Ha! That's what governments do. What else would you expect from bureaucrats who finish one long complicated task and don't want anyone to think they are unnecessary? Good heavens! Imagine what lesson DOGE would take from that!
The government regs may seem to be half right, but they are all wrong. If they didn't exist, only the die hard delusional would sell or buy thermostats with inefficient choices.
It's just another Stupid Government trick, solving a problem which doesn't exist in a manner which makes the problem worse.
You have a very optimistic view of the intelligence and knowledge of the average person and their ability to discern the best choices amidst the overwhelming flood of misleading advertisements they are bombarded with daily.
People buy all sorts of things more expensive than thermostats and heating costs -- phones, computers, cars, and shelter. What makes thermostats so uniquely difficult that government has to hold people's hands?
Not at all, most people don't care enough or have the ability to discover the information hence it's there to avoid the more common scenario of low knowledge poor people getting fleeced, especially renters who have no say on their thermostat.
Good thing you are rich enough to do that, many aren't; also good thing tuur landlord let you rather than evict you as I've seen happen in cases like yours. The government isn't trying to protect rich kids with high expendable income, they are trying to protect the poor.
I think it's geographical. In Hawaii I'd agree with you as natural gas is rare and likewise maybe out in rural America where propane is still the norm but when I lived in Wisconsin his setup was common in my experience.
"When we put them in, a year or two ago, I calculated that at current prices for gas and electricity, it was less expensive to heat with the furnace than with the heat pump."
I was sure this could not be correct, but then I remembered that California electricity rates are stupidly high. That's what you should be annoyed at!
FWIW, I have a Lennox heat pump, and there is a setting to only use gas below a configurable temperature. Are you sure you can't do that with your thermostat?
As I explained, there is a setting to only use gas, labelled "emergency heating." It isn't obvious that there is a setting to do what you describe, but there might be. If you go below the top level of the interface there seem to be quite a lot of options.
What I am annoyed about is not that I can't do it but that most users won't, because there is nothing to tell them that "emergency heating" might be the less expensive option.
My wife 'manages' a customer survey (residential, commercial, industrial, etc) for PG&E. The responses to some open-ended questions are just stupefying. People are scared, angry, suspicious, and mostly unhappy with PG&E but not the govt regulations that create the problems they mention.
I think the survey covers HI, CA, OR, and maybe WA. Of course there are other utilities in the area, but PG&E ia what she handles.
A friend who works for a think tank in NY is finding brewing resentment there over the restrictions in using gas, NG or LP.
I'm a dissatisfied PG&E customer, mainly over winter power outages. I live at 4000 feet in the Sierras. Here is how many times I started my little generators during winter.
2021-22: 37 times
2022-23: 25 times
2023-24: 11 times
2024-25: none yet
As much as I gripe about PG&E, I am convinced it is the PUC causing the problems. They say frog, PG&E jumps.
Several years ago, there were stories going around that when PG&E's budget for paying outrageous prices for rooftop solar was drained, the PUC refused to let PG&E raise rates and told them to cut expenses, because there was an election coming up. So PG&E cut way back on trimming trees near power lines. Did they do that for the same reason the government shuts revenue-producing national parks when the debt limit stops borrowing, to make the pain palpable? I doubt we'll ever know.
How true those rumors were, I do not know. But everyone up here noted a lot fewer tree crews at work and a lot more power outages. My list above starts after those rumors.
Still, it's easy to whine with neighbors about PG&E losing power. It would be nice if PG&E felt they could be honest about the reasons, but I doubt the PUC would sit back and not retaliate.
The reason I put in solar and a battery was not that I thought it would save me money, although it might. The reason was that I didn't want to rely on PG&E providing power. As things are now I can get through a several day electric outage without losing anything important but use of the oven — we have hotplates that substitute for the stove top — and for most of the year we could probably get through a much longer outage without losing power for the freezer, refrigerator, lights and computers.
If you have a natural gas hookup, as you wrote, it almost certainly would have been cheaper, more reliable and supply an indefinite backup time (not limited by sunlight and battery capacity) to get a natural gas generator for backup.
Also, given that you have gas, why in the world did you have a heat pump installed?
2. As a backup if the furnace stopped working for any reason.
3. On the chance that gas might get substantially more expensive or electricity substantially less during the life of the unit.
A natural gas generator might have made more sense, but that still leaves me dependent on PG&E, for gas instead of electricity. This way if both become unavailable our only problem is heating the house, and we are in a reasonably warm climate, have a fireplace and a good deal of wood.
