The article is light on technical details, pointing to a heat pump vendor site for "proof" that they're great.
I live in a heavily populated area with high standard of living, and yet we have had power outages lasting up to a week in the years we've lived here. Almost all in the winter, but also some due to hurricanes. We have have solar, which is great in the summer heat, but not as wonderful in the winter. We have air source heat pump, but also oil furnace backup.
We normally run the heat pump when its above 35F, as the efficiency of the heat pumps drops like a rock below 40F and its just not worth running below 35F. The heat pump is not an ancient POS. It works great 99% of the time, but 1% of 365 is 3.65 days per year. Banking on "most of the time" to be alright all of the time is foolish.
We have diesel generator in case of power outage, which allows us to run the oil furnace using the same fuel as the furnace. This strategy has allowed us to ride through many 1% case scenarios without drama.
Your normal experience is far outside what most people in Europe would prepare for, so our comments on this thread should probably be ignored by North Americans.
Looking at [1], I can see only two power cuts lasting more than 24 hours (Barcelona, 2007 and Cyprus, 2011).
Instead, "major power cut" refers to things like "The power cut occurred at 4:20 pm and power was slowly restored between 5:20 and 6:30 pm." (Glasgow, 2009.)
I can't remember being without power for more than 6 hours, and it's probably more like 3 or 4. I've been responsible for some colocated servers for about 8 years, and there's been one occasion where grid power was lost. That was about 20 minutes. A Raspberry Pi I have in a village in England has lost power once in the last three years.
> I live in a heavily populated area with high standard of living, and yet we have had power outages lasting up to a week in the years we've lived here.
Maybe you are in the USA? The infrastructure situation seems to be different there. We don't have any above-ground power lines in this country (except for high-voltage long-distance transmission trunks) and in the past ten years the power has gone out exactly twice, according to my uptime logs - once for 40 minutes and once for about three hours.
At the risk of asking a dumb question, doesn't working great 99% of the time represent a pretty good solution to most problems by any standard? The tone of the post you're replying to seems to suggest having a backup heat source for rare situations is somehow an indictment of heat pumps, as if addressing your climate control needs 360 days a year without relying on fossil fuels is somehow a failure. Sure, those few days where an alternative is necessary means you might need a backup plan. But that's light years ahead of having to rely on the backup plan every day.
I'd also suggest that the necessity of a backup plan can be reduced as well. Having an unreliable power grid is probably not an immutable law of nature so much as a policy choice and modern heat pump technology performs well at considerably lower temperatures than you describe.
I live in a heavily populated area with high standard of living, and yet we have had power outages lasting up to a week in the years we've lived here. Almost all in the winter, but also some due to hurricanes. We have have solar, which is great in the summer heat, but not as wonderful in the winter. We have air source heat pump, but also oil furnace backup.
We normally run the heat pump when its above 35F, as the efficiency of the heat pumps drops like a rock below 40F and its just not worth running below 35F. The heat pump is not an ancient POS. It works great 99% of the time, but 1% of 365 is 3.65 days per year. Banking on "most of the time" to be alright all of the time is foolish.
We have diesel generator in case of power outage, which allows us to run the oil furnace using the same fuel as the furnace. This strategy has allowed us to ride through many 1% case scenarios without drama.