Thank you so much for your replies! This quote is from Salesman #3. He is the grandson of the man who started this heating and cooling company in 1945. His dad and 3 brothers all still work there. They were voted "Contractor of the Year" in 2002 and won an "Ethical Business Award" in our area last year or the year before. I thought they would be the most expensive, so I had him come out last, but his quote is the best. (he said he could do gas heat with heat pump,but doesn't recommend it based on our cheap electric. He said you have to set a temp where heat pump turns off and gas kicks in, same as Salesman #2) Last question - Does it seem reasonable that in this area people haven't been spending the money for a higher SEER unit because we only need to cool for 3 months or so? (it takes too long to get back the initial added cost) He said there hasn't been the demand for these units in this area, but I wonder if the stimulus rebate changes that. The $1500 rebate is pretty new, do they just need some time to catch up? Is it worth pushing him to quote me something from Rheem that does qualify? From what I can see on the Rheem website they have a 3 ton system that qualifies, in their high-end systems. It has lots of "bells and whistles" and I can't tell how much more it will cost. This contractor has said that he prefers to "keep it simple". less areas to have problems down the line. Do you think it is worth pursuing this in light of the new rebate?

The DOE has worksheets that can help you calculate the relative cost of heating and cooling with different systems using your current energy costs. Of course you need to predict the relative costs over the next decade or two to really tell what is best. How is your crystal ball working? I would like to clear up a couple of common misconceptions. One type of heat does not dry a house in the winter any more than another. Leaky house envelopes dry houses. Heat by flame of some sort might dry a house more because they draw more outside air in if there is not a source of outside combustion air. That would be the only mechanism. There is nothing special about heat pumps in poorly-insulated, leaky homes. No heat or air conditioning source works as well in that situation as well as they do in tighter, well-insulated homes.

Chaz I'll make some general comments and observation. First what size AC and furnace are you replacing? Heil is one of the HVAC companies part of the ICP family. While there is a business connection with Carrier, Heil is not Carrier. It is difficult for me to believe you require a 100 KBTU furnace. I would want to see a Man J in writing to support that. In the old days, it was quite common to oversize HVAC; energy was cheap and more was better. Not true on either account today. You could get better performance/eff numbers from that HP condenser with a different size coil according to the AHRI HP directory. Your dealer should know this. That HP condenser does not have electronic demand defrost which is a good feature and better than time defrost. The HW VP stat mdl 8321 is preferred over the 8320 for better AC dehumidification in the summer. Has dealer quoted a whole house air filter cabinet? I recommend that you have one. IMO

Tigerdunes - We have a sort of complicated system I think. We already had a Crestron home control system with a wall sensor in each of the three zones reporting back to the Crestron thermostats (CHV-THSTAT) located in the furnace room. An EWC control board controls the automatic dampers (model UZC4). Initially, there was not an outside temp sensor for the EWC board, but I had them install that last spring. At that time they also checked the HP refrigerant charge, so that should be OK. The dip switches I need them to check are on the EWC board - I don't think it is set right now to have the outside temp sensor control turning off the HP. We had switched to a different HVAC contractor for this furnace/HP install as they have a good reputation, but are not the cheapest in town. They work mostly with Trane systems and do a lot of heat pumps, but were not familiar with the EWC control panel or interfacing with this Crestron system. Their quote to check the furnace/HP for overall function and CO, etc is $135. My only real question is to have them check that the humidifier is running correctly (not hooked to a specific humidity, but runs when heat is called for); it appears otherwise that the system is working ok and CO levels are zero. I'm not sure there is much reason to do a whole system check at this point. When selling us the system, they argued that using a HP for the long fall and spring times is more efficient than using gas all year - for average yearly temps, using the HP about 206 days (some of that is cooling but mostly heating) and furnace 159 days. Last winter, I manually locked out the HP (a switch on the EWC panel) for most of the winter as we had a cold winter last year. I got different answers as to when to lock out the HP. The chart they gave us suggested around 35 degrees, but the salesman suggested around 25 degrees or so. Hopefully this winter the changeover between HP and furnace will be based on outside temp. Last year without the temp sensor, the thermostat would call for the changeover when it would take too long to get the house up to the desired temp using the HP. Regarding utility rates on the most recent bills: natural gas per therm: $0.9897 + $0.1177 distribution charge, but there also was a rebate of 0.26/ therm for change in gas rates. elec: $0.1015/KWH Hopefully this makes some sense! Thanks!