It might have been sensible to put in twice as many solar panels to give us adequate power even in winter months, but I was not thinking of that at the time.
Unfortunately, now if you increase the size of your solar system by more than 10% you will be subject to NEM 3 for your entire system.
Would a simple solution to your problem be to remove control of the gas heater from your thermostat and just purchase a second thermostat to do what your original thermostat did, control the gas heater? This way you could set the heat-pump thermostat to control only air conditioning and the gas-heater thermostat to control only heating. Or am I confused?
I strongly suspect you're right. My wife has been 'managing' this account for at least a decade. You may have gotten an email or such about taking the survey. Basically she does the logisitics of getting the survey (which she has no hand in writing) into the hands of the potential respondents and the results back to PG&E. That means she oversees things like translation into (appropriate dialects, too) various languages needed in CA (about 6 I think, currently), making sure the emails get sent and the online surveys are available, and phone banks get going and such. And keeping track of when to shut the survey down, and all that gut work.
She also reviews, in a general sense, all the responses. (She also usually has around 10 other surveys "in the filed" so she's very busy.)
Plus, her office phone number is the one listed on the surveys "if you have a problem" so she gets the calls from unhappy customers. And she can get an earful of things she frequently can do nothing about.
She forwards this to PG&E, but due to the vagaries of business she is not allowed to speak directly to the PG&E people who give her the survey, let alone anyone in the upper reaches of management. So she has no idea if the complaints she fields about your situation (and she does get some of those) ever reaches anyone who can do anything about them.
This is a weird (late) question. but why did it make sense to get a heat pump alongside your gas furnace? Since heating with gas is cheaper, it's hard to see what the benefit is of the heat pump over just having an air conditioner (which I think is substantially cheaper/simpler).
“It makes sense that the federal and state regulations require that kind of thermostat for a system…”
Did I actually just read a piece by the libertarian David Friedman defending government regulation *requirements* here as a good thing?? 😁
Or did you merely mean “well, given that in reality they are gonna regulate, at least they chose the better regulation rather than the worser [sic] regulation”? 😏
I have a carrier with a heat pump and gas furnace. On that system at least, you can set a lockout temps to control this behavior if you go into servicer model, which a quick Google search shows how to do. Ironically in my area I mostly use this to prevent the gas from kicking on because the crossover point here is around 20 degrees based on calculations from the efficiency table and utility rates.
To be fair they are installers, not engineers nor technicians. They are basically just minimum wage employees doing physical data entry for people who are either lazy, can't be bothered, don't have three basic tools like a screwdriver, or more generally, simply want the work warrantied. They aren't paid to know anything, they are paid to unbox your fridge, move the old one (it has wheels btw), and plug it in because that's "scary" for most people and too difficult.
That's what the installer for a fridge does, but the installation for a heat pump is much more complicated. It involves running copper lines through walls, bending the copper pipes without kinking them, drawing a vacuum on the line, putting in the right amount of refrigerant, monitoring pressures, etc. It's maybe not quite at the same level as a technician who can evaluate a system having problems, but it's close.
I know, I was being slightly fastidious. Point is the installers are tier 1 support, they may even be expert level but they aren't going to be able to tell you the engineering design reasons nor soffer a transistor on a control board as troubleshooting, they'll just replace the board. They aren't the guy you ask thermostat programmable code logic that was implemented by a software engineer.
In that case why did I need to find a company that had a specific certification, trust them to do all the setup for my thermostat and agree that if I touch the thermostat settings myself I'm voiding the warrantee, and pay them thousands of dollars for their "expertise"?
Regulatory capture, insurance coverage, and legal liability; nothing to do with capability or expertise.
The same reason as a homeowner you can patch the drywall in your house but if you are a landlord you have to use a bonded tradesmen to patch that same hole.
The question is why there are regulation about this thing at all?
Ha! That's what governments do. What else would you expect from bureaucrats who finish one long complicated task and don't want anyone to think they are unnecessary? Good heavens! Imagine what lesson DOGE would take from that!
The government regs may seem to be half right, but they are all wrong. If they didn't exist, only the die hard delusional would sell or buy thermostats with inefficient choices.
It's just another Stupid Government trick, solving a problem which doesn't exist in a manner which makes the problem worse.
You have a very optimistic view of the intelligence and knowledge of the average person and their ability to discern the best choices amidst the overwhelming flood of misleading advertisements they are bombarded with daily.
Myself, I avoid all these issues with thermostats and inefficient heating by using the AlphaHeater (https://topconsumerguide.com/review-alphaheater-portable-heater).
