242: The Genius of Heat Pumps - Interview with Tom Sahagian
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Everybody, welcome to still to be determined. This, of course, is to follow a podcast to undecided with math fairwell. I am not mat feral.

I made older brother, i'm shown fairly. I A writer. I write some size. I I write some stuff for kids. And i'm just generally curious of A A technology, Lucy, for me, my brother is that matter of undecided with maper's, which takes a look in emerging tech and its impact, our lives and here on and still to be determined.

We follow up on math episodes, have a brief conversation about our previous episode and then follow to your questions and comments on his most recent episode, but not this week. This week, we have one of our deep dive interviews. This, of course, is when we share the full conversation between map and expert in the field about a given subject.

This week, IT was met opportunity talk to tom sahakian, and tom is involved in the project. We had a previous episode. This was math episode, why this window heat pump is genius? Link in the in the episode description below.

Tom is involved in retrofitting new york city apartment with new heat pump technology to address heating and cooling issues in new york city as a energy saving approach and time works for the new york city housing authority. And he teaches analysis for energy efficiency at columbia university. And he spoke with mad about retrofitting older buildings with the newer heat pump tech, why they landed on the model that they did.

And people who remember red the earlier episode, remember red, that the model is effectively the flip phone of heat pumps. Is this transformer looking thing that kind of sits in your window looking to me, the most exciting part of IT is but IT starts to look good drawed from star wars. I love IT. So ah yes, so the conversation was about why they landed on that model of tech and why cities, not just new york city, but cities worldwide, are approaching and should be approaching analysis of how to use technology like this to help with energy use in the city. So on now to match conversation with tom.

Hi tom, thanks so much for joining me. Um uni had a conversation before and I was really excited to have you on the podcast because i've talked about heat pump S A lot of my youtube channel and IT always comes from the perspective of a home on or doing a pump in their home. And you have a unique experience with ruling out heat pumps in situations that I don't think many people have ever thought about or think about much. Uh, could you kind of walk through who first who you are like, what your basic background is?

Okay, thanks for having me. Um so i've spent the last forty years or so in the energy efficiency field and most of that time I was involved in learning about how to make buildings more efficient, particularly multi family buildings but also commercial, industrial and uh so forth. And most my expertise was in areas other than heat pumps.

Several years ago, I started to realize that if if electrification was really going to take place and was gonna be there answer to reducing our Greenhouse gases significantly that I had to start learning about those. So I I just started doing that. And um as you probably know, there's a lot of inertia among gs people wanting to try to address the whole climate change thing, especially if I evolve betting when you're making any kind of sacrifice or whatever.

And there was a real possible of hard information about heat pumps. How much do they cost to install, how well did they work, how much energy or Greenhouse gases where they are gone to save. Really, there was no unbiased information about there out there, and really even very little biased information. So in order to try to feel that vacuum, I joined up with a friend and um was able to persuade a large H V A C manufactured to subsidized a project where we would convert the existing steam heating system, oil fired steam heating system to individual heat pumps in nature apartment.

The only way we were gonna be able to get any building to the volunteer to do this is to basically help them pay very little for IT, because the risk was just too great for any any building you call up board, whatever, trying to make a decision about what to do. Oh yeah, let's go spend xd million dollars. And what if? What if IT doesn't work? What if he doesn't save energy? What happened? I guess that's sort of the answered your question.

Yeah, yeah. Explains why you we're interested in hip on technology. Can you kind of walk through the process of because you've gone to that process of kind of refitting and building, can you walk through like what that was like and kind of like i'm curious what chAllenges is specific to that you can rain into during doing that?

Well, the chAllenges were many and continuing, but overall, things have worked out pretty well. First, IT was getting people to accept the idea. Um as you probably know, there's a law in new york city called local on ninety seven which is compelling buildings above twenty five thousand square phee to reduce their Greenhouse gas as eighty percent by the year twenty fifty.

Most vast majority buildings in new york city and elsewhere have fossil field heating systems. So one very likely way to reduce one's Greenhouse gas is considerably is to go from a fossil field heading system to an electric heating system, as long as the electrical grid is also Green. In parallel with that effort, which in new york, that's happened, and saving a lot of parts of country as well.

But another big problem was that there was the Smith out there that heat pumps did not work. And cold weather this, this was a major road block. And it's true that in the old day is the older versions of heat pumps. If you installed them north of amazing dick online very frequently in the winter time, your electric bills would be huge, because as the system would default into resistance electric key mode, which is much less sufficient.

