 Hi, I'm Nate the House Whisperer, and I wanted to show you what electric usage looked like and how things operated during the cold snap that was just past Christmas Eve of 2022. So I wanted to take a look at that for three different houses we have that run on heat pumps. So we're going to look at the game house, which was where I'm sitting now. The Clue stuff in the background, this is one of our Airbnbs in Oak Hill, West Virginia. And then we'll look at the Candy House, or the Candy Cottage, which is next door. This is 800 square feet here. The Candy Cottage is about 700, so they're little baby houses. They both have one and a half ton dyke and fits. And then we will look at our house, which is about 15 minutes from here and has a two slash three ton Bosch heat pump and then a train air handler. So that's what we're going to look at. So here is the game house and here is the total usage for December of 2022, if you see at the bottom here. So it used about 1200 kilowatt hours, 333 for the heat pump, 293 for the A-HU. This is air handler unit or this is the fan, the indoor unit, but this has the resistance electric in it. So it will show as usage when it's resistance, because the normal amounts of fan. So this is 293, keep an eye here, and I'll switch back to November. And this is Emporia, by the way. This is an Emporia view. I'll put a link below, because this is how you figure out what to be afraid of and what not to be afraid of. So normally the air handler is 48 kilowatt hours here for a month over 30 days. So one and a half per day, give or take, and so that is 25 cents a day to have clean air because it's constantly running at low speed and running the air through the filter. You're also mixing it through the house. And in my case, I also have outdoor ducts coming in. So it's pulling in a little bit of outdoor air at the same time. Take a look at October as well, just so you can get an idea of what this looks like. Where is air handler? It's way down here, 17. So not very much. So the 48 was because it was doing enough heating to be running above your base low fan speed, which is where I normally have it set. And so this is 18 kilowatt hours for October, as opposed to 48 for November. So just so you get a comparison. And then moving back to December, we're at 300. So you figure it's 50. So we use like 250 kilowatt hours of resistance, something like that. So minus the 48 or whatever. So somewhere in that ballpark. All this stuff, you can at least get a general idea of where it is. And if it's 240 versus 270 kilowatt hours, who cares? It just, it doesn't matter. We're arguing over a couple of bucks. It's not a big deal. So let's go back and take a look at hourly for this house. And then I'm going to click down here graphs. And so you can see hour by hour, what's going on. And so the resistance has been running a little bit here. So like the lower hours, so let's see that hour there, about one kilowatt hour per hour. That's actually still on the high side. Oh, I somehow got on mountain escape. How did I do that? Do, looking at the wrong house, mountain escape is our house. So here's the, the heat pump will come at it this way. So we'll look at the heat pump and I need to scroll back quite a bit. And so here we are Wednesday, 12 21. And so you can see in this case, this is where I screwed up to a game house heat pump. It went below 15 degrees, which is where the die can fit is set up to stock, turn the heat pump off and go to resistance. So note that it went to almost no usage at 7 AM. So overnight, Thursday, the 22nd into Friday, the 23rd, the temperature dropped. And so I screwed up. So and I realized it, but it was, it was basically Christmas Eve. So I realized this at night, this night on Friday. And then I called the friends and he came over and made adjustments to the thermostat. But this section here was handled entirely by resistance. I don't have a big one on this house. I have five KW, which is one of the smallest heat strips you can get. And then you can see the heat pump usage went up. But it is odd. It didn't go up enough in this period. It's a one and a half ton. So it should be able to use 1.5 kilowatt hours per hour. And note that oftentimes it wasn't like, I don't know exactly what happened here, something happened here. But it was using less than I was expecting and running resistance. So I've got some sort of a setting that I need to figure out what's going on. I made some changes yesterday. We'll see if it works. The curses you don't really know until it gets really cold again, which this is why it's difficult to learn new equipment because you don't know what settings do what. And that's really tricky. So you have to watch the system quite a bit or better yet be in the house like I am. We like just coming here sometimes when the units aren't rented and just spending time here. So we're living next door for a week at the candy cottage. And I'm coming over here to do some work and videos and things like that. So every day or every hour here is one and a half kilowatt hours or so. So that is what the heat pump was doing through there. And it stayed cold through Christmas basically. And then you can see it got warm just after Christmas and see that the usage per hour dropped to under 0.4. So not very much. And the max that this can pull is about one and a half kilowatt hours per hour somewhere in that range. Okay. So let's go look at the resistance for this period. Let's see. Aircraft circuits, game house, A-Hue. Zoom back so looking at the bottom we're in December back to January back to February. Now basically every thousand watts or every KW it's a kilowatt hour. So if you're pulling one kilowatt which is a thousand watts and you pull it for an hour you just pulled one kilowatt hour. This is a 5KW backup and it's oftentimes it's like a hair more like it pulls like 5100 watts or 5200 watts. It's not exactly 5,000. And actually the other 100 or 200 is going to be the fan while the fan is running with this on. So you can see remember how it showed where the heat pump just stopped working. So you can see the air handler is using almost no power over here. So we're using .04 of a kilowatt hour per hour for the fan and then all of a sudden boom we're using four and five kilowatt hours per hour. So this is the resistance hitting and it almost kept up. It got pretty cold here. So design temperature here is 11 