Technology

The incredible shrinking heat pump

/ Justine CalmaIllustration of a person’s silhouette through a window of an apartment building. The heat pump unit hanging outside of their window warms their home.

The side of an apartment building with many windows. Some of the windows have AC units sticking out of them. One window on the bottom floor has a larger appliance, a heat pump, sticking out of the window.

A rectangular heat pump sits in a window sill with off-white lace curtains tucked behind it.

A man wearing a jacket and glasses stands in front of the door to an apartment building.

Two women stand next to the window in an empty living room. One woman has her hand on a heat pump appliance that’s installed in the window. A person’s hand points a finger at a control panel on a white appliance. The digital display says “80 F”

A person’s hand points a finger at a control panel on a white appliance. The digital display says “80 F”The side view of a heat pump installed in a window in an empty living room.

The side view of a heat pump installed in a window in an empty living room.

NYCHA is the biggest landlord in New York City, after all, and is already thinking about the possibility of putting this new technology in many of its more than 177,000 apartments. New York Power Authority says it’s also considering installing heat pumps across other governmental properties it serves. Those kinds of contracts have the power to make heat pumps the new norm by giving the industry incentive to scale and lowering manufacturing costs. 

That kind of shift will come with new challenges, of course, and other things will have to change to avoid passing on costs to renters. In New York City, for example, landlords are required to provide heat and often take care of gas bills, while it’s common for tenants to pay for electricity. Without the right policies in place, an electric heat pump could shift heating costs to renters’ tabs. That probably wouldn’t go over well with renters, so policymakers and building managers will need to listen to them, too, if they’re hoping for a smooth and just transition. 

“You have to take a kind of a wider approach to how you electrify the building,” says Gradient CEO Vince Romanin. “We saw this coming. I don’t think we saw how fast this was coming.”