Heating & Cooling with Solar
Maximizing your solar investment with the most cost-effective way to heat and cool your home makes perfect sense. Pair your solar panels with a cold-climate heat pump to use the renewable electricity being generated to power clean and extremely efficient heating and cooling throughout your home.
If you have baseboard electric heat or a more expensive heating fuel, like propane or oil, the cost of heating and cooling your home with a heat pump is typically less — especially when powered by the renewable energy from your solar panels.
What Are the Benefits?
Pairing solar with a cold-climate heat pump can bring many benefits to homes of all types and sizes:
- Realize Savings. Solar generated power is typically less expensive than power purchased through the grid because there is no need to pay extra for the delivery of electricity. When you pair your solar panels with a cold-climate heat pump you’ll typically spend less to heat and cool your home compared to most other systems.
- Enjoy Peace of Mind. With no combustion of fossil fuels, fuel storage, or carbon monoxide emissions, heating and cooling with the combination solar energy and a cold-climate heat pump is the safest choice for your home.
- Reduce Your Carbon Footprint. You are already contributing to a cleaner and healthier community by generating your own power, and a cold-climate heat pump will reduce your carbon footprint even further when you replace your existing heating and cooling systems. Boilers and furnaces burn harmful fossil fuels (natural gas, oil, or propane) and release greenhouse gasses into environment, while electric resistance heating systems and central or window air conditioning use a lot more electricity than a heat pump.
- Explore More Benefits of Cold-Climate Heat Pumps.
What Are the Options? How Do They Work?
Unlike conventional, less efficient heating and cooling systems, cold-climate heat pumps draw heat from the environment and move it indoors to heat or move it outdoors to cool a home. Heat pumps require electricity to run but deliver more energy than they use by concentrating and moving heat rather than generating it.
There are two types of cold-climate heat pumps available: air source and geothermal (ground source) heat pumps. There is also a highly efficient heat pump that can heat your water: heat pump water heater (hybrid).
Types:
- Cold-climate Air Source Heat Pumps - for space heating and cooling
- Geothermal (Ground Source) Heat Pumps - for space heating and cooling
- Heat Pump Water Heaters (Hybrid Water Heaters) - for hot water
Explore our How They Work page to learn more.
Need help determining the heat pump system that might be best for your home?
By answering a few questions about your home, our Heat Pump Planner tool will help you learn more about the types of heat pump technology available, compare your options, help you understand installation and operating costs, and prepare you with questions to ask your installer.
Ready to get started?
Explore rebates available in your area, or find a qualified contractor.