People buy all sorts of things more expensive than thermostats and heating costs -- phones, computers, cars, and shelter. What makes thermostats so uniquely difficult that government has to hold people's hands?
Not at all, most people don't care enough or have the ability to discover the information hence it's there to avoid the more common scenario of low knowledge poor people getting fleeced, especially renters who have no say on their thermostat.
I always controlled my own thermostat in every rental. I replaced some of them myself.
Good thing you are rich enough to do that, many aren't; also good thing tuur landlord let you rather than evict you as I've seen happen in cases like yours. The government isn't trying to protect rich kids with high expendable income, they are trying to protect the poor.
Evict for changing a thermostat which controls how much the tenant spends?
Rich to buy a $5 or $10 thermostat? The last one I bought, in 2021, was a half-fancy one at $20.
And the government trying to protect the poor? Just about every government action screws the poor more than the rich.
I think you have been drinking government KoolAid for too long. The real world has more facets than you can imagine.
I suspect that your combination of gas and heat pump may be fairly rare.
I think it's geographical. In Hawaii I'd agree with you as natural gas is rare and likewise maybe out in rural America where propane is still the norm but when I lived in Wisconsin his setup was common in my experience.
"When we put them in, a year or two ago, I calculated that at current prices for gas and electricity, it was less expensive to heat with the furnace than with the heat pump."
I was sure this could not be correct, but then I remembered that California electricity rates are stupidly high. That's what you should be annoyed at!
FWIW, I have a Lennox heat pump, and there is a setting to only use gas below a configurable temperature. Are you sure you can't do that with your thermostat?
As I explained, there is a setting to only use gas, labelled "emergency heating." It isn't obvious that there is a setting to do what you describe, but there might be. If you go below the top level of the interface there seem to be quite a lot of options.
What I am annoyed about is not that I can't do it but that most users won't, because there is nothing to tell them that "emergency heating" might be the less expensive option.
My wife 'manages' a customer survey (residential, commercial, industrial, etc) for PG&E. The responses to some open-ended questions are just stupefying. People are scared, angry, suspicious, and mostly unhappy with PG&E but not the govt regulations that create the problems they mention.
I think the survey covers HI, CA, OR, and maybe WA. Of course there are other utilities in the area, but PG&E ia what she handles.
A friend who works for a think tank in NY is finding brewing resentment there over the restrictions in using gas, NG or LP.
"People are scared, angry, suspicious, and mostly unhappy with PG&E but not the govt regulations that create the problems they mention."
Yeah, so they move to Texas and vote in support of the same regulations that chased them out of California.
Yes. When the politicians were arguing about border control, I kept hoping someone would shut the California border to keep the Californians in...
In Austin, since '75 and I apologize in advance for how deeply stupid the voters of Austin are.
I'm a dissatisfied PG&E customer, mainly over winter power outages. I live at 4000 feet in the Sierras. Here is how many times I started my little generators during winter.
2021-22: 37 times
2022-23: 25 times
2023-24: 11 times
2024-25: none yet
As much as I gripe about PG&E, I am convinced it is the PUC causing the problems. They say frog, PG&E jumps.
Several years ago, there were stories going around that when PG&E's budget for paying outrageous prices for rooftop solar was drained, the PUC refused to let PG&E raise rates and told them to cut expenses, because there was an election coming up. So PG&E cut way back on trimming trees near power lines. Did they do that for the same reason the government shuts revenue-producing national parks when the debt limit stops borrowing, to make the pain palpable? I doubt we'll ever know.
How true those rumors were, I do not know. But everyone up here noted a lot fewer tree crews at work and a lot more power outages. My list above starts after those rumors.
Still, it's easy to whine with neighbors about PG&E losing power. It would be nice if PG&E felt they could be honest about the reasons, but I doubt the PUC would sit back and not retaliate.
The reason I put in solar and a battery was not that I thought it would save me money, although it might. The reason was that I didn't want to rely on PG&E providing power. As things are now I can get through a several day electric outage without losing anything important but use of the oven — we have hotplates that substitute for the stove top — and for most of the year we could probably get through a much longer outage without losing power for the freezer, refrigerator, lights and computers.
If you have a natural gas hookup, as you wrote, it almost certainly would have been cheaper, more reliable and supply an indefinite backup time (not limited by sunlight and battery capacity) to get a natural gas generator for backup.
Also, given that you have gas, why in the world did you have a heat pump installed?
