Ithaca Monthly Meeting’s Earthcare Committee invites you to a presentation on Heat Pumps, on Thursday, February 8 at 7:00pm via Zoom. The speakers will be Anne Rhodes and Leigh Miller from Cornell Cooperative Extension

During our October listening session on Earthcare, some people shared that they love their heat pumps. Others asked questions and expressed concerns about them. Are they appropriate for everyone? What are the advantages? What are the problems? Now we can offer you some answers!

New York is on the cutting edge of using energy-efficient heat pumps to change the ways that we heat and cool our buildings and that we heat our water. In NYS, millions of dollars of incentives to install heat pumps are currently available.

This presentation will talk about the range of heat pump options, their pros and cons, and introduce ways to navigate the incentives. Let us know what YOUR questions are, and Anne and Leigh, both knowledgeable Community Energy Educators, will be ready to answer them.

Depending on your building and the surrounding land, a heat pump can be geothermal (using the ground or a body of water) or air-source. You can install a “stand-alone” hot water heater, or have it be part of your whole house heating system. If “right-sized” and properly installed in an energy-efficient building, heat pumps use small amounts of electricity. And yes, there are now “cold weather” heat pumps” that can even handle an Arctic blast!

As our planet warms, the ability to cool our buildings (one of heat pumps’ big advantages over traditional heating systems) will become ever more important. More importantly, intergenerational justice — our love for the people and other beings who will be living in the world of the future — calls us to limit future warming as much as possible (AMAP) by reducing our use of fossil fuels as soon as possible (ASAP). Installing heat pumps in buildings we own and/or help make decisions about is a key way we can substantially reduce our use of fossil fuels AMAP ASAP.