And so that persisted in people's minds, even though for some time it's been possible for these heat punch to Operate in heat pump mode as low as minus thirteen degrees fahrenheit, which is much colder than we ever get here in new york and and most other parts of country. So those were the two things. First of all, just what do we do with this thing? And then is, is really onna work, or are we going to get soaked and going to regret IT for the rest of our lives? You know.

so all on that cold, but the performance like, I mean, magin york doesn't get that cold like so IT easily can handle the new york city winters. How have the building that you retrofitted? How is IT been working over the course of the water?

It's worked fantastically well, far Better than I expected actually. So we've been through four winters now and we have had absolutely no problems whatsoever. Uh, we never crop a break her. Uh, we never had a complaint about a lack of heat, not a single one.

That's interesting because in york is I not sure how old the building was. You did, but new york city has some very old buildings. It's been round for a while. And so i'm sure i'm sure you may have run in the issues with just the age of the building, the electrical infrastructure in the building, where there anything around was there anything around that cause problems?

sure. While any retrofit is always going to be more difficult than designing from scratch, and so this building was no different, the building that ended up being part of the project is a ten unit building, five story walk up um and it's about one hundred years old or so. So it's a pretty typical new york city building. And so when you're retrofitting what's called a multi split heat pump in a building like that, there's a lot of drilling through wall, there's a lot of running electrical wires and refrigerant lines. There's just a lot of fairly disruptive construction activity that takes place over the course of installing systems like that.

Are there benefits even, even with all those issues with product of older building, other benefits over going to the heat pump verses a traditional like steam boiler system for the building, his ministry ing for steam boiler system, the apartment building like the the departments themselves are kind of working on the lost common denominator for when you're heating in the winter.

where for the system .

that you put in you just mention multiple times is like it's a multi system. So like i'm seeing each IT has their own dial that continues the heat what they wanted to be and it's napoo government dominated. Is that the case?

Yeah, well, you sound like you must have spent a few winters in new york because practically every multifamily building in new york overheated. And the way people control the heat is open. The windows, you know, want to gets too hot, which is, you can imagine, is not very energy efficient IT turns out that steam heat, in most cases, is very difficult to control on a room by room or an apartment by apartment basis.

I mean, there are things like thermostatic radiator vows that can make things Better. But h in general, it's pretty difficult to find, tom, the temperature that you want as a resident with the steam system at the steam system is gone to be centralized. And there's a network of pipes that goes to the apartments and that is connected to radiators in the rooms and IT just turns out that is is very difficult to get the right amount of stem to flow to the right place, the right time.

Ah with these individual heat pumps in each apartment, not only could they control the apartment overall, but they could control each room. So for example, if they were gone to be in their bedroom all day, they could reduce the energy use in that room and have the rest of the apartment at a temperature that they want. IT and the residents absolutely love that the sense of control and the actuality of control was a very big deal for the residence.

It's kind near dear to my heart cycle. I was in grade call in boston. I lived in a building just like this where I was like, I had to open the window up a little bit in the winter of time because I could not get IT cool enough.

My brother lives in bricklin, and one of the rooms in the apartment is directly above the boiler. And that room is like getting it's like super heated in the winter. It's like a steam, like a steam log when you go in there and you have to crack a winter, something that so yes, so i'm summer that this is a very popular with residents that light tuned .

to what they want yeah that they are univerSally very happy with the system. Overall.

it's awesome. So for energy efficiency, how do this um hey, pumps impact the overall efficiency of the building pretty .

substantially because with a heat pump with a boiler, you burn fossil fuel and you extract as much of the energy out of that fuel as you can. But you can't get any more than one hundred percent of the fuel and usually it's much, much less. A heat pump doesn't create energy.

IT moves energy. Uh, IT works pretty much exactly like the refrigerator in your house. Refrigerator in your house moves heat from the inside of the fridge outside to your kitchen.

An air conditioner moves heat from the inside of your house to the outdoors. A heat pump can do two things that can move heat from indoors to out. But I can also move heat energy from outdoors to end, which is why I can serve both as a cooling unit and a heating unit.

And because is moving energy rather than creating energy, IT can actually Operate at the equivalent of more than one hundred percent efficiency. Now we know the laws of thermo I X say that can be more than one hundred person efficient, and that's true. But because you're moving energy around, IT is the equivalent of being more than one hundred percent efficient.

And the the units that we have in this particular project average about two and half times one hundred percent efficient. Uh, it's called the C O P coefficient of performance. And over the course of the year, the average is about two point five. So if you compare that to a typical steam boiler system in the basement, which has an equivalent C O P of about point five, maybe point six, you're talking four or five times as efficient in terms of energy use, which is, which is huge, is huge.

