The Politics of Heat Pumps and the Clash of Ideas

It all started innocently enough. I spotted a tiny green “unmute” button illuminate beside my name, and I clicked it. In an offhand way, I lobbed a comment about my home team, the Minnesota Vikings, being better than the Pittsburgh Steelers. I’d lived in Pittsburgh for years, so I assumed the comment would land like friendly banter, met with a chuckle. Instead, silence from the Pittsburgh half of the crowd.

A sports metaphor served as the backdrop to a debate on the effectiveness of air-to-water heat pumps.

When it was my turn to introduce myself, I turned the camera to show my gutted basement, letting the class see why I needed this seminar: to finish the work my wife and I had started. I hoped to lighten the mood—I'm no fan of fake Zoom backgrounds and sitting in a basement with the walls and ceiling off, seemed more in keeping with the class.

Later, when I broached the subject of air-to-water heat pumps, one of the HVAC professionals from just outside Pittsburgh unmuted. His box flickered, filling my screen just as I started to extol the virtues of air-to-water heat pumps—saving energy, good for the environment, and government incentives making them more accessible. I barely finished that last sentence before he interrupted.

“Air-to-water heat pumps?” he scoffed. “Garbage. All of ‘em. I tell folks, if you’re gonna try it, let your neighbors waste their money first, so you can laugh at them instead of the other way around.”

I stared, dumbfounded, at his black screen as his voice boomed across the seminar and cast a shadow across my laptop screen. I could feel my face flush as I tried to reconcile his admirable expertise with this dismissal of an idea I’d been nurturing for for my own home for months. An air-to-water heat pump works just like an air-to-air heat pump, whether it be mini-splits or the whole home units most of us are becoming familiar with, except it heats water for radiators or showers instead of ducted air.

“Just don’t force everyone else to get one,” he said. Like I had that kind of power. “And don’t get me started on government programs, making everyone buy stuff nobody wants. Look at England—they forced everyone to get heat pumps, and now half the poor folks over there are freezing.”

My first reaction was disbelief—a cognitive dissonance so sharp it might as well have been ringing in my ears. Here was a man, a professional who had been answering every HVAC and building science question the instructor posed with near-encyclopedic knowledge, dismissing what, to me, was the future of home energy systems.

I had assumed that anyone with this much technical know-how would be an ally, sharing my enthusiasm for this cool technology and the government incentives designed to push us toward it. But he was having none of it.

Then it hit me: the Trump vs Harris election was just two weeks away. This wasn’t personal; this was political.

Me being from Minnesota—with its liberal background—obviously Democrat—triggered a crusade against government programs.

But then as I sat there, I thought maybe that didn’t matter to him as much as the practicality of the situation - maybe he wasn’t just parroting politics. Maybe where he lived every dollar spent had to pull its weight. I pictured him trudging up someone’s snowy driveway to install a replacement gas furnace in January, to a customer relucent to buy anything, let alone a heat pump.

He didn’t live inside spreadsheets or government models—he lived in the bracing winds off the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers. He lived far from the spreadsheets, policy briefs and energy models that fueled my interests. Instead, his practicality was honed in the field, where comfort isn’t just an ideal; it is his lifeline. To him, my notion of taking a risk on new technology was absurd, the kind of idealism you might expect from someone who’d never had to hold a flashlight between their teeth while fixing a frozen pipe at 3 a.m.

Part of me wanted to continue arguing, but luckily, the thoughtful part took over.

Maybe…there’s a lesson in the clash of our perspectives.

Maybe every great idea needs a grumbling HVAC guy’s seal of approval before it could really go anywhere—because if it could convince him, well, then it might just flourish in the marketplace.