1. For air conditioning.
2. As a backup if the furnace stopped working for any reason.
3. On the chance that gas might get substantially more expensive or electricity substantially less during the life of the unit.
A natural gas generator might have made more sense, but that still leaves me dependent on PG&E, for gas instead of electricity. This way if both become unavailable our only problem is heating the house, and we are in a reasonably warm climate, have a fireplace and a good deal of wood.
It might have been sensible to put in twice as many solar panels to give us adequate power even in winter months, but I was not thinking of that at the time.
Unfortunately, now if you increase the size of your solar system by more than 10% you will be subject to NEM 3 for your entire system.
Would a simple solution to your problem be to remove control of the gas heater from your thermostat and just purchase a second thermostat to do what your original thermostat did, control the gas heater? This way you could set the heat-pump thermostat to control only air conditioning and the gas-heater thermostat to control only heating. Or am I confused?
I strongly suspect you're right. My wife has been 'managing' this account for at least a decade. You may have gotten an email or such about taking the survey. Basically she does the logisitics of getting the survey (which she has no hand in writing) into the hands of the potential respondents and the results back to PG&E. That means she oversees things like translation into (appropriate dialects, too) various languages needed in CA (about 6 I think, currently), making sure the emails get sent and the online surveys are available, and phone banks get going and such. And keeping track of when to shut the survey down, and all that gut work.
She also reviews, in a general sense, all the responses. (She also usually has around 10 other surveys "in the filed" so she's very busy.)
Plus, her office phone number is the one listed on the surveys "if you have a problem" so she gets the calls from unhappy customers. And she can get an earful of things she frequently can do nothing about.
She forwards this to PG&E, but due to the vagaries of business she is not allowed to speak directly to the PG&E people who give her the survey, let alone anyone in the upper reaches of management. So she has no idea if the complaints she fields about your situation (and she does get some of those) ever reaches anyone who can do anything about them.
It's for sure a lousy situation.
This is a weird (late) question. but why did it make sense to get a heat pump alongside your gas furnace? Since heating with gas is cheaper, it's hard to see what the benefit is of the heat pump over just having an air conditioner (which I think is substantially cheaper/simpler).
“It makes sense that the federal and state regulations require that kind of thermostat for a system…”
Did I actually just read a piece by the libertarian David Friedman defending government regulation *requirements* here as a good thing?? 😁
Or did you merely mean “well, given that in reality they are gonna regulate, at least they chose the better regulation rather than the worser [sic] regulation”? 😏
Additionally, external heat pump units must defrost when the outside temperature is below freezing. This page discusses this additional cost: https://www.mitsubishielectric.com.au/blog/all-you-need-to-know-about-the-defrost-cycle-this-winter/
I have a carrier with a heat pump and gas furnace. On that system at least, you can set a lockout temps to control this behavior if you go into servicer model, which a quick Google search shows how to do. Ironically in my area I mostly use this to prevent the gas from kicking on because the crossover point here is around 20 degrees based on calculations from the efficiency table and utility rates.
I had similar issues installing my heat pump. I would ask them very basic questions about its functionality, and they didn't know the answer.
To be fair they are installers, not engineers nor technicians. They are basically just minimum wage employees doing physical data entry for people who are either lazy, can't be bothered, don't have three basic tools like a screwdriver, or more generally, simply want the work warrantied. They aren't paid to know anything, they are paid to unbox your fridge, move the old one (it has wheels btw), and plug it in because that's "scary" for most people and too difficult.
That's what the installer for a fridge does, but the installation for a heat pump is much more complicated. It involves running copper lines through walls, bending the copper pipes without kinking them, drawing a vacuum on the line, putting in the right amount of refrigerant, monitoring pressures, etc. It's maybe not quite at the same level as a technician who can evaluate a system having problems, but it's close.
I know, I was being slightly fastidious. Point is the installers are tier 1 support, they may even be expert level but they aren't going to be able to tell you the engineering design reasons nor soffer a transistor on a control board as troubleshooting, they'll just replace the board. They aren't the guy you ask thermostat programmable code logic that was implemented by a software engineer.
In that case why did I need to find a company that had a specific certification, trust them to do all the setup for my thermostat and agree that if I touch the thermostat settings myself I'm voiding the warrantee, and pay them thousands of dollars for their "expertise"?
Regulatory capture, insurance coverage, and legal liability; nothing to do with capability or expertise.
The same reason as a homeowner you can patch the drywall in your house but if you are a landlord you have to use a bonded tradesmen to patch that same hole.