There is kind of A A touchy question i've got around, like you just mentioned, like the till the bill, like the electricity usage of the system, even though super efficient, like typical apartment, sometimes heat is included in your rent bill. By shifting this to electric, sometimes the tenant is paying their on electric bill, which means is shifting the cost from the landlord recent on to the tenant.

I mean, they're paying for no matter what, to the rent to the the rent right now. It's more obvious that my electric bill higher now than I was before because I have electricity. Have you gotten feedback from tenants on like how I feel about that? Or do you have a senses to like what that looks like for a typical well.

you've put your finger on a very important issue yeah at this particular building because it's a cop. Um at first people were kind of freaking out because their electric bills did go up. I mean, they used to pay for the oil that was burned in in the boiler indirectly through their monthly fees and IT was the same number every month.

So they they had no idea how much of what was going to fuel and how much I was going to something else. But when IT comes in on your own electric bill, suddenly IT, you know, IT has a reality that IT didn't have before. I have to say, overall, even though there was come an initial shock, a people didn't really mind very much.

They seem to have taken IT in stride. But the thing is, because this building was a cop, the organized differently from a rental building. And the issue of who is gonna pay for the heat pump l electricity, have a rental building shifts over the heat pumps is one that's being kind of thought out right now.

New york, with strong opinions on both sides. And I have no idea how it's going to play out. My personal feeling is that it's very important for energy users of any kind to get feedback on how much they are using and how much it's costing them.

So when they get that Price signal, they will say, oh, maybe I should use less, maybe I should turn this thing off and i'm not using IT so that my monthly bill will be less. And if you don't have that feedback loop, I think you have a situation where people just, you know, you they pay a fixed amount every month and they're gonna use as much as they want because sort of be foolish. Not too.

I am getting this thing for a certain amount. I'm used to use as much as I want, so I am a strong believer in that. But of course, there are a lot of housing advocates and so forth who feel very strongly that that's not how I should be done.

There are legal issues in new york as well. So i'm not sure how that's going to play out. But IT is a very, very important issue.

Kind of you've mentioned how you put this kind of like centralized system, he pump system into the building. Are there any advances in he pump technology? There are conflict exciting you where there you're interested in and for where this is evolving to for situations like this?

Yeah well, let me just sort to make a minor correction. So the heat pumps that we put in, it's central in the sense that it's central to given apartment, right, but it's it's discretized relative to the central boy, right? Yeah, okay, yeah.

In the course of doing this project, IT became clear to me that there are a lot of disadvantages to what we were doing. I was disruptive to the residence. You had to drill holes in the the walls to allow the refrigeration ines to go outside.

And so fourth, there are a lot of little things here and there that I began to realize were not conducive to mass adoption of this technology. And we really sort of need to adopt IT a lot, you know, very quickly, know, twenty fifty years, right around the corner. So that kind of start the wheel turning in my mind.

And I came up with the idea of, uh, hip pop that you could put in a window similar to a window. A C, but a little different. We talk, talk about a second.

And because I happen to a work part time for the new york city housing authority, I brought that idea to my boss and he brought to his boss. And the decision was made to for nature, new york city housing authority to try to create a market for a new product that didn't yet exist. And so back, I want to seek, two and a half years ago, something like that.

We put out a request for proposals. We got proposals from about six firms. We elected two of them.

And just this past month, we finished our first year of data gathering for these window heat pumps. And the project has just been at insane, successful. Several bumps on the road, of course.

But the advantage of this window heat pop is that you don't have to cut any holes or drill any holes. You can plug IT into a regular electrical outlet, which the a multi pitch you can do, that they need. They need two hundred eight volts. Uh, they can be installed with non skilled labor in a very short period of time. The amount of disruption to the apartment is, is practically nothing of the overall cost per apartment for having the heat pump capability is a fraction of what I would be if we were doing multi splits.

And from the perspective of nitch a, which has a super centralized heating system in most of its buildings, it'll have a um you know a large heating plant in the middle of the development and then the denticles of the same lines will go out to each building. And if if there's a failure in that central system, everybody loses their heat or their hot water. And that's obviously really bad and not something that we want to have happen.

