints for, but no definitive answer, is how these tests treat the waste heat of the electric motors themselves.  I saw at least one credible-looking website showing that ground-source heat pumps add the value of this waste heat to their heating output, as if that heat would make it into your ductwork.  But air source heat pumps do not.  That’s consistent with where the compressor is located (inside for one, outside for the other).  But it boils down to an assumption that the waste heat of the compressor motor somehow warms the air in your ductwork, which clearly isn’t the case for the units in my basement now.  I have yet to find a clear answer on that, and it matters materially to the comparison.

So you need to take the table above with a grain of salt.  My interpretation is that if there is a difference in efficiency across the three units I looked at, it’s small.

Definitions

Each of these measures compares output heating or cooling power, to input electrical power used.

EER (energy efficiency ratio).  Cooling.  Measured at a steady 35C outdoor air temperature, 26C indoor air temperature, and 50% relative humidity (for the outdoor air?).  Heat/cool is measured in BTU/H, electricity is in watts.  I think the test calls for the unit to run full-blast when this is measured.

SEER (seasonal energy efficiency ratio).  Cooling.  Near as I can tell, this is set up to simulate the range of temperatures you would see in a “standard summer”, so to speak.  Heat/cooling power output is measured in BTU/H, electricity input is measured in watts.

COP (coefficient of performance):  Heating:  Generically, COP is simply watts of heat out, divided by watts of electricity used.  Heat pumps have different COP values depending on the temperature tested, and how hard they were running.  But the EPA-reported COP appears to be for one temperature, and I think its with the unit running full blast.  Heat/cooling power is measured in watts, electrical input power is measured in watts.

HSPF (heating seasonal performance factor).  Heating.  Like SEER, this tests the units over a range of temperatures designed to be a sort of “standard winter”.  I believe that, where the unit has a resistance-heating secondary heater, if that clicks on during the testing, the electricity used in secondary heating is counted toward the total.  Heating power is measured in BTU/H, electrical use in watts.

The -2 suffixed versions of these appear to include a more realistic measure of the back-pressure of typical home ducts.  Best I can tell, in the typical situation, you’d expect the (e.g.) SEER2 rating of an appliance to be 5% to 10% lower than the SEER rating.

Accounting for test stringency:  SEER to EER conversion, units-adjusted HSPF to COP conversion.  Here, I found some sketchy internet sources suggesting that where you have SEER and EER for the same unit, SEER is typically 85% of the EER value, due to the more stringent testing cycle.  So I used that to adjust these all to a common EER-style basis.

Conclusion so far

Again, take this table with a grain of salt. There’s a whole lot I don’t know about the details of how each test is applied to each type of machine.  And probably never will know, particularly for the details of testing ground source machines, where tests specifying outdoor air temperature are irrelevant.

That said, if you adjust for the difference in units-of-measurement (BTU/H versus watt), and assume that the tests that use a broad range of conditions (SEER, HSPF) tend to run about 85% of the equivalent tests that use a single set of conditions (EER, and COP as EPA reports it), then you get the comparison above.

Which, honestly, is just about what I came up with, back-of-the-envelope, when I first looked into this some years ago.  The super-high-SEER Japanese-made heat pumps that emerged a decade ago seemed to eclipse (my estimate of) my existing ground-source heat pump’s efficiency.  SEER 25? Maybe I mis-recall.  But I do recall being startled with how high the available SEER ratings got, for air-source units.

Bottom line, efficiency-wise it’s a tossup.  If I weight each units two numbers by local degree-day (3x heating a cooling), I get my estimated all-year efficiency values of 3.6, 3.5, and 4.0 for the three heat pumps examined, respectively.)

If your location experiences lot of time at extremely cold or hot temperatures, ground-source heat pumps still seem to offer some significant efficiency advantages over air-source.  And, for sure, because the equipment is all inside, ground-source is likely to last longer.

But in my case — with a relatively mild climate, efficient (gas-fired) backup heat, and so on — it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other.

Finally, this pretty strongly suggests that the current tax law is out-of-date.  The huge advantage given to ground-source heat pumps might have made sense in 2004.  It appears to make no sense in 2024.

Once upon a time, ground-source heat pumps were king.  But not any more.  And the law has yet to catch up with that.