degrees which means 99% of the year we are above 11. We got down to just below zero here and so this is beyond design. So technically the temperature is allowed to slide. It's easy enough to usually have a little extra resistance to prevent that from happening. But I needed the resistance and the heat pump to be able to hold temperature and I only had resistance in this case. So 5KW works out to about 17,000 BTUs. The heat pump is 18,000 BTUs on this. So you can see I was matching that up in doing that. So there was a bunch of electricity used right in this period. So actually let's look at by day and yeah here we are 88KW that day and then more like 75 the day after. So you can see there's been a little bit of resistance getting hit but not a whole heck of a lot. Those were the bad days because it was cold like yesterday. It wasn't that cold but if you ask for a big temperature difference and it's kind of cold oftentimes you'll engage resistance and it'll do it. So you use 14KW hours yesterday. So this is what that looks like. So this was an ugly day. It just was. And in fact I can go back and we can look at by day and you can click this up and this is challenging to do. This is something that would be better to have more of a slider but let's see I haven't tried. Oh yeah this works. Okay great. This is a new feature. I wasn't here last time I played with this. So December 24th Christmas Eve. So this is our house in Ohio the River House it's still on resistance. I just bought a heat pump for it but we got to save the money to have it installed. But the mountain escape this is our house used 55KW hours but we were gone and I had it set to 60 degrees so it wasn't working that hard. And it also has a larger heat pump. The game house used a bunch of juice that day 125KW hours. Now this isn't actually totally obscene. One of my clients bought the five stage carrier heat pump which shuts the heat pump off below two and we spent a while below two and it doesn't turn it back on until you get to seven. So he ran a couple days. So he had one day where he used 250KW hours. So that was an expensive day. That cost 35 bucks, 40 bucks to heat the house that day. But that's one day out of 365 days. So it's going to happen. There's going to be a few days that are ugly. It just is. It doesn't matter what fuel you're using it's going to be expensive. But doesn't help that was resistance but I let him know what the option was and then I asked him so did you regret buying the cheaper one because the next step up was like two grand more. I was like nah it's fine. He just wanted to complain and complain to me. Pretty normal. We have a fun relationship. So the candy house used 79 this day. The day before it's going to be quite a bit less. Let's go to the 23rd. So see the candy house only used 41 this day and I can put this down and the heat pump used 21 where the game house, the heat pump only used four because it got cold and shut off the heat pump. And so it ran a ton of resistance 88 kilowatt hours of resistance. So that's what happened that day with it. Now let's go look at the candy house and we'll look at the air handler and look at the air handler normally doesn't use all that much. So 25 or 30 kilowatt hours per month. And this is pretty amazing because remember the way that I have this set up these houses both have what we call bad ass HVAC well not quite they don't have reheat dehumidification. I have little dehumidifiers is extra. But these run the air handler all the time so you get continuous mixing. So you're stirring the house and it helps reduce temperature variations between rooms. You're filtering the air because you're constantly running that air through a very good filter. So you're not going to dust in the garbage out. And then I have on both of these houses there are two fresh air ducts. So one is open basically all the time and the other one is only open when the air quality monitor notices that the VOCs get too high of all to organic compounds. So for 25 or 30 kilowatt hours per month or like five bucks a month you get a cleaner healthier home. So to me that's pretty much no brainer I mean literally the price of a cup of coffee it's just not a big deal. So 139 kilowatt hours it used of resistance last month and this month we have stayed out of resistance at the candy house for the most part I saw a little bit of it yesterday. Again the way to look at resistances it's like an afterburner in a jet. So your main engine the heat pump is the one that's doing most of the work but every so often you want to go faster you need more power and that's where the afterburner or the resistance comes in underneath and bumps it up unless you screw up the commissioning which is what I did because I've never used these units before and like typical guy I didn't read the freaking manual. So I learned this way I like looking through the thermostat to try and understand what's going on and I didn't know you had to add the equipment of the resistance backup. I'm used to playing with carrier where when you put it in it sees everything that's there and it lets you set everything up. So it's just a difference in equipment it's considerably less expensive for this equipment which is why I wanted to try it plus they had a one and a half ton size and I knew one and a half was about what these houses were going to need so sorry for the rambling but there's there's a lot of like little details hiding underneath here so the air handler ended up using 139 kilowatt hours minus 25 or so for the fan so 115 something like that kilowatt hours of resistance we use last month but it the resistance was not turned on I screwed that up and the candy house slid down to 52 degrees in that cold period but I could tell that it was not going to freeze so I waited until the next day to send my friend over to make the changes. Okay so let's then check the heat pump at the candy house so it used a decent chunk last month but 269 kilowatt hours that is for the whole month to keep the house warm oh that's that's November here too so that's really not that bad this is 35 bucks and you know dollar a day to keep the house warm now it was pretty mild that month December this is what I want to look at 421 so December was relatively mild but then we had that snap at the end and then so far what are we we're almost halfway through January and we're at 84 kilowatt hours of resistance