If you have a heat pup, say, in each bedroom and your living room, and one of them fails for some reason, first of all, no one else is effect that except you. And secondly, you still have two or three others that can know, heat the rest of your apartment. And three is pretty easy to have somebody come in, take the failed one out, put a fresh one in and fix the other one at ones more or less.

user. So IT solves a lot of problems at once, you know what I think is a fairly attractive way. And we're now going into our second phase of Operation where we're going to have an entire forty eight unit building with heat pumps in every apartment, and we're going to have a heat pump water heater for the domestic hot water in the building. And if things go well with that, the housing authority is gonna buying tens of thousands of these things, if not more, in the future, because nature needs to meet the requirements of local and ninety seven, just like any other building over twenty five thousand graphite.

You to go to the money angle, the first whats I can you mentioned in your its cheaper than poor unit than what you did in the first building. Would you say the first building, even at the cost that you paid, was kind of worthy investment for for the long term verse because guys, what i'm getting at is IT sounds like doing IT that way still would make sense long term versus this, which saves you even more .

money potentially yeah I mean, um there are advantages and disadvantages to every form of this technology and there is no silver bullet that's going to solve everything. There was still a worthwhile investment for this building because they're getting benefit a few years ahead of the curve. If these window he pumps paying out, I mean, they didn't exist.

So there there wasn't an option at the time. You know, theyve cut their, their, their energy use for space seating about sixty percent. They've cut their Greenhouse gases a similar amount. So if your target is is to cut your Greenhouse gases eighty percent by twenty and fifty.

And in one fell swap you've cut by sixty percent that that's a huge Victory yeah in addition um the comfort, the the control of all of those things are advantages that the the residents still like. And I think that there are buildings that may not want to a wait until the window he pumped is, is on the market. The one question that people had was, okay, suppose you save all the energy, but electricity is so much more expensive than gas or oil aren't. We're going to be settled with higher energy bills overall.

And the answer to that question in this case was now we actually, after doing quite an extensive calculation, determine that the net cost for energy of this building actually went down slightly ah and that was when they were paying about two dollars and forty two cents of garland for fuel loyal ah there was a period a year two after we installed these units, when they were paying like five dollars in twenty six cents for fuel oil because they are still using fuel loyal for the domestic t water. And if that Price had been in effect previously, the energy cost savings would have been gigantic. So yeah is onna pay back in two years now I don't think so um but depending on the circumstances of any given building could pay back and in five years or ten years, which is really that's not bad.

One of the things about the the window, hey, pop unus you're talking about, which are those kind of like u shaped sell style units that you put in? I know like I made a video about those and a lot of feedback was why they so expensive compared to in your conditioner or why they so expensive. Is is adding a reversing valve? I'm curious here we thoughts about because we talk about some of the misconceptions around heat pumps. IT also seems as A A misconception about that about why these are more expensive than like an an air conditioner when it's just .

a quote reversing about which a couple it's not just a reverse a into a heat pump in addition to what you already have inside A A window air conditioner. Ah so that's number one. Number two, don't forget the quantities that fears are being made in right now is mini school the the window heat pump market, a given manufacturer.

S gonna. Be manufacturing ten, twenty, thirty, fifty thousand at a time. I don't know, one hundred thousand times IT has become a commodity.

And you can get you know on five thousand b to window unit for like two hundred and fifty box. But when window A C S first came out, they were the, they were only the province of the wealthy. They were much more expensive in constant dollars than than they are now.

And I firmly believe that once these things get manufactured in large quantities, that the the Price will will drop. I mean, well, it's still be more expensive than a window in IT. Yeah, absolutely because it's got a lot more in IT.

One of the key things that I think most folks don't realize is that one of the largest design issues was cotta handle the concentrate, the moisture that gets pulled out of the air when you're you know cooling or heating and um with the window I see you know IT sticks outside and the excess kind of and say just drips out on somebody y's head down on the street. That's not really an option with these things. Uh and so there's a fairly I signed in india can really talk directly about how how works.

But the condensate handling a IT is something that also adds to the cost. But I have to say if, let's say, these things go for, I don't know, three ground a piece which I think is on the high side and you have four of them in your house. So that's twelve thousand dollars.

The the heat pump project that we did with the multi I split was on the average about twenty two thousand per apartment and that was for only three rooms having he pup unit indoor units uh and since there are also pretty substantial subsidies from the utilities and state energy authority, the overall cost is gonna of a fraction if you put in if you put in multi split or this kind, I think you'll you'll get A A subsidy. The overall cost will be so much less because you're spending so much less up front. Not to mention, you know just plug IT right in no no electrical word is no climbing work a this very little disruption to the installation so forth.

