A testimonial from owner Blaine Guilette…
Hi, I’m Blaine Guilette from Guilette Heating & Air Conditioning in Sturgeon Bay. I like to personally test in my own home most of the products that we sell in order to make sure that we are providing our customers with the very best products available in the industry. If we don’t believe in a product how can we expect to sell it to our customers?
Six years ago I built a new home not far from our offices south of Sturgeon Bay. Because I have been in the business for 25+ years I wanted to make sure that I put the best products in my own home. So when I built I put in a two stage, variable speed furnace with a 14 SEER air conditioning system. Most people were putting in 10 SEER at the time but I wanted to maximize my energy savings and minimize my ongoing operational costs.
For the first three years my family lived in our new house I averaged about 1,500 gallons of LP gas per year. When the price was $1.45 per gallon that wasn’t too bad. It’s another story with the price of fuel today.
So two years ago I replaced my air conditioning system with a new 14 SEER heat pump. A heat pump works just like an air conditioner but has a reversing valve so it can switch from cooling to heating. It is amazing how much heat there is in the outside air in the winter. A heat pump does just what its name implies—-it pumps the heat from the outside to the inside of my home. Instead of burning a fossil fuel to heat my family I am using a small amount of electrical energy to “pump” the outside heat to the inside of my home. It’s kind of like the heat you feel coming out at the back of your refrigerator.
Since putting my new heat pump in I have seen my fuel consumption drop from 1,500 gallons per year down to around 800 gallons the last two heating seasons. That is a 47% savings! Why? Because, the heat pump supplements my furnace and provides the majority of my heat down to when it is about 17 degrees outside. On average the outside temperature in the winter isn’t much lower in our climate. My LP furnace ONLY runs when the outside temperature dips below 17 degrees.
It used to be that heat pumps had a bad reputation. When they came out in the mid 70’s they weren’t anywhere as technically sophisticated as they are today. Generally they weren’t installed properly and they fell short of expectations. That isn’t the case today. In fact, the number one market in the world for heat pumps is Canada and it is colder there than here in Wisconsin.
So what did I save? Well I did use more electricity to run my heat pump than I might have used otherwise. My electrical costs went up $460.00 each of the last two winters. But that increase was more than offset against the LP gas savings. With LP gas now at $2.65 per gallon and taking into consideration the additional cost of electricity my net savings for this winter is just shy of $1,400.00!
These aren’t marketing boasts off of a manufacturer’s website—these are the actual returns that I have found at my own home. With the price of energy expected to continue to go up at an average of 18% per year more and more people are asking us about heat pumps and how they can help them with their heating bills. I’ve saved a ton of money and so can you. Give us a call at Guilette Heating & Air Conditioning today and we can show you how you can start saving today.
Thank you!
Blaine Guilette