or of heat pump usage so this is what we're looking at just showing you what we got and hour by hour for the candy house heat pump that's interesting it was warm enough it just didn't hardly run get back in here so this heat pump again maxes at 1.5 1.5 tons it's basically a thousand watts per ton so 1.5 ton is going to max somewhere around 1500 watts I've seen these pull 1800 because they can run the compressor extra fast to pull more and they're supposed to have full output to 5 degrees Fahrenheit which is another reason I chose them and let's see where are we let's get back into so this is where it got cold and this hour here where it didn't use anything I'm pretty sure we were playing with settings so the temperature was falling in the house we were playing with settings between 11 12 maybe 12 and 1 this day or am I looking at the wrong day no sorry it was Christmas Eve I think that we actually played with it but in any case you can see the heat pump getting up to about 1.5 and then it wasn't running flat out here for some reason I don't really understand why although this might be I thought that it had changed it but I made a dumb screw up on this when you have a 220 device you have you only clamp one of the sides of the the circuit but if it shares in neutral the pole on them is identical so you take whatever the pole is from one of the the circuits and you double it and that's what you get so you can make your your CT clamps go further you don't need to have two clamps on a 220 device you only need to have one and then multiply times two except for I didn't multiply it times two I left it at one and I was wondering why it was only pulling half the power the candy house next door so this may actually be inaccurate I thought that it it went back and doubled stuff but I'm not entirely sure so because like over here it looks like it is so we're getting to one and a half kilowatt hours per hour which is about as much as it can pull but then it's interesting like it goes back and forth a little bit so this might have been hitting a bunch of defrost cycles something like that but anyway you can look at this and get an idea of what's going on so then lastly let's take a look at our house which again was set at 60 degrees and what do I have it set to month here so let's go to graphs so last month used 1227 kilowatt hours let's just chart the heat pump so far halfway into the month we've used 250 kilowatt hours so 40 bucks thus far so if we stay there we're on pace for about 80 bucks a month come on honey there we are last month use 771 kilowatt hours so last year you can see this one that was highs from November December this is January January may be bad but man it's been mild again so I don't know maybe February will be bad and it's still we still have 20 days left in the month so it may get cold and drive the usage up quite a bit that's anybody's ballgame but the most that it used last year was 1150 kilowatt hours which isn't that bad that's 150 bucks 160 bucks something like that for the heaviest heat month of the year not a big deal and I'll look at resistance as well the air handler see it's way down here so that month it used so there was 1150 for the the heat pump and it used 243 for the air handler so the majority of that's going to be resistance this was the only month that it really did much resistance a little bit the next month but not much and it got into a little bit of resistance in November there was a cold snap around Thanksgiving this year as well we were gone but there was a cold snap and then again in December so there's a little bit this is resistance doing what supposed to do just kind of picking up underneath on the bottom as needed and it really hasn't used much so the air handler at that house so looking at the normal months 30 kilowatt hours kilowatt hour per day to have clean fresh air doesn't suck so again five bucks a month and that's pretty consistent that of what we see you know it might be ten bucks a month maybe but it's it's somewhere between five and ten for basically all of our clients I don't think I've seen an exception and that is you need to have a system where the the fan is running relatively low speed and the ductwork can handle the air flow but like in this house this is a double line it's a manufactured home and I didn't change the ductwork I thought that I would and I saw how much power the air handler was pulling and it's just not that much and I'm like you know what it's fine we're just gonna run with it so that's what we've done I'm not worried about it spend the money where the money matters and considering we have renovated three houses in a camper in a little over a year we've needed the money elsewhere so that's what's going on but this gives you an idea of what's going on you know here's the the energy use the Christmas Eve Eve if you will and then Christmas Eve now it was cold I'm trying to thank for I think it was Monday so Christmas was Saturday so you can see the usages is coming down here we don't have anything that's over a hundred at all Christmas day day after Christmas we're still halfway reasonable now one thing to note I've noticed this consistently the day after a cold snap all the building materials are cold so the house still uses a bunch of energy to warm everything back up that's pretty common even with the houses with a good shell you still have to warm the building materials back up and then two days after Christmas you can see energy use is dropping down to 50 or less basically I got 53 but things are down quite a bit considering the game house was 125 on the cold snap day so just gives you an idea of what's going on maybe this is too much to give all at once but hey you're not paying for this I just wanted to go over these couple of houses and see what the Christmas cold snap look like so hope you found this interesting and helpful and if you don't have an Emporia and you're curious about any of this if you're even somewhat handy it's definitely an install you can do yourself and if you're worried about it then call an electrician but it not that long ago this monitoring cost a thousand dollars to do like five years ago the products were grand to have the same capabilities now this is a hundred and sixty bucks and if you use the link below you get five percent off so it's an affiliate link so I hope this is helpful and I'll see you on the next one bye bye