After years of struggling through heat waves, we’re now living the cool life with a fancy new heat pump. And just in time for this years hot temperatures – which are forecasted to be extra hot with El Niño and climate change combining. It wasn’t a cheap upgrade (almost as expensive as World Cup tickets), but it has been totally worth it already.

Back in 2024 I helped our strata amend the by-laws to allow heat pumps. The first two years, only a few units installed them, but this spring a bunch of us decided it was time.

We got a pretty good group discount from The Cool Guys, and they did a great job installing everything. We now have a 3000 BTU/hr compressor on our upper balcony and 4 indoor units keeping our house cool in the summer. They’ll also take over the heating load in the winter.

Total Cost

Item	Vendor	Cost
Heat Pumps – 30,000 BTU compressor and 4 indoor units	The Cool Guys	$27,817.50
Group Discount	The Cool Guys	– $2,250.00
Drywall and Painting	Gordon Drywall & Painting	$3,412.50
Heat Pump Rebate	BC Hydro	– $4,000.00
Total		$24,980.00

This was by far the most expensive renovation we’ve ever done, even with the very helpful $4000 rebate from BC Hydro.

Installation Process

We live in a 3 story townhouse building with no central air ducts, so we had a relatively complicated installation process. The Cool Guys spent 6 days putting holes in the walls, installing the multi-split heat pump, and running coolant lines from a compressor on the 3rd floor to indoor units on every floor.

Gordon Drywall and Painting spent 3 days repairing the drywall and repainting everything.

It was disruptive living in an active construction site for weeks, especially with all the drywall dust everywhere. But I have to say both sets of contractors we worked with were excellent and I would highly recommend then for anyone looking to get a heat pump installed.

Experience So Far

We’ve gone through at least 5 days of hot (over 25 C) weather since installing our heat pump, and it’s done an amazing job keeping our house at the perfect temperature. I’ve been really impressed with how quiet the Mitsubishi units are. If they’re not blasting cool air directly at you, you hardly notice they exist.

The biggest adjustment factor has been how little programming it needs – just set the ideal temperature and walk away. With our baseboard heaters, we had complicated schedules programmed into our smart thermostats. And in the summer, we were constantly comparing the outside and inside temperatures to decide when to open windows and run fans. I have most of our rooms now set to 24 or 25 C and I just leave it there all the time.

It’s a good thing it is simple, because the Kumo Cloud app that comes with the Mitsubishi units is truly terrible. I’ve given up trying to program anything through the app and instead bought a $20 universal remote that I can use to make tweaks when necessary.

We’ll see how it handles heating in the winter (I’ll update this once in November), but it should be more comfortable and cheaper than running our old electric baseboards.