Just from my understanding, there was a lot of researchers envelopment that went into those units that you mentioned. The way they have to handle the concentrate is very unique to them. So it's there's new stuff in their new technologies. H he pumps also have to do deep ost cycles and things like that, which air conditioners don't. So there's additional things in them that add complex irca .

yeah yeah that I mean yeah window A C does not have to worry about deep cycle in the winter type, right?

And as they agree to as IT gets to scale, it's gonna finites come down at cost because these are doing done in small runs right now. And so as they could, why the manufacturer look at cheaper, cheaper and cheaper, do you see like, okay, so you did the the two different you've had experience with the two different styles here of retrofit building and seeing what the results actually are. Are you aware of any interest from other cities that have seen these these pilot projects and things being done in new york that are interested saying, hey, we think we might want to do. Do you know of that if there's any out there that trying to go do?

Actually because when night up was putting the R, F, P together, uh, we wanted to make IT as attractive to applicants as possible. And so we actually got letters of support from a variety of um public and agencies throughout the country whose basically said, yeah, if you make these and they work, we're really interested in in getting this.

And there's also been expression of interest uh in in market rate housing, also one of the companies that makes a the the units that we're testing uh company called my idea. They've been displaying their that various trade shows and stuff. And I asked them, you know the people look at what's the attitude towards.

They said people are really interested in IT. They think that I could be an a really useful solution to the problem that they have. And like I say, it's not gona be for every building. But I think there are many buildings are gonna say, you know, this is the way we want to do IT.

One of the final questions I do have for you is what advice would you give to other landlords or other building owners that are considering a transition to heat pumps? What advice would you give them?

Yeah, that's a really good question. Uh and people ask me that all the time and I basically say to them, okay, if your building is affected by local on ninety seven so that you have to make some kind of change. First of all, don't freak out. A lot of people are freaking out and they don't need to freak out.

The first thing I would suggest that they do is do a lot of air ceiling in their building, air ceiling installations, stuff like that, things that they're probably been ignoring over the years, very basic stuff that's not expensive and at the same time, start up a capital fund for whatever is you're going to end up spending on your building to comply with the local law. And then I I would say, you know, wait a wait a couple years to see what happens with these window units. Because if you can then have a choice between that and multi split or many split or they are effort, whatever you you just have more options that you can consider.

I would not rush into IT. I don't know if you read the trade press, but it's all over the trade press that there's a giant shortage of qualified H V A C. installers. And my experience with this project and others is that, yes, sometimes you can even get these heat pumping stalls ers to bid because they're so busy that they don't even bother to bid on your project or they give you an a Price that's insane uh and just hope that you fall for it's really crucial that the industry to ramp up in terms of qualified and stalkers, people are gna opt for the multi split and the mini split.

Uh with the window you on IT, you're you know you're still gna need somebody who has a clear idea what they need to do to install IT, but they don't have to be a trained electrician or train plummer or something like that. And so there's many more people in that category than there are plumbers, electricians and so forth. Um but I guess the first thing I would say to people is don't panic, start to put a plan together, start to put some money away and give you a couple years to see how at all falls out and and then act there after it's a great .

piece of advice. Is there anything else we haven't touched on that you'd .

want to touch on? Just recently, we've had these two really bad hurricanes down south. And the scientific consensus is that is the result of global warming, uh, and this is gonna continue.

And so more and more people are going to be affected by the global rise and temperature if we don't do something to reverse the process. And there's also the issue of the ocean level rising as well. I mean, this is something that is a big deal, especially for people in lower manhattan and you know other other coastal areas all over the country and all over the world.

And so I would just say to your listeners ah, you have to not only consider what's happening globally but also locally and you you should be willing to do your share to help the rest of the people on the plan or not experience these horrific conditions. So sit down, try to figure out what you can do. Start to fun to save money so you can do something about IT. You know, that's not just a virtue signal or something. Let's do this together to help each other out.

I like that something a lot of time. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk me again. Um it's great catching up and I love your perspective on this. So thanks so much.

Well, thank you. mad. This has really been a lot of fun and I hope it's great for your your audience.

So thanks to thoms hehai in for taking the time to talk to matt. And now viewers and listeners, what do you think about this conversation? Do you think there was anything that came up that caught your year, maybe something that wasn't in match video in which he shared the the more condenser version of the conversation?

Was there something in this long form conversation that you think stood out that you would like to flag for other viewers and listeners? Jump in to the comments. Let us know. And as usual, your comments will be feeding a future episode of this podcast s so come back to see how we pick up the conversation there. Don't forget to like to subscribe and to